Textual Silence

Textual Silence PDF Author: Jessica Lang
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813589940
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
There are thousands of books that represent the Holocaust, but can, and should, the act of reading these works convey the events of genocide to those who did not experience it? In Textual Silence, literary scholar Jessica Lang asserts that language itself is a barrier between the author and the reader in Holocaust texts—and that this barrier is not a lack of substance, but a defining characteristic of the genre. Holocaust texts, which encompass works as diverse as memoirs, novels, poems, and diaries, are traditionally characterized by silences the authors place throughout the text, both deliberately and unconsciously. While a reader may have the desire and will to comprehend the Holocaust, the presence of “textual silence” is a force that removes the experience of genocide from the reader’s analysis and imaginative recourse. Lang defines silences as omissions that take many forms, including the use of italics and quotation marks, ellipses and blank pages in poetry, and the presence of unreliable narrators in fiction. While this limits the reader’s ability to read in any conventional sense, these silences are not flaws. They are instead a critical presence that forces readers to acknowledge how words and meaning can diverge in the face of events as unimaginable as those of the Holocaust.

Textual Silence

Textual Silence PDF Author: Jessica Lang
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813589940
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
There are thousands of books that represent the Holocaust, but can, and should, the act of reading these works convey the events of genocide to those who did not experience it? In Textual Silence, literary scholar Jessica Lang asserts that language itself is a barrier between the author and the reader in Holocaust texts—and that this barrier is not a lack of substance, but a defining characteristic of the genre. Holocaust texts, which encompass works as diverse as memoirs, novels, poems, and diaries, are traditionally characterized by silences the authors place throughout the text, both deliberately and unconsciously. While a reader may have the desire and will to comprehend the Holocaust, the presence of “textual silence” is a force that removes the experience of genocide from the reader’s analysis and imaginative recourse. Lang defines silences as omissions that take many forms, including the use of italics and quotation marks, ellipses and blank pages in poetry, and the presence of unreliable narrators in fiction. While this limits the reader’s ability to read in any conventional sense, these silences are not flaws. They are instead a critical presence that forces readers to acknowledge how words and meaning can diverge in the face of events as unimaginable as those of the Holocaust.

Textual Silence

Textual Silence PDF Author: Jessica Lang
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813589924
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
There are thousands of books that represent the Holocaust, but can, and should, the act of reading these works convey the events of genocide to those who did not experience it? In Textual Silence, literary scholar Jessica Lang asserts that language itself is a barrier between the author and the reader in Holocaust texts—and that this barrier is not a lack of substance, but a defining characteristic of the genre. Holocaust texts, which encompass works as diverse as memoirs, novels, poems, and diaries, are traditionally characterized by silences the authors place throughout the text, both deliberately and unconsciously. While a reader may have the desire and will to comprehend the Holocaust, the presence of “textual silence” is a force that removes the experience of genocide from the reader’s analysis and imaginative recourse. Lang defines silences as omissions that take many forms, including the use of italics and quotation marks, ellipses and blank pages in poetry, and the presence of unreliable narrators in fiction. While this limits the reader’s ability to read in any conventional sense, these silences are not flaws. They are instead a critical presence that forces readers to acknowledge how words and meaning can diverge in the face of events as unimaginable as those of the Holocaust.

Articulate Silences

Articulate Silences PDF Author: King-Kok Cheung
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501721127
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
In this pathbreaking book, King-Kok Cheung sheds new light on the thematic and rhetoncal uses of silence in fiction by three Asian American women: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, and JoyKogawa. Boldly articulating the unspeakable, these writers break the silence imposed by families or ethnic communities and defy the dominant culture that suppresses the voicing of minority experiences. Yet at the same time, they demonstrate how silences—voiceless gestures, textual ellipses, authorial hesitations—can themselves be articulate. Drawing on theoretical works on women's writing, on ethnicity and race, and on postmodernism and history, Cheung takes issue with Anglo-American feminists who valorize speech unequivocally and with revisionist Asian American male critics who attempt to refute Orientalist stereotypes by renouncing silence. She challenges Eurocentric views of speech and silence as polarized, hierarchical, and gendered, and proposes an approach to Asian American literature which overturns the "East-West" or "dual personality" model. Yamamoto, Kingston, and Kogawa interweave speech and silence, narration and ellipses, autobiography and fiction as they adapt and recast Asian and Euro-American precursors. Drawing freely from both traditions, they reinvent the past by decentering, disseminating, and interrogating authority-but not by reappropriating it. A fresh and subtle response to issues relating to cultural diversity, Articulate Silences will be important reading for scholars and students in the fie,4s of literary theory and criticism, women's studies, Asian American studies, and ethnic studies.

James Joyce's Silences

James Joyce's Silences PDF Author: Jolanta Wawrzycka
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350036730
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
In this landmark book, leading international scholars from North America, Europe and the UK offer a sustained critical attention to the concept of silence in Joyce's writing. Examining Joyce's major works, including Ulysses, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegans Wake, the critics present intertextual and comparative interpretations of Joyce's deployment of silence as a complex overarching narratological strategy. Exploring the many dimensions of what is revealed in the absences that fill his writing, and the different roles – aesthetic, rhetorical, textual and linguistic – that silence plays in Joyce's texts, James Joyce's Silences opens up important new avenues of scholarship on the great modernist writer. This volume is of particular interests to all academics and students involved in Joyce and Irish studies, modernism, comparative literature, poetics, cultural studies and translation studies.

