Semiotics & Theory

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780801837456Author Barbara JohnsonFormat PaperbackPage Count 256Imprint Johns Hopkins University PressPublisher Johns Hopkins University PressWeight(grams)...

Are dreams merely odd things that happen to us at night, sometimes pleasant, sometimes terrifying, but not to be taken too seriously? Is there any reason to think about them at all, other than in terms of questions such as 'Why should Aunt Sarah turn...

Narrative features such as frames, digressions, or authorial intrusions have traditionally been viewed as distractions from or anomalies in the narrative proper. In Theory and the Novel Jeffrey Williams exposes these elements as more than simple...

This cutting-edge collection of essays showcases the work of some of the most influential theorists of the past thirty years as they grapple with the question of how literature should be treated in contemporary theory. The contributors challenge trends...

In this study, inquiry will be directed to the past, and it will, for many reasons, have to reach into a past which is rather remote from present-day Shaba Swahili. The author's principal concern remains with a contemporary situation, namely the role of...

This book is an invaluable reference guide for students of literary and cultural studies which introduces over forty of the complex terms, motifs and concepts in literary and cultural theory today. Critical Keywords in Literary and Cultural Theory-...

A study of C. S. Peirce's conception of the sign, with a critique of Saussure and Hjelmslev, Dialogic Semiosis presents a semiotics of the production, transmission, and interpretation of signs in human communication. Jorgen Dines Johansen studies the...

In Heuretics-a word defined as "the branch of logic that treats the art of discovery or invention"-Gregory Ulmer sets forth new methods appropriate for conducting cultural studies research in an age of electronic hypermedia.A book like Ulmer's, that aims...

The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century is a sustained critical examination of the developments in the field of literary studies from the early 2000s onwards within the context of the systematic problems in the humanities. This volume...

Was Ezra Pound the first theorist of world literature? Or did he inaugurate a form of comparative literature that could save the discipline from its untimely demise? Would he have welcomed the 2008 financial crisis? What might he say about America's...

Conventional narratives describe the United States as a continental country bordered by Canada and Mexico. Yet, since the late twentieth century the United States has claimed more water space than land space, and more water space than perhaps any other...

Originally published in 1996. In The Cryptographic Imagination, Shawn Rosenheim uses the writings of Edgar Allan Poe to pose a set of questions pertaining to literary genre, cultural modernity, and technology. Rosenheim argues that Poe's cryptographic...

Eighteenth-century British literary history was long characterized by two central and seemingly discrete movements-the emergence of the novel and the development of Romantic lyric poetry. In fact, recent scholarship reveals that these genres are...

Paris has always fascinated and welcomed writers. Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, writers of American, Caribbean, and African descent were no exception. Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic considers the travels made to...

This path-breaking book explores different ways in which writing about poetry can deepen and extend our critical engagement by deploying creatively the manifold resources of poetic language and form. Through a series of verse-essays, reflective...

The Humanities and Human Flourishing series publishes edited volumes that explore the role of human flourishing in the central disciplines of the humanities, and whether and how the humanities can increase human happiness. The contributors to this...

A polemical reaction against a trend in global modernist studies which still privileges European and Anglophone texts.Existing studies of literary modernism generally read Anglophone Atlantic texts through the lens of critical theories emanating from...

A captivating portrait of futurist artist Iliazd infused with the reflections of his accidental biographer on the stickiness of the genre.The poet Ilia Zdanevich, known in his professional life as Iliazd, began his career in the pre-Revolutionary...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781909631359Author Peter ColeFormat PaperbackPage Count 44Imprint Sylph EditionsPublisher Sylph Editions

The possibility of literary theory has been repeatedly put at risk by the apparently simple question 'What is a literary text?' Throughout the twentieth century the epistemological status of literature, the problem of language's claim to true...

What might behaviorism, that debunked school of psychology, tell us about literature?If inanimate objects such as novels or poems have no mental properties of their own, then why do we talk about them as if they do? Why do we perceive the minds of...

