Semiotics & Theory

Intentionality and the New Traditionalism argues that both the text and the author of a literary work are important to a cogent and full reading of that work. The author creates the text, which then leads the reader into a reading of it through its...

" . . . the details of Saint-Martin's argument contain a wealth of penetrating observations from which anyone with a serious interest in visual communication will profit." -Journal of CommunicationSaint-Martin elucidates a syntax of visual language that...

"For anyone seriously interested in Peirce, or in nineteenth-century American philosophy, or in American intellectual history, or in philosophy in general, or in semiotics and its philosophical import, these volumes should be required reading." -Murray G...

Placing climate change within the long histories of enslavement, settler colonialism, and resistance, Climate Change, Literature, and Environmental Justice: Poetics of Dissent and Repair examines the connections between climate disruption and white...

This book explores the formative role of mobilities in the production of our close relationships, proposing that the tracks-both literal and figurative- we lay down in the process play a crucial role in generating and sustaining intimacy. Working with...

Edward Tomarken's previous book, Filmspeak, was a study of literary theory in relation to contemporary mainstream films. Some of the abstruse ideas of early literary theorists (1950-70) had in fact permeated our thinking to such an extent that both films...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. A classic teenage fetish object, the American driver's license has long symbolized freedom and mobility in a nation whose design assumes car ...

In Interpretive Conventions, Steven Mailloux provides a general introduction to reader-response criticism while developing his own specific reader-oriented approach to literature. He examines five influential theories of the reading process-those of...

Escape, Escapism, Escapology: American Novels of the Early Twenty-First Century identifies and explores what is emerging as perhaps the theme of 21st-century American fiction: the desire to escape - from the present, from history, from the existential -...

How does Martin Luther King, Jr., understand race philosophically and how did this understanding lead him to develop an ontological conception of racist police violence? In this important new work, Mark Christian Thompson attempts to answer these...

This collection of essays explores laughter, humor, and the comic from a psychoanalytic perspective. Edited by two leading practicing psychoanalysts and with original contributions from Lacanian practitioners and scholars, this cutting-edge volume...

Embers of the Past is a powerful critique of historicism and modernity. Javier Sanjines C. analyzes the conflict between the cultures and movements of indigenous peoples and attention to the modern nation-state in its contemporary Latin American...

In this wide-ranging analysis, Marie-Christine Leps traces the production and circulation of knowledge about the criminal in nineteenth-century discourse, and shows how the delineation of deviance served to construct cultural norms. She demonstrates how...

All of us take our moral bearings from a conception of the good, or a range of goods, that we consider most important. We are in this sense selves in moral space. Building on the work of the philosopher Charles Taylor, among others, David Parker examines...

This unique collection of essays, accompanied by a pioneering DVD, at last brings a dazzling view of the literary, social, and performative aspects of American Sign Language to a wide audience. The book presents the work of a renowned and diverse group...

"The book . . . succeeds at refining elements in the problem that semiotics and theater represent to and for one another." -Choice"The Semiotics of Performance surprisingly retains its revelatory freshness, and actually opens up areas of reseach that...

Does reading novels evoking empathy with fictional characters really cultivate our sympathetic imagination and lead to altruistic actions on behalf of real others? Empathy and the Novel presents a comprehensive account of the relationships among novel...

2017 Nicolas Guillen Outstanding Book Award presented by the Caribbean Philosophical Association As the first successful revolution emanating from a slave rebellion, the Haitian Revolution remains an inspired site of investigation for a remarkable range...

In Autonomy Nicholas Brown theorizes the historical and theoretical argument for art's autonomy from its acknowledged character as a commodity. Refusing the position that the distinction between art and the commodity has collapsed, Brown demonstrates how...

An analysis of the significance of literature in the work of one of America's most influential contemporary philosophers.Stanley Cavell is widely recognized as one of America's most important contemporary philosophers, and his legacy and writings...

In the past ten years, theorists from Elaine Scarry to Roger Scruton have devoted renewed attention to the aesthetic of beauty. Part of their discussions claim that beauty - because it arises from a sense of proportion, symmetry, or reciprocity -...

Children's literature isn't just for children anymore. This original study explores the varied forms and roles of children's literature—when it's written for adults.What do Adam Mansbach's Go the F**k to Sleep and Barbara Park's MA! There's Nothing to Do...

Dante and the Other brings together noted and emerging Dante scholars with theologians, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists, bridging the Florentine's premodern world to today's postmodern context. Exploring how alterity has become a...

It is the first sustained study to explore the relationship between touching and writing in contemporary literature. For centuries, writers have explored the intimate links between the page and the skin, between the hand and writing, and between language...

Patrick Cheney's new book places the sublime at the heart of poems and plays in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Specifically, Cheney argues for the importance of an 'early modern sublime' to the advent of modern authorship in...

This book provides a comprehensive compilation of essays on the relationship between formal experimentation and ethics in a number of generically hybrid or "liminal" narratives dealing with individual and collective traumas, running the...

Challenging the widely-held assumption that Slavoj Zizek's work is far more germane to film and cultural studies than to literary studies, this volume demonstrates the importance of Zizek to literary criticism and theory. The contributors show how...

Thinking Literature across Continents finds Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller-two thinkers from different continents, cultures, training, and critical perspectives-debating and reflecting upon what literature is and why it matters. Ghosh and Miller do...

This collection of essays by Walter J. Ong focuses on the complex and dynamic relationship between verbal performance and cultural evolution. By studying the history of rhetoric and related arts from classical antiquity through the age of romanticism to...

What is psychoanalytic criticism and how can it be justified as a type of criticism in its own right? In this new and thoroughly revised edition of her classic textbook, Elizabeth Wright provides a cogent answer to this question and a wide--ranging...

Frantz Fanon was a French psychiatrist turned Algerian revolutionary of Martinican origin, and one of the most important and controversial thinkers of the postwar period. A veritable "intellect on fire," Fanon was a radical thinker with original theories...

Contemporary celebrations of interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences often harbor a distrust of traditional disciplines, which are seen as at best narrow and unimaginative, and at worst complicit in larger forms of power and...

Blackness and Value investigates the principles by which 'value' operates, and asks if it is useful to imagine that the concepts of racial blackness and whiteness in the United States operate in terms of these principles. Testing these concepts by...

Syntactic Argumentation and the Structure of English (SASE) presents the major theoretical developments in generative syntax and the empirical arguments motivating them. Beautifully and lucidly written, it is an invaluable resource for working linguists...

In Look, a Negro! , political theorist Robert Gooding-Williams imaginatively and impressively unpacks fundamental questions around race and racism. Inspired by Frantz Fanon's famous description of the profound effect of being singled out by a white child...

A good biography is a well-staged illusion. It creates - on paper - a vivid, rounded, and immediate sense of lived life. In contrast to purely fictional forms, biography writing does not allow total freedom to the biographer in the creative act. Ideally,...

For centuries, the standard account of the development of the novel focused on the rise of realism in English literature. Studies of early novels connected the form to various aspects of British life across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,...

How did literature shape nineteenth-century science?Erasmus Darwin and his grandson, Charles, were the two most important evolutionary theorists of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Although their ideas and methods differed, both Darwins were...

A case for literary critics and other humanists to stop wallowing in their aestheticized helplessness and instead turn to poetry, comedy, and love.Literary criticism is an agent of despair, and its poster child is Walter Benjamin. Critics have spent...

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 methodologies and...