Textual criticism—the traditional term for the task of evaluating the authority of the words and punctuation of a text—is often considered an undertaking preliminary to literary cr
This volume gives a theoretical account of the problem of analyzing and evaluating argumentative discourse. After placing argumentation in a communicative perspective, and then discussing the fallacie
Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the lexicon. The demand for a fuller and more adequate understanding of lexical meaning required by developments in computational linguistics, artificia
This volume is a comprehensive, up-to-date, and readable introduction to linguistic meaning. While partial to conceptual and typological approaches, the book also presents results from formal approach
The heart of this study consists of Collins's application of six "cognitive modes" of reading: perception, retrospection, assertion, introspection, expectation, and judgment. In addition, Collins cons
Examining the constitutive role of language and narration in key areas of human experience, Narrative and the Self articulates a view of the self as the implied subject of narrative utterances. Anthon
Manfred Pfister's book is the first to provide a coherent and comprehensive framework for the analysis of plays in all their dramatic and theatrical dimensions. The materical on which his analysis is
When children learn a language, they soon are able to make surprisingly subtledistinctions: "donate them a book" sounds odd, for example, even though "give them a book" isperfectly natural. How can th
Plato's conversations of Socrates are among the most accessible philosophical texts most of us have ever read, yet the more one pursues the art or intelligibility of this writing, the more mysterious
What can the philosophy of language learn from the classical Indian philosophical tradition? As recently as twenty or thirty years ago this question simply would not have arisen. If a practitioner of
Art history as we know it would not exist without Vasari, and Barolsky shows us that something of the same claim should be made for literary history. He demonstrates the ways in which a literary appro
Can there be major dimensions of a poem, a painting, a musical composition created in the absence of God? Or, is God always a real presence in the arts? Steiner passionately argues that a transcenden
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 rationa
In his first book, French critic Roland Barthes defines the complex nature of writing, as well as the social, historical, political, and personal forces responsible for the formal changes in writing f
