Semiotics & Theory

Few terms have garnered more attention recently in the sciences, humanities, and public sphere than the Anthropocene, the proposed epoch in which a human "signature" appears in the lithostratigraphic record. Anthropocene Reading considers the...

In Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity, William Kuskin asks us to reconsider the relationship between literary form and historical period. As Kuskin observes, most current literary histories of medieval and early modern English...

The PEIRCE EDITION contains large sections of previously unpublished material in addition to selected published works. Each volume includes a brief historical and biographical introduction, extensive editorial and textual notes, and a full chronological...

How can literature, which consists of nothing more than the description of imaginary events and situations, offer any insight into the workings of "human reality" or "the human condition"? Can mere words illuminate something that we...

Over a span of thirty years, twentieth-century French philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida held a conversation across texts. Sharing a Jewish heritage and a background in phenomenology, both came to situate their work at the margins of...

In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very serious condemnations of the Church and relying on a...

Thirty high-level essays on various aspects of semiotics by Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian scholars.Thirty high-level essays on various aspects of semiotics by Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian scholars.Book InformationISBN 9780253213204Author Eero...

Drawing on the work of British sculptor Antony Gormley, alongside more traditional literary scholarship, this book argues for new relationships between Chaucer's poetry and works by others. Chaucer's playfulness with textual history and chronology...

Seductive Reasoning takes a provocative look at contemporary Anglo-American literary theory, calling into question the critical consensus on pluralism's nature and its status in literary studies. Drawing on the insights of Marxist and feminist critical...

A WIRED 2020 Book of the Year Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. "Nothing's bulletproof," the salesman said. "The thing's only bullet resistant." The New York Times journalist...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Feared and worshiped in equal measure, snakes have captured the imagination of poets, painters, and philosophers for centuries. From Ice Age...

The essays brought together in this book understand phobia not as a pathology, but as a versatile moral, political, and aesthetic resource - and one with a history. They demonstrate that enquiry into strong feelings of aversion has enabled writers and...

A fascinating study of how behavioral science shaped twentieth-century politics and the modernist literary period.The advent of the twentieth century famously brought about new personal and political freedoms, including radical changes in voting rights...

In Defense of Reading What happens when we read imaginative literature? What do we learn from reading such texts? Reading complements our experience, sharpens our perceptions, gives us insight into how other humans live, enables us to understand other...

How can we use digital media to understand reading, editing, and writing as literary processes? How can we design the digital medium in a way that goes beyond the printed codex? This book is an attempt to answer those fundamental questions by bringing...

The human body is a primary source of meaning-making, with the body conveying over two-thirds of our messages. But how can we understand these physical communicative cues? How are they being expressed and exploited in new media and multimodal online and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814215081Author Marie-Laure RyanFormat HardbackPage Count 248Imprint Ohio State University PressPublisher Ohio State University PressWeight(grams)...

This volume engages critically with the recent and ongoing consolidation of "world literature" as a paradigm of study. On the basis of an extended, active, and ultimately more literary sense of what it means to institute world literature, it views...

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas explores Victorian representations of femininity in narratives that depart from mainstream realism, from fairy tales by George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Juliana Horatia Ewing, and Jean Ingelow, to sensation...

This new Dictionary features a thoughtfully collated collection of over 150 jargon-free definitions of key terms and concepts in postcolonial theory. * Features a brief introduction to postcolonial theory and a list of suggested further reading that...

What is valuable about literary studies? What is its point and purpose? In The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas, leading scholars in the field illuminate both the purpose and priorities of literary criticism. At a time...

In Mapping Memory, Kaitlin M. Murphy investigates the use of memory as a means of contemporary sociopolitical intervention. Mapping Memory focuses specifically on visual case studies, including documentary film, photography, performance, new media, and...

Reified Life addresses the most pressing political question of the 21st century: what forms of life are free and what forms are perceived legally and economically as surplus or expendable, human and otherwise. The 2008 economic crisis solidified the...

Frontier: the border between two countries; the limits of civilization; the bounds of established knowledge; a new field of activity. At a time when all borders, boundaries, margins, and limits are being-often violently-challenged, erased, or reinforced,...

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...

This book is a marker of the "state of theory" today. Its rich array of wideranging essays explores the dimensions and implications of the work of J. Hillis Miller, one of the most eminent literary scholars in America. For nearly half a...

In Latinamericanism after 9/11, John Beverley explores Latinamericanist cultural theory in relation to new modes of political mobilization in Latin America. He contends that after 9/11, the hegemony of the United States and the neoliberal assumptions of...

In Things Fall Away, Neferti X. M. Tadiar offers a new paradigm for understanding politics and globalization. Her analysis illuminates both the power of Filipino subaltern experience to shape social and economic realities and the critical role of the...

When Sartre referred to Georges Bataille as a "new mystic," he meant the label as an insult. Sartre considered mysticism to be a less rigorous mode of inquiry than philosophy-especially dangerous where the writings of mystics adapt philosophical...

If Walter Benjamin (with an irony that belies his seemingly tragic life) is now recognized as one of the century's most important writers, reading him is no easy matter. Benjamin opens one of his most notable essays, "The Task of the Translator", with...

"All literary genres are artifacts", writes Michael Riffaterre, "but none more blatantly so than fiction. Its very name declares its artificiality, and yet it must somehow be true to hold the interest of its readers, to tell them about experiences at...

Among the contributors, Lynda Boose explores the structural implications of Western culture's central daughter-father kinship exchange stories; Leah S. Marcus examines the politics of daughter-father relations in a historical study of Mary I and...

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...

An elegant introduction to Bataille's major concepts and concerns, Bataille: A Critical Reader underlines the powerful impact his work has had, in different ways, on an entire generation of thinkers.About the AuthorFred Botting and Scott Wilson both...

In a parlor game played by the Surrealist group-the foremost avant-gardists of their time-participants made their marks on the quadrants of a folded sheet of paper: a many-eyed head, a distorted torso, hands fondling swollen breasts, snarling...

In Modernism, Expressionism and Theories of the Avant Garde, Richard Murphy mobilises theories of the postmodern to challenge our understanding of the avant-garde. He assesses the importance of the avant-garde for contemporary culture and for the debates...

The Deliverance of Others is a compelling reappraisal of the idea that narrative literature can expand readers' empathy. What happens if, amid the voluminous influx of otherness facilitated by globalization, we continue the tradition of valorizing...

Roland Barthes was one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, but why should the reader of today, or tomorrow, be concerned with him? Martin McQuillan provides a fresh perspective on Barthes, addressing his political and institutional...

Recent developments in literary theory (such as structuralism and deconstruction) have come under attack for ignoring history, while historically based approaches have been criticised for failing to take account of the problems inherent in their...

The early twentieth century saw modernist writers challenge literary conventions to express their perspectives on a dynamic but unsettling world. This book provides a lucid overview of the period, mapping the literary alongside historical, social and...