Author: Penelope Ingram
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791478378
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
How do we live ethically? What role do sex and race play in living or being ethically? Can ethics lead to ontology? Can literature play a role in ethical being? Drawing extensively on the work of Luce Irigaray, Frantz Fanon, and Martin Heidegger, Penelope Ingram argues that ethical questions must be understood in light of ontological ones. It is only when sexual and racial difference are viewed at an ontological level that ethics is truly possible. Central to the connection between ontology and ethics is the role of language. Ingram revisits the relationship between representation and matter in order to advance a theory of material signification. She examines a number of twentieth-century film and literary texts, including Neil Jordan's The Crying Game, J. M. Coetzee's Foe, Toni Morrison's Paradise, and Don DeLillo's The Body Artist, to demonstrate that material signification, rather than representation, is crucial to our experience of living authentically and achieving an ethical relation with the Other. By attending closely to Heidegger's, Irigaray's, and Fanon's positions on language, this original work argues that the literary text is indispensable to a "revealing" of the relationship between ontology and ethics, and through it, the reader can experience a state of "authentic Being ethically."
Author: Paul J. Thibault
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826492533
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
This cutting-edge study of linguistic theory by one of the world's leading authors in the field of semiotics will be of interest to academics and postgraduates researching applied linguistics and advanced semiotics. In his foreword M. A. K. Halliday explains the importance of Paul J. Thibault's work to linguistics. Book jacket.
Author: Judith Harris
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791487067
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
A deeply personal yet universal work, Signifying Pain applies the principles of therapeutic writing to such painful life experiences as mental illness, suicide, racism, domestic abuse, and even genocide. Probing deep into the bedrock of literary imagination, Judith Harris traces the odyssey of a diverse group of writers—John Keats, Derek Walcott, Jane Kenyon, Michael S. Harper, Robert Lowell, and Ai, as well as student writers—who have used their writing to work through and past such personal traumas. Drawing on her own experience as a poet and teacher, Harris shows how the process can be long and arduous, but that when exercised within the spirit of one's own personal compassion, the results can be limitless. Signifying Pain will be of interest not only to teachers of creative and therapeutic writing, but also to those with a critical interest in autobiographical or confessional writing more generally.
Author: Velma E. Love
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271061456
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 159
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Book Description
Divining the Self weaves elements of personal narrative, myth, history, and interpretive analysis into a vibrant tapestry that reflects the textured, embodied, and performative nature of scripture and scripturalizing practices. Velma Love examines the Odu—the Yoruba sacred scriptures—along with the accompanying mythology, philosophy, and ritual technologies engaged by African Americans. Drawing from the personal narratives of African American Ifa practitioners along with additional ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Oyotunji African Village, South Carolina, and New York City, Love’s work explores the ways in which an ancient worldview survives in modern times. Divining the Self also takes up the challenge of determining what it means for the scholar of religion to study scripture as both text and performance. This work provides an excellent case study of the sociocultural phenomenon of scripturalizing practices.
Author: G. Thomas Couser
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472050699
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
Sheds new light on the memoir boom by asking: Is the genre basically about disability?
Author: Henry Louis Gates (Jr.)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195136470
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
A groundbaking work of enduring influence. The Signifying Monkey illuminates the relationship between the African and African American vernacular traditions and literature. Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., uncovers a unique system for interpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. This superb twenty-fifth-anniversary edition features a new preface and introduction by Gates that reflect on the book's genesis and its continuing relevance for today's culture, as well as a new afterword written by the noted critic W.J.T. Mitchell. --Book Jacket.
Author: Paul Naylor
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810116689
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
This text studies five contemporary writers whose radical engagements with poetic form and political content shed new light on issues of race, class and gender. In a detailed reading of three American poets - Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey and Lyn Hejinian, and two Caribbean poets, Kamau Brathwaite and M. Nourbese Philip, the book argues that these writers have produced new forms of poetry that address the holes in history that more traditional forms of poetry neglect. By refusing to limit their work to lyrical expressions of personal experience, it maintains that these writers produce poetry that explores the linguistic, historical and political conditions of contemporary culture, advancing a formally and thematically challenging critique of the ways in which women and people of colour are represented. Far from constituting a unified school of poetry however, the book argues that these five writers represent different facets of the various kinds of poetic practice taking place on the margins of contemporary culture.
Author: Ian Maclachlan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351198416
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
"This is the first full-length study devoted to Roger Laporte, whose lifelong exploration of the stakes of writing has produced a body of work on the borderline of literature and philosophy. Charting the development of Laporte's writing in relation to the work of Heidegger, Levinas, Blanchot and Derrida, this study offers both a comprehensive reading of Laporte's oeuvre and a new perspective on an important strand of recent thinking about literature. In particular, it is claimed here that the imperfect reflexivity of Laporte's 'Ophic' texts effects a singular opening to reading, and that in doing so it illuminates the ethical dimension of literature which has been the subject of much recent discussion."
Author: Robert Perinbanayagam
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351522124
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
Language, Signs and Selves applies conversational analysis to the discourse of everyday life and its roles in social behavior. The explanation offered of the complex elements and processes of language use is theoretically and empirically grounded, synthesizing European post structuralist theory and semiotics with American pragmatist currents.This book parallels work done under other rubrics sociolinguistics, conversation and discourse analysis, and ethnomethodology. This work, however, presents the same matter from a different standpoint. While enthnomethodology and sociolinguistics focus on certain formal properties of conversations, they have pursued the quest for these properties with great methodological rigor, while avoiding questions about intentions. In their work, as in that of many structuralists, discourse has become depersonalized, with the linguistic form itself becoming an independent entity sealed from the world of selves, interaction, conflict, and suffering. Perinbanayagam's interest is in displaying the dialogic properties of such discourses, conceiving each element in them as pragmatic and directed.In many ways Language, Signs and Selves is an enlargement and exemplification of themes discussed in the analysis of language, interactions, and social relationships. The author takes dialogue to be the central event of human being and doing and argues that it is the defining principle of all actions and interactions. Drawing from a variety of sources, he seeks to construct a theory of interaction between humans that is dialectical in all senses of the word; that is to say, a theory concerned with dialects and double processes, as well as with speaking and the logic of relational processes.
Author: Alexandra-Ecaterina Irimia
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111150585
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Although post-structuralism has highlighted the importance of what is offstage, lost, forgotten, hidden or discarded, silent or silenced, the poetics and politics of absence (much like its ethics and aesthetics) have rarely been discussed across media or disciplines. The book conceptualizes 'radical absence' to describe a certain tradition of resistance to ontology, predication, and representation, contesting their reliance on a metaphysics of presence. Apophatic speech, empty signifiers, and figural voids are some of the figures through which radical absence becomes apparent, with unprecedented intensity, in 20th-century theory, literature, film, and the arts. Phantasmatic and outrageous, such figures play with creative strategies of de-materialization, irony, and other forms of discursive undoing. Therefore, absence becomes more than a simple theme; it reflects back on the medium and the meaning-making conditions under which it operates. Elusive and imprecise as an object of study, absence is in need of more subtle and flexible epistemological frameworks. The author proposes to think it not only as a counter-concept for presence, but also - perhaps more productively - as infinite spacing, deferral, fragmentation, and displacement.
