Semiotics & Theory

For decades, we have been told we live in the "information age"-a time when disruptive technological advancement has reshaped the categories and social uses of knowledge and when quantitative assessment is increasingly privileged. Such...

Since the early days of film, critics and theorists have contested the value of formula, cliche, conventional imagery, and recurring narrative patterns of reduced complexity in cinema. Whether it's the high-noon showdown or the last-minute rescue, a...

In Plato's Republic, Socrates spoke of an 'ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy' which he offered to resolve once and for all by banning the poets from his ideal city. Few philosophers have taken Socrates at his word, and out of the ancient...

Conventional studies of the 18th-century novel link the form's evolution to the emergence of a modern liberal subject whose actions and attachments are imagined to be voluntary and intentional. Sandra Macpherson challenges this account of modernity,...

A compelling revision of the history of experimental writing from Pound and Stein to Language poetry, disclosing its uses and its limits.In this bold new study of twentieth-century American writing and poetics, Natalia Cecire argues that experimental...

A reimagining of how the aesthetic movement of the Victorian era ushered in modern queer theory.Late Victorian aesthetes were dedicated to the belief that an artwork's value derived solely from its beauty, rather than any moral or utilitarian purpose...

Mid-twentieth-century developments in science and technology produced new understandings and images of the planet that circulated the globe, giving rise to a modern ecological consciousness; but they also contributed to accelerating crises in the global...

Philosophical thinking is interrupted by the finitude of what cannot be named, on the one hand, and that within which it is subsumed as one of multiple modes of sense-making, on the other. Sense and Singularity elaborates Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical...

This work is both an introduction to and a critical appraisal of the work of Rainer Forst, one of the most important political theorists in Germany today. Structured for classroom use, this collection of original essays engages with Forst's extant corpus...

This is the first book of its kind to look across disciplines at this vital aspect of British art, literature and culture. It brings the various intertwined histories of social realism into historical perspective, and argues that this sometimes...

This anthology presents a series of texts in which major twentieth--century thinkers engage in dialogue with their predecessors. * Presents a series of texts in which major twentieth--century thinkers engage in dialogue with their predecessors. *...

The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900-2000 is a collection of the most influential writings on the theory of the novel from the twentieth century. * Traces the rise of novel theory and the extension of its influence into other...

Can a bout of laziness or a digressive spell actually open up paths to creativity and unexpected insights? In Obstruction Nick Salvato suggests that for those engaged in scholarly pursuits laziness, digressiveness, and related experiences can be...

Using narrative, philosophical, and psychoanalytic theory, Linda S. Raphael investigates the development of skepticism in narrative. She argues that as authors explore more deeply the inner life of characters, their narratives become more skeptical about...

Emerging from mid-century social movements, Civil Rights Era formations, and anti-war protests, Asian American studies is now an established field of transnational inquiry, diasporic engagement, and rights activism. These histories and origin points...

Against Sustainability responds to the twenty-first-century environmental crisis by unearthing the nineteenth-century U.S. literary, cultural, and scientific contexts that gave rise to sustainability, recycling, and preservation. Through novel pairings...

In Xenocitizens, Jason Berger returns to the antebellum United States in order to challenge a scholarly tradition based on liberal-humanist perspectives. Through the concept of the xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms "xeno," which connotes...

Henri Bergson has been the subject of keen interest within French philosophy ever since being championed by Gilles Deleuze and others. Yet his influence extends well beyond European philosophy, especially within Africa and South Asia. Postcolonial...

What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it. By the same token, what he thinks cannot be isolated from how he thinks it. The central aim of Richter's book is to examine how these basic yet far-reaching assumptions teach us to...

What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it. By the same token, what he thinks cannot be isolated from how he thinks it. The central aim of Richter's book is to examine how these basic yet far-reaching assumptions teach us to...

Supplementing theological interpretation with historical, literary, and philosophical perspectives, The Weight of Love analyzes the nature and role of affectivity in medieval Christian devotion through an original interpretation of the writings of the...

Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid- eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in...

The "place" in the title of Claudia Brodsky's remarkable new book is the intersection of language with building, the marking, for future reference, of material constructions in the world. The "referent" Brodsky describes is not...

This book is an extended inquiry into the dimension of exteriority constructed by philosophical systems and literary works. Literature has, since its inception, depended on a rogue's gallery of outsiders-the more outlandish the better, with human...

Wild Materialism speaks to three related questions in contemporary political philosophy. How, if different social interests and demands are constitutively antagonistic, can social unity emerge out of heterogeneity? Does such unity require corresponding...

Conditions of the Present collects essays by the late Lindon Barrett, whose scholarship centers African American literature as a site from which to theorize race and liberation in the United States. Barrett confronts critical blind spots within both...

Conditions of the Present collects essays by the late Lindon Barrett, whose scholarship centers African American literature as a site from which to theorize race and liberation in the United States. Barrett confronts critical blind spots within both...

In his virtuosic new book noted cultural critic Mark Seltzer shows how suspense, as art form and form of life, depicts and shapes the social systems that organize our modern world. Modernity's predicament, Seltzer writes, is a society so hungry for...

The Limits of Ferocity is a powerful critique of the culture of extremity represented in the works of D. H. Lawrence, Georges Bataille, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer. Daniel Fuchs provides close readings of their literary and intellectual texts, which...

Introducing this collection of essays, Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih argue that looking back-investigating the historical, intellectual, and political entanglements of contemporary academic disciplines-offers a way for scholars in the humanities to...

In The Feeling of Kinship, David L. Eng investigates the emergence of "queer liberalism"-the empowerment of certain gays and lesbians in the United States, economically through an increasingly visible and mass-mediated queer consumer lifestyle,...

This collection of essays, originally published at different times, presents a coherent, systematic, and comprehensive theory of the work of literature and its major aspects. The approach, which may be called "Constructive Poetics," does not...

The articulation of the unsayable, of negativity-that which has been excluded by what is sayable-is one of the most important areas of contemporary humanistic study. This volume brings together fifteen outstanding literary theorists and philosophers to...

First published in 1987, this rich variety of essays confronts the changes in theories of the text and textuality that have seen a shift in focus from the author as a controlling agent to the scene of writing itself and the historical forces that produce...

Often identified with its lyric poetry, Romanticism has come to be dismissed by historicists as an ineffectual idealism. By focusing on Romantic narrative, noted humanist Tilottama Rajan takes issue with this identification, as well as with the equation...

Dame Muriel Spark-the highly acclaimed Scottish writer-published over twenty novels and more than a dozen short-story collections from the late 1950s until her death in 2006. Two of her novels, The Public Image and Loitering with Intent, were...

Vigilant Memory focuses on the particular role of Emmanuel Levinas's thought in reasserting the ethical parameters for poststructuralist criticism in the aftermath of the Holocaust. More than simply situating Levinas's ethics within the larger context of...

At the core of postmodern thought, especially in literary theory, is the belief that such ideals as truth, reason, and objectivity are social constructs that have no universal or trans-historical validity. In exploring this constructivist view, Satya P...

Pettersson demonstrates the implications and applications of the theory through a series of detailed studies of literary works, taking care to show that his theory is compatible with a broad variety of perspectives. Combining an intimate knowledge of...

Site Reading offers a new method of literary and cultural interpretation and a new theory of narrative setting by examining five sites--supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums--that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the...