Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader


Victor Villanueva - 1997
    Expert text includes coverage of various areas, from acid rain and atomic energy, to waste disposal and wetlands. Touches upon the many statutory and common-law regulations shaping the world in which we live.

The Rhetoric of Fiction


Wayne C. Booth - 1961
    One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms—such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"—have become part of the standard critical lexicon.For this new edition, Wayne C. Booth has written an extensive Afterword in which he clarifies misunderstandings, corrects what he now views as errors, and sets forth his own recent thinking about the rhetoric of fiction. The other new feature is a Supplementary Bibliography, prepared by James Phelan in consultation with the author, which lists the important critical works of the past twenty years—two decades that Booth describes as "the richest in the history of the subject."

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos


John Berger - 1984
    This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless . . . . In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses."This brooding, provocative, and almost unbearably lovely book displays one of the great writers of our time at his freest and most direct, addressing the themes that run beneath the surface of all his work, from Ways of Seeing to his Into Their Labours trilogy.In an extraordinary distillation of his gifts as a novelist, poet, art critic, and social historian, John Berger reveals the ties between love and absence, the ways poetry endows language with the assurance of prayer, and the tensions between the forward movement of sexuality and the steady backward tug of time. He re-creates the mysterious forces at work in a Rembrandt painting, transcribes the sensorial experience of viewing lilacs at dusk, and explores the meaning of home to early man and to the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in our cities today.A work of unclassifiable innovation and consummate beauty, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos reminds us of Nabokov and Auden, Brecht and Lawrence, in its seamless fusion of the political and the personal.

On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction


Brian Boyd - 2009
    Now a distinguished scholar offers the first comprehensive account of the evolutionary origins of art and storytelling. Brian Boyd explains why we tell stories, how our minds are shaped to understand them, and what difference an evolutionary understanding of human nature makes to stories we love.Art is a specifically human adaptation, Boyd argues. It offers tangible advantages for human survival, and it derives from play, itself an adaptation widespread among more intelligent animals. More particularly, our fondness for storytelling has sharpened social cognition, encouraged cooperation, and fostered creativity.After considering art as adaptation, Boyd examines Homer's "Odyssey" and Dr. Seuss's "Horton Hears a Who!" demonstrating how an evolutionary lens can offer new understanding and appreciation of specific works. What triggers our emotional engagement with these works? What patterns facilitate our responses? The need to hold an audience's attention, Boyd underscores, is the fundamental problem facing all storytellers. Enduring artists arrive at solutions that appeal to cognitive universals: an insight out of step with contemporary criticism, which obscures both the individual and universal. Published for the bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of "Origin of Species, " Boyd's study embraces a Darwinian view of human nature and art, and offers a credo for a new humanism.

Semiotics: The Basics


Daniel Chandler - 2002
    Along the way, the reader will find out: * What is a sign?* Which codes do we take for granted?* What is a text?* How can semiotics be used in textual analysis?* Who were Saussure, Peirce, Barthes and Jakobson - and why are they important?Features include a glossary of key terms and realistic suggestions for further reading. There is also a highly-developed and long-established online version of the book at: www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B.

The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language


Mark Turner - 1996
    Certainly we do not think it is the basis of the mind. We think of stories and parables from Aesop's Fables or The Thousand and One Nights, forexample, as exotic tales set in strange lands, with spectacular images, talking animals, and fantastic plots--wonderful entertainments, often insightful, but well removed from logic and science, and entirely foreign to the world of everyday thought. But Mark Turner argues that this common wisdom iswrong. The literary mind--the mind of stories and parables--is not peripheral but basic to thought. Story is the central principle of our experience and knowledge. Parable--the projection of story to give meaning to new encounters--is the indispensable tool of everyday reason. Literary thoughtmakes everyday thought possible. This book makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking.In The Literary Mind, Turner ranges from the tools of modern linguistics, to the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, as he explains how story and projection--and their powerful combination inparable--are fundamental to everyday thought. In simple and traditional English, he reveals how we use parable to understand space and time, to grasp what it means to be located in space and time, and to conceive of ourselves, other selves, other lives, and other viewpoints. He explains the roleof parable in reasoning, in categorizing, and in solving problems. He develops a powerful model of conceptual construction and, in a far-reaching final chapter, extends it to a new conception of the origin of language that contradicts proposals by such thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker.Turner argues that story, projection, and parable precede grammar, that language follows from these mental capacities as a consequence. Language, he concludes, is the child of the literary mind.Offering major revisions to our understanding of thought, conceptual activity, and the origin and nature of language, The Literary Mind presents a unified theory of central problems in cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. It gives new and unexpected answers toclassic questions about knowledge, creativity, understanding, reason, and invention.

