Homo sapiens is a "meaning-producing" species. The ability of our minds to create these meanings is termed poetic logic. The use of metaphor to create and communicate ideas is so commonplace and pervasive as to go unnoticed. We no longer are aware that a metaphor is truly a metaphor because it is so entrenched. These metaphors permeate our thought processes, are exemplified in our language, and are reflective of our cultures.
The Poetic Logic of Administration is an investigation of the most important organizational forms of our time, theoretically as well as practically. Central to the presentation are four main trends: the rational bureaucracy, the human network, the harmonious system and the strong culture. The book provides a new and challenging picture of these organizational forms. Difficult to capture in common logical terms, they appear to follow a certain pattern: a 'poetic logic'. They are, for example, enacted as various literary dramas: comedy, tragedy etc. They are also marked by different conceptions of the world - such as the metaphorical and the ironic - and by different explanatory ideals. Kaj Skoldberg's book contains a rhetorical analysis of the styles of modern administration and the changes they have undergone. This is a groundbreaking work, offering new interpretations and critical re-evaluations of the individual approaches to organization, including their 'gurus' and current importance, within the framework of a highly-original, overarching analysis. No previous book has tried to capture the major forms of organizing, and their dynamics, in terms of their rhetorical master tropes, main narrative genres, and explanatory ideals, and also uses this as an interpretive scheme for understanding individual organizational theories and practices within those main approaches. Examples are given from both the private and the public sectors and various forms of efficiency and effectiveness are also discussed.
This book treats eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico’s theory of poetic logic for the first time as the originating force in mathematics, transforming instinctive counting and spatial perception into poetic (metaphorical) symbolism that dovetails with the origin of language. It looks at current work on mathematical cognition (from Lakoff and Núñez to Butterworth, Dehaene, and beyond), matching it against the poetic logic paradigm. In a sense, it continues from where Kasner and Newman left off, connecting contemporary research on the mathematical mind to the idea that the products of early mathematics were virtually identical to the first forms of poetic language. As such, this book informs the current research on mathematical cognition from a different angle, by looking back at a still relatively unknown philosopher within mathematics. The aim of this volume is to look broadly at what constitutes the mathematical mind through the Vichian lens of poetic logic. Vico was among the first to suggest that the essential nature of mind could be unraveled indirectly by reconstructing the sources of its “modifications” (his term for “creations”); that is, by examining the creation and function of symbols, words, and all the other uniquely human artifacts—including mathematics—the mind has allowed humans to establish “the world of civil society,” Vico’s term for culture and civilization. The book is of interest to cognitive scientists working on math cognition. It presents the theory of poetic logic as Vico articulated it in his book The New Science, examining its main premises and then applying it to an interpretation of the ongoing work in math cognition. It will also be of interest to the general public, since it presents a history of early mathematics through the lens of an idea that has borne fruit in understanding the origin of language and symbols more broadly.
The Poetic Organization explores the inherent aspects of organization that revolve around poetic processes. This book is a commentary on poetic elements in organization that are critical to developmental areas of organizations, yet poetics are rarely given the attention deserved.
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.
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) is best remembered for his major work, the New Science (Scienza nuova), in which he sets forth the principles of humanity and gives an account of the stages common to the development of all societies in their historical life. Controversial at the time of its publication in 1725, the New Science has come to be seen as the most ambitious attempt before Comte at a comprehensive science of human society and the most profound analysis of the philosophy of history prior to Hegel. Despite the fundamental importance of the New Science, there has been no philosophical commentary of the text in any language, until now. Written by the noted Vico scholar Donald Phillip Verene, this commentary can be read as an introduction to Vico’s thought or it can be employed as a guide to the comprehension of specific sections of the New Science. Following the structure of the text scrupulously, Verene offers a clear and direct discussion of the contents of each division of the New Science with close attention to the sources of Vico’s thought in Greek philosophy and in Roman jurisprudence. He also highlights the grounding of the New Science in Vico’s other works and the opposition of Vico’s views to those of the seventeenth-century natural-law theorists. The addition of an extensive glossary of Vico’s Italian terminology makes this an ideal companion to Vico’s masterpiece, ideal for both beginners and specialists.
Literary theory flourished in Central and Eastern Europe throughout the twentieth century, but its relation to Western literary scholarship is complex. This book sheds light on the entangled histories of exchange and influence both within the region known as Central and Eastern Europe, and between the region and the West. The exchange of ideas between scholars in the East and West was facilitated by both personal and institutional relations, both official and informal encounters. For the longest time, however, intellectual exchange was thwarted by political tensions that led to large parts of Central and Eastern Europe being isolated from the West. A few literary theories nevertheless made it into Western scholarly discourses via exiled scholars. Some of these scholars, such as Mikhail Bakhtin, become widely known in the West and their thought was transposed onto new, Western cultural contexts; others, such as Ol’ga Freidenberg, were barely noticed outside of Russian and Poland. This volume draws attention to the schools, circles, and concepts that shaped the development of theory in Central and Eastern Europe as well as the histoire croisée – the history of translations, transformations, and migrations – that conditioned its relationship with the West.
This text introduces key theoretical and epistemological concepts in an accessible style together with historical and current real-world examples employed to bring these otherwise difficult concepts to life.
