Analyzes a wide range of literary topics, including the nature of science fiction, writing for children, the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, and fairy tales

Product Description: At a moment when 'literature' threatens to be collapsed into other discourses, or to be subsumed by such terms as 'narrative' and 'genre,' Jurgen Dines Johansen, although he recognizes its protean nature, focuses on literature itself as it relates to other discourses...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Previously uncollected essays discuss Lewis' views on ethical issues arising from World War II, threats to education and religious life, living in an atomic age, and sex in literature

Reading versions of important lectures given in the 1950s demonstrate Nabokov's critical talents and reveal his judgments on the works and achievement of Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, Proust, and Stevenson (view table of contents)

Critical essays discuss Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorki, and the nature of philistinism

Product Description: For much of the 20th century, an apparently solid conceptual wall allowed us to separate information and bodies. Information is that which exists between elements; bodies are the elements themselves. One is abstract the other corporeal...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Linguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist, Julia Kristeva is one of the most influential and prolific thinkers of our time. Her writings have broken new ground in the study of the self, the mind, and the ways in which we communicate through language. Her work is unique in that it skillfully brings together psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, literature, linguistics, and philosophy.In her latest book on the powers and limits of psychoanalysis, Kristeva focuses on an intriguing new dilemma. Freud and psychoanalysis taught us that rebellion is what guarantees our independence and our creative abilities. But in our contemporary "entertainment" culture, is rebellion still a viable option? Is it still possible to build and embrace a counterculture? For whom―and against what―and under what forms?Kristeva illustrates the advances and impasses of rebel culture through the experiences of three twentieth-century writers: the existentialist John Paul Sartre, the surrealist Louis Aragon, and the theorist Roland Barthes. For Kristeva the rebellions championed by these figures―especially the political and seemingly dogmatic political commitments of Aragon and Sartre―strike the post-Cold War reader with a mixture of fascination and rejection. These theorists, according to Kristeva, are involved in a revolution against accepted notions of identity―of one's relation to others. Kristeva places their accomplishments in the context of other revolutionary movements in art, literature, and politics. The book also offers an illuminating discussion of Freud's groundbreaking work on rebellion, focusing on the symbolic function of patricide in his Totem and Taboo and discussing his often neglected vision of language, and underscoring its complex connection to the revolutionary drive. (view table of contents)

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Product Description: A study of C. S. Peirce's conception of the sign, with a critique of Saussure and Hjelmslev, Dialogic Semiosis presents a semiotics of the production, transmission, and interpretation of signs in human communication. Jørgen Dines Johansen studies the process of sign creation, how signs fulfill their office of transmitting information between human agents, chiefly through a study of human speech...read more

Product Description: "... the details of Saint-Martin’s argument contain a wealth of penetrating observations from which anyone with a serious interest in visual communication will profit." ―Journal of CommunicationSaint-Martin elucidates a syntax of visual language that sheds new light on nonverbal language as a form of representation and communication...read more

Product Description: The appeal of semiotics lies in its apparent ability to establish a common framework for all disciplines, a framework rooted in the understanding of the sign as the universal means of communication. Introducing Semiotic provides a synoptic view of semiotic development, covering for the first time all the previous epochs of Western philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to the present...read more