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction


Ursula K. Le Guin - 1986
    Le Guin retells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination.Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: 'before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.' Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero's long, hard, killing tools, our ancestors' greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars.This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota: unknown lands where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew.With a new introduction by Donna Haraway, the eminent cyberfeminist, author of the revolutionary A Cyborg Manifesto and most recently, Staying with the Trouble and Manifestly Haraway. With images by Lee Bul, a leading South Korean feminist artist who had a retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery in 2018.

The Philosophy of Literary Form


Kenneth Burke - 1941
    Yet words also have a nature peculiarly their own. And when discussing them as modes of action, we must consider both this nature as words in themselves and the nature they get from the non-verbal scenes that support their acts. I shall be happy if the reader can say of this book that, while always considering words as acts upon a scene, it avoids the excess of environmentalist schools which are usually so eager to trace the relationships between act and scene that they neglect to trace the structure of the act itself.

Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary


Anonymous - 2001
    Also, blessings for the Torah and haftarot, full-color maps, glossary, timeline of biblical events, and indexes.

The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg


Geoff Herbach - 2008
    I killed myself.”Having destroyed his life, the suicidal T. Rimberg strikes out on a journey through history and geography. From Minneapolis to Europe to a fiery accident near Green Bay, he searches for a father who is likely dead, digs for meaning where he’s sure there is none, fires off suicide letters to family, celebrities, presidents, and football stars, and lands in a hospital bed across from a priest who believes that Rimberg has caused a miracle. This funny, moving novel asks us to consider the nature of second chances and the unexpected form that grace sometimes takes.

An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism


Madan Sarup - 1989
    A new introductory section discusses the meaning of such concepts as modernity, postmodernity, modernization, modernism, and postmodernism. A section on feminist criticism of Lacan and Foucault has been added, together with a new chapter on French feminist theory focusing on the work of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva.The chapter on postmodernism has been significantly expanded to include a discussion of Lyotard's language games and his use of the category "sublime." This chapter ends with a discussion of the relationship between feminism and postmodernism. A further chapter has been added on the work of Jean Baudrillard, a cult figure on the current postmodernist scene, whose ideas have attained a wide currency. The chapter includes a new section on postmodern cultural practices as revealed in architecture, TV, video, and film. Suggestions for further reading are now listed at the end of each chapter and are upgraded and annotated.In tracing the impact of post-structuralist thought not only on literary criticism but on such disciplines as philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, the social sciences, and art, this book will be essential reading for those who want a clear and incisive introduction to the theories that continue to have widespread influence.

The Rule of Metaphor


Paul Ricœur - 1975
    In The Rule of Metaphor he seeks 'to show how language can extend itself to its very limits, forever discovering new resonances within itself'. Recognizing the fundamental power of language in constructing the world we perceive, it is a fruitful and insightful study of how language affects how we understand the world, and is also an indispensable work for all those seeking to retrieve some kind of meaning in uncertain times.

Structure, Sign, and Play


Jacques Derrida - 1966
    "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" was a lecture presented at Johns Hopkins University on 21 October 1966 by philosopher Jacques Derrida.http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derri...Translation is in Public Domain.

Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry


Stephen Dobyns - 2011
    Stephen Dobyns, author of the classic book on the beauty of poetry, Best Words, Best Order, moves into new terrain in this remarkable book. Bringing years of experience to bear on issues such as subject matter, the mechanics of poetry, and the revision process, Dobyns explores the complex relationship between writers and their work. From Philip Larkin to Pablo Neruda to William Butler Yeats, every chapter reveals useful lessons in these renowned poets' work. Both enlightening and encouraging, Next Word, Better Word demystifies a subtle art form and shows writers how to overcome obstacles in the creative process.

An Experiment in Criticism


C.S. Lewis - 1961
    Lewis's classic analysis springs from the conviction that literature exists for the joy of the reader and that books should be judged by the kind of reading they invite. Crucial to his notion of judging literature is a commitment to laying aside expectations and values extraneous to the work, in order to approach it with an open mind.