Addresses the early twentieth-century intersection of scientific and religious discourse exploring literary modernism through the lens of cultural history, focusing on the works of H.D., Mina Loy, and Jean Toomer. It covers a range of topics such as...

The Fourth Genre offers the most comprehensive, teachable, and current introduction available today to the cutting-edge, evolving genre of creative nonfiction. While acknowledging the literary impulse of nonfiction to be a fourth genre equivalent to...

Individually and collectively, these essays establish a new direction for scholarship that examines the crucial activities of reading and writing about literature and how they relate to 'authenticity'. Though authenticity is a term deep in literary...

In literary theory, the philosophy of law, and the sociology of knowledge, no issue has been more central to current debate than the status of our interpretations. Do they rest on a ground of rationality or are they subjective impositions of a merely...

"Literature matters because... it allows for experiences important to the living out of a sophisticated and satisfying human life; because other arenas of culture cannot provide them to the same degree; and because a relatively small number of texts...

At a 1966 international symposium hosted by the Johns Hopkins University, many of the leading figures of European structuralist criticism first presented their ideas to the American academic community. The proceedings of this event-which proved...

In The Mystery to a Solution, John Irwin brilliantly examines the deeper significance of the analytical detective genre which Poe created and the meaning of Borges' efforts to "double" the genre's origins one hundred years later. Combining history,...

Subversive Pleasures offers the first extended application of Mikhail Bakhtin's critical methods to film, mass-media, and cultural studies. With extraordinary interdisciplinary and multicultural range, Robert Stam explores issues that include the...

In Symbolism and Interpretation, Tzvetan Todorov examines two aspects of discourse: its production, which has traditionally been the domain of rhetoric, and its reception, which has always been the object of hermeneutics. He analyzes the diverse theories...

Complaints about the decline of critical standards in literature and culture in general have been voiced for much of the twentieth century. These have extended from F.R. Leavis's laments for a "lost center of intelligence and urbane spirit," to...

This authoritative guide introduces the key figures in contemporary critical theory to the beginning student. Important topics in critical theory which are covered in this volume include semiotics and discourse analysis, deconstruction, feminism, queer...

Inquiring into the formation of a literary canon during the Restoration and the eighteenth century, Barbara Benedict poses the question, "Do anthologies reflect or shape contemporary literary taste?" She finds that there was a cultural dialectic at work:...

John McWhorter challenges an enduring paradigm among linguists in this provocative exploration of the origins of plantation creoles. Using a wealth of data--linguistic, sociolinguistic, historical--he proposes that the "limited access model" of...

Playing on the frequently used metaphors of the 'turn toward' or 'turn back' in scholarship on religion, The Turn Around Religion in America offers a model of religion that moves in a reciprocal relationship between these two poles. In particular, this...

Tosaka Jun (1900-1945) was one of modern Japan's most unique and important critics of capitalism, the emperor system, imperialism, and everyday life in wartime Japan. This collection of translations contains some of Tosaka's most important essays and...

Common Readers casts a fascinating light on the literary experiences of ordinary people: miners in Scotland, churchgoers in Victorian London, workers in Czarist Russia, schoolgirls in rural Australia, farmers in Republican China, and forward to today's...

Zukofsky, Oppen, and Niedecker wrote with a diversity of formal strategies but a singularity of purpose: the crafting of an anticapitalist poetics.Inaugurated in 1931 by Louis Zukofsky, Objectivist poetry gave expression to the complex contours of...

In a rare fusion of literary sensibility with psychological research, Norman N. Holland brings to light important data showing how personality-in the fullest sense of character development and identity-affects the way in which we read and interpret...

In a letter to Boccaccio, Petrarch extolled the virtue of poetry and letters for promoting an understanding of both human nature and morals. The letter was designed to console him after hearing a prediction that he was soon to die and that he ought to...