This book outlines an innovative approach to the study of literature called pragmapoetics, a philosophy of poetic utterances. The book posits that studies are as much a branch of linguistics as they are of the philosophy of language and mind, and considers the poetic self-referential function a profound feature of life and intentionality. As a structuralist thinker, the author is drawn towards graphical definitions for their greater elucidative power. This collection contains three sections: “General Poetics,” “Pragmapoetics,” and “Estonian and Comparative Poetics,” consisting of nineteen of the author’s works from 1996 up to 2022, which best represent his approach.
This collection of essays examines the unprecedented reach, magnitude and complexity of global challenges—political, economic, technological, social and environmental. It advocates fundamental changes in theory, research, public policy, and institutions, and advances new thinking on global leadership, human security, human-centered economics, and human rights. The book also proposes measures to break down the barriers between academic disciplines and between research and policy-making, and reconciles the objective facts of science with the subjective truths of the arts and human values. It replaces mechanistic analytic thinking with integrated knowledge, bridging the divide between abstract theory and the living complexity of social reality.
This book outlines an innovative approach to the study of literature called pragmapoetics, a philosophy of poetic utterances. The book posits that studies are as much a branch of linguistics as they are of the philosophy of language and mind, and considers the poetic self-referential function a profound feature of life and intentionality. As a structuralist thinker, the author is drawn towards graphical definitions for their greater elucidative power. This collection contains three sections: "General Poetics," "Pragmapoetics," and "Estonian and Comparative Poetics," consisting of nineteen of the author's works from 1996 up to 2022, which best represent his approach.
Critiquing the fictive nature of socially accepted values about gender, the authors unravel the strategies adopted by writers and filmmakers in (de)constructing the gendered self in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
The poetics of intertextuality proposed in this book, based mainly on semiotics, elucidates factors determining the socio-historically elusive border between general intertextuality and citationality, and explores modes of intertextual representation.
This book examines the emplotment of India in the Western literary imagination. Basing her discussion on the reception of an emblematic Sanskrit text, Kālidāsa's Śākuntala, Figueira studies how and why this text was distorted in translation, criticism, and adaptation, and isolates the linguistic errors and cultural distortions that can be grouped into trends and patterns. The unique situation of Śākuntala's reception affords the author the opportunity to look at the way Europeans projected their cultural needs upon India. The author puts into perspective an entire social and intellectual history of Europe's encounter with Indian culture, an examination of its cultural and political consequences, and a philosophical inquiry into differences between Eastern and Western world views.
Figueira (comparative literature, U. of Illinois) identifies how the Gadamerian concept of prejudice in the form of specific exotic clichTs elucidates the dynamics of exoticism, while tracing Sanskrit studies in the West, focusing on 19th-century German, French, and English scholarship and also touching on 20th-century associations between Indo-Ger
As the annual peer-reviewed publication of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), Recherche littéraire / Literary Research is an Open Access journal published by Peter Lang. Its mission is to inform comparative literature scholars worldwide of recent contributions to the field. To that end, it publishes scholarly essays, review essays discussing recent research developments in particular sub-fields of the discipline, as well as reviews of books on comparative topics. Scholarly essays are submitted to a double-blind peer review. Submissions by early-career comparative literature scholars are strongly encouraged. En tant que publication annuelle de l'Association internationale de littérature comparée (AILC), Recherche littéraire / Literary Research est une revue expertisée par des pair·e·s et publiée par Peter Lang en libre accès voie dorée. Elle vise à faire connaître aux comparatistes du monde entier les développements récents de la discipline. Dans ce but, la revue publie des articles de recherche scientifique, des essais critiques dressant l'état des lieux d'un domaine particulier de la littérature comparée, ainsi que des comptes rendus de livres sur des sujets comparatistes. Les articles de recherche sont soumis à une évaluation par des pair·e·s en double anonyme. Des soumissions par de jeunes chercheuses et chercheurs en littérature comparée sont fortement encouragées.
In Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, Dorothy M. Figueira provides a fascinating account of the construction of the Aryan myth and its uses in both India and Europe from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. The myth concerns a race that inhabits a utopian past and gives rise first to Brahmin Indian culture and then to European culture. In India, notions of the Aryan were used to develop a national identity under colonialism, one that allowed Indian elites to identify with their British rulers. It also allowed non-elites to set up a counter identity critical of their position in the caste system. In Europe, the Aryan myth provided certain thinkers with an origin story that could compete with the Biblical one and could be used to diminish the importance of the West's Jewish heritage. European racial hygienists made much of the myth of a pure Aryan race, and the Nazis later looked at India as a cautionary tale of what could happen if a nation did not remain "pure." As Figueira demonstrates, the history of the Aryan myth is also a history of reading, interpretation, and imaginative construction. Initially, the ideology of the Aryan was imposed upon absent or false texts. Over time, it involved strategies of constructing, evoking, or distorting the canon. Each construction of racial identity was concerned with key issues of reading: canonicity, textual accessibility, interpretive strategies of reading, and ideal readers. The book's cross-cultural investigation demonstrates how identities can be and are created from texts and illuminates an engrossing, often disturbing history that arose from these creations.
This book offers a groundbreaking perspective on the political, cultural and pedagogical issues of English in the age of globalization. Additionaly it addresses theoretical concepts as they relate to language and globalization while simulataneously creating new perspectives on the issues. The fifteen papers that make up this collection present valuable information about the English language in Hong Kong and China. Including pioneering works that examine how language functions as a mediating agent in the global cultural formation, and vice versa.
