Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality
Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality
by Richard Harvey Brown
University of Chicago Press, 1987 Paper: 978-0-226-07617-1 | Cloth: 978-0-226-07616-4 Library of Congress Classification P40.B76 1987 Dewey Decimal Classification 401.9
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Brown makes elegant use of sociological theory and of insights from language philosophy, literary criticism, and rhetoric to articulate a new theory of the human sciences, using the powerful metaphor of society as text.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Richard Harvey Brown is professor of sociology at the University of Maryland.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Discourse and Polity
Sociolinguistics, Language Use, and the Mobilization of Low-Income Groups
2. Personal Identity and Political Economy
Western Grammars of the Self in Historical Perspective
3. Reason as Rhetorical
On Relations between Epistemology, Discourse, and Practice
4. Theories of Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Theories
Emile Durkheim and the Political Symbology of Sociological Truth
5. Rhetoric and the Science of History
The Debate between Evolutionism and Empiricism as a Conflict of Metaphors
6. Social Reality as Narrative Text
Interactions, Institutions, and Polities as Language
7. Narrative Fiction as Social Text
Literature, Literary Theory, and the Self as Social-Symbolic Act
8. Literary Form and Sociological Theory
Dialectical Irony as Emancipatory Discourse
Notes
References
Index