A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. In the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched...

"It is in and through Symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously, lives, works, and has his being: those ages, moreover, are accounted the noblest which can the best recognise symbolical worth, and prize it highest." ​ Carlyle ​ Without symbolism there can be no literature; indeed, not even language. What are words themselves but symbols, almost as arbitrary as the letters which compose them, mere sounds of the voice to which we have agreed...

Theory of Mind is what enables us to "put ourselves in another's shoes." It is mindreading, empathy, creative imagination of another's perspective: in short, it is simultaneously a highly sophisticated ability and a very basic necessity for human communication. Theory of Mind is central to such commercial endeavors as market research and product development, but it is also just as important in maintaining human relations over a cup of coffee. Not...

El cuerpo no es, para la semiótica, un dominio de análisis como cualquier otro. La encarnación de los procesos significantes le proporciona un substrato que se impone a todas las elaboraciones cognitivas y emotivas. En primer lugar, el cuerpo es la sede donde se encuentra el que va a ser el plano de la expresión con el que será el plano del contenido: se convierte así en operador de la semiosis. Por lo demás, los cuerpos que interactúan con...

Focusing primarily on the work of Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, and J. M. Coetzee, Ato Quayson launches a thoroughly cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study of the representation of physical disability. Quayson suggests that the subliminal unease and moral panic invoked by the disabled is refracted within the structures of literature and literary discourse itself, a crisis he terms "aesthetic nervousness." The disabled reminds the able-bodied...

As a city that seems to float between Europe and Asia, removed by a lagoon from the tempos of terra firma, Venice has long seduced the Western imagination. Since the 1797 fall of the Venetian Republic, fantasies about the sinking city have engendered an elaborate series of romantic clichés, provoking modern artists and intellectuals to construct conflicting responses: some embrace the resistance to modernity manifest in Venice's labyrinthine premodern...

Examines the increasingly prevalent assumption that postmodernism is over and that literature and film are once again engaging sincerely with issues of ethics and politics. The Passing of Postmodernism addresses the increasingly prevalent assumption that a period marked by poststructuralism and metafiction has passed and that literature and film are once again engaging sincerely with issues of ethics and politics. In discussions of various twentieth-...

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) was University Professor at the University of Toronto, where he was also professor of English at Victoria College. His books include Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton). David Damrosch is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature and director of the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University. A landmark work of literary criticism Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism...

Se puede decir que la pregunta central de cualquier propuesta semiótica (del estructuralismo europeo a la semeiótica peirceana, del culturalismo lotmaniano al cognitivismo de la Escuela de Árhus) es en qué consiste la significación. Y cada una de ellas, con variaciones de muy diverso grado, ofrece una respuesta a dicha pregunta. En este libro queremos proponer un enfoque alternativo, que hemos denominado "agentivo": aquí la significación se...

Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) combined the study of literature, cinema, technology, and philosophy in a manner sufficiently novel to be recognized as a new field of academic endeavor in his native Germany. "Media studies," as Kittler conceived it, meant reflecting on how books operate as films, poetry as computer science, and music as military equipment. This volume collects writings from all stages of the author's prolific career. Exemplary essays...