Implicitness

Implicitness PDF Author: Piotr Cap
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027265488
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Although the term implicitness is ubiquitous in the pragmatic scholarship, it has rarely constituted the focus of attention per se. This book aims to help crystallize the concept of implicitness by defining its linguistic boundaries, as well as specifying and exploring its different communicative manifestations. The contributions by leading specialists scrutinize the main conceptualizations, forms and occurrences of implicitness (such as implicature, impliciture, explicature, entailment, presupposition, etc.) at different levels of linguistic organization. The volume focuses on phrasal, sentential, and discursive phenomena, showcasing the richness and variety of implicit forms of communication, systematizing (where possible) the existing analytic perspectives, and identifying the most productive procedures for further exploration. Taken together, the chapters exhibit theoretical differences that hinder a consensus on the nature of implicitness, but they simultaneously reveal methodological points of contact and raise common questions, thereby signposting a future analytic agenda. The book will appeal to both theoretically and empirically minded scholars working within and across the disciplines of Pragmatics, Semantics, Language Philosophy, Discourse Analysis, and Communication Studies.

Lovecraft

Lovecraft PDF Author: Donald R. Burleson
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813147514
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) has been described variously as the successor to Edgar Allan Poe, a master of the Gothic horror tale, and one of the father of modern supernatural fantasy fiction. Published originally in pulp magazines, his works have grown in popularity since his death, so that more than thirty editions are currently in print. Yet only recently has Lovecraft received serious attention from literary critics. And until now no one has examined his work from a post-structuralist perspective. Donald Burleson fills that void, for the first time in an extended study bringing the resources of deconstruction to bear on the works of this modern gothicist. In an introductory overview, Burleson gives an unusually readable account of deconstruction theory and terminology, a field all too often discussed in densely opaque fashion. He goes on to deconstruct thirteen Lovecraft stories, delving into their fascinating etymological mazes, abundant ambiguities, and shifting levels of meanings. His lively and remarkably jargon-free readings explore Lovecraft's rich figurality to unprecedented depths. At the same time Burleson develops the view that in practicing self-subversion and structural displacement, literary texts perpetuate themselves. His final chapter explores the broad themes running though Lovecraft's fiction, arguing that these themes in themselves prefigure the deconstructive gesture. This insightful and provocative volume will go a long way toward displacing the label of popular writer and establishing Lovecraft as an important figure in American literature.

Arguing over Texts

Arguing over Texts PDF Author: Martin Camper
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190677147
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
From the Constitution to the Bible, from literary classics to political sound bites, our modern lives are filled with numerous texts that govern and influence our behavior and beliefs. Whether in the courtrooms of our judiciaries or over our dining room tables, we argue over what these texts mean as we apply them to our lives. Various schools of hermeneutics offer theories of how we generally understand the world around us or how to read certain types of texts to arrive at the correct or best interpretation, but most neglect the argumentative and persuasive nature of every act of interpretation. In Arguing over Texts, Martin Camper presents a rhetorical method for understanding the types of disagreement people have over the meaning of texts and the lines of argument they use to resolve those disagreements. Camper's fresh approach has its roots in the long forgotten interpretive stases, originally devised by ancient Greek and Roman teachers of rhetoric for inventing courtroom arguments concerning the meaning of legal documents such as wills, laws, and contracts. The interpretive stases identify general, recurring debates over textual meaning and catalogue the lines of reasoning arguers may employ to support their preferred interpretations. Drawing on contemporary research in language, persuasion, and cognition, Camper expands the scope of the interpretive stases to cover textual controversies in virtually any context. To illustrate the interpretive stases' wide range of applicability, Arguing over Texts contains examples of interpretive debates from law, politics, religion, history, and literary criticism. Arguing over Texts will appeal to anyone who is interested in analyzing and constructing interpretive arguments.

Traditions of Writing Research

Traditions of Writing Research PDF Author: Charles Bazerman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113584996X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description
Traditions of Writing Research reflects the various styles of work offered at the Writing Research Across Borders conference. This volume, like the conference that it grew out of, will bring new perspectives to the rich dialogue of contemporary research on writing and advance understanding of this complex and important human activity.

The Patient as Text

The Patient as Text PDF Author: Petter Aaslestad
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 131535778X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
A commonly-held model of the doctor-patient relationship casts it as a subject/object relationship: broadly the patient is a 'text', and the doctor the reader or interpreter of that text. However, recent critical models preset notions of text and reader as complex and unstable, and the relationship of doctor and patient as similarly complicated. Explorations of psychiatry and 'madness' by critics such as Michel Foucault present a further background of complex ideological change. In The Patient as Text, Petter Aaslestad explores selections from over a century of psychiatric notes from Gaustad Hospital, Norway against this critical background, exploring the impact of ideological and medical changes surrounding the psychiatric clinical relationship and psychiatric professionals as constructors of narratives. This book will be of interest to researchers in the medical humanities, psychiatric practitioners, and those with an interest in medical history and critical theory.

Pop Music and Easy Listening

Pop Music and Easy Listening PDF Author: Stan Hawkins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351553771
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
What defines pop music? Why do we consider some styles as easier listening than others? Arranged in three parts: Aesthetics and Authenticity - Groove, Sampling and Industry - Subjectivity, Ethnicity and Politics, this collection of essays by a group of international scholars deals with these questions in diverse ways. This volume prepares the reader for the debates around pop's intricate historical, aesthetic and cultural roots. The intellectual perspectives on offer present the interdisciplinary aspects of studying music and, spanning more than twenty-five years, these essays form a snapshot of some of the authorial voices that have shaped the specific subject matter of pop criticism within the broader field of popular music studies. A common thread running through these essays is the topic of interpretation and its relation to conceptions of musicality, subjectivity and aesthetics. The principle aim of this collection is to demonstrate that pop music needs to be evaluated on its own terms within the cultural contexts that make it meaningful.