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546 books match the query 'Semiotics & Theory' and 21 start with n

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Names Of History

On the Poetics of Knowledge

Jacques Ranciere

University of Minnesota Press, 1994

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Narrating Demons, Transformative Texts

Rereading Genius in Mid-Century Modern Fictional Memoir

Daniel T. O’Hara

The Ohio State University Press, 2012

Narrating Demons, Transformative Texts: Rereading Genius in Mid-Century Modern Fictional Memoir, by Daniel T. O’Hara, acknowledges that the modern conception of literary genius is probably most lucidly expressed in the criticism of Lionel Trilling. But O’Hara also demonstrates that certain important and widely read mid-century modern fictional memoirs subversively return to an earlier conception that emphasizes the demonic nature of genius, a conception that is associated with the occult and the visionary and embraces the vision of evil articulated in earlier literature. O’Hara argues that Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947), Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) all demonstrate an imagining of genius in art and in life that stands in stark and total opposition to the emerging post–World War II age of conformity. These influential works show that genius is inherently a dangerous reality, albeit a creative one. Despite its most transcendent appearances, the full immanence of this conception of demonic genius condemns the modern world to a Last Judgment that is every bit as severe as any envisioned in the Western religious traditions.

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Narrating the Past

Fiction and Historiography in Postwar Spain

David K. Herzberger

Duke University Press, 1995

The relationship between fiction and historiography in Francoist Spain (1939–1975) is a contentious one. The intricacies of this relationship, in which fiction works to subvert the regime’s authority to write the past, are the focus of David K. Herzberger’s book.
The narrative and rhetorical strategies of historical discourse figure in both the fiction and historiography of postwar Spain. Herzberger analyzes these strategies, identifying the structures and vocabularies they use to frame the past and endow it with particular meanings. He shows how Francoist historians sought to affirm the historical necessity of Franco by linking the regime to a heroic and Christian past, while several types of postwar fiction—such as social realism, the novel of memory, and postmodern novels—created a voice of opposition to this practice. Focusing on the concept of writing history that these opposing strategies convey, Herzberger discloses the layering of truth and meaning that lies at the heart of postwar Spanish narrative from the early 1940s to the fall of Franco. His study clearly reveals how the novel in postwar Spain became a crucial form of dissent from the past as it was conceived and used by the State.
Making a decisive intervention in the debate about the ways in which narration determines both the meaning and truth of history and fiction, Narrating the Past will be of special interest to students and scholars of the politics, history, and literature of twentieth-century Spain.

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Narrative Bonds

Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel

Alexandra Valint

The Ohio State University Press, 2021

While narrative fracturing, multiplicity, and experimentalism are commonly associated with modernist and postmodern texts, they have largely been understudied in Victorian literature. Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel focuses on the centrality of these elements and address the proliferation of multiple narrators in Victorian novels. In Narrative Bonds, Alexandra Valint explores the ways in which the Victorian multi-narrator form moves toward the unity of vision across characters and provides inclusivity in an era of expanding democratic rights and a growing middle class. Integrating narrative theory, gothic theory, and disability studies with analyses of works by Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Wilkie Collins, Emily Brontë, and Bram Stoker, this comprehensive and illuminating study illustrates the significance and impact of the multi-narrator structure in Victorian novels.

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Narrative Co-Construction

Author-Audience Interactions and Their Contexts

Edited by Malcah Effron, Margarida McMurry, and Virginia Pignagnoli

The Ohio State University Press, 2026

Advances a new, inclusive, and varied framework for understanding narrative as a product of interplay between authors, audiences, and texts.

In centering the interplay between authors and audiences as the foundation for the narrative act, the innovative and varied collection Narrative Co-Construction makes a resounding argument for the importance of making space for attending to world-building both within the world of the story and out in the world of the audience. Drawing from a range of theoretical orientations, contributors advance a framework that allows multiple points of entry to a given story and welcomes intersectional approaches, both in terms of the embodied identities of its critics and in terms of the theoretical tools they use to identify the methodologies currently active within narrative theory.

Analyzing texts by Jane Austen, André Gide, Mark Z. Danielewski, Ruth Ozeki, Ocean Vuong, and others, as well as interviews and digital (epi)texts, contributors put co-construction in dialogue with digital media studies, empirical studies, cognitive theories, literary history, literary geography, narrative criminology, and more. This inclusive approach puts different viewpoints, identities, and intellectual allegiances in conversation and asserts the value of making context and intersectionality explicit when examining narrative. By highlighting the author-audience collaboration at the heart of narrative vitality, Narrative Co-Construction deepens our understanding of narrative’s world-building power and celebrates how fictions engage readers.

Contributors:
Helen H. Davis, Malcah Effron, Erika Gotfredson, Lindsay Holmgren, Isabell Klaiber, Margaret Love, Margarida McMurry, Rae Muhlstock, Virginia Pignagnoli, Lois Presser, Alexander Scherr, Siim Sorokin, Martha Swift, Anna Torvaldsen, Katherine Weese

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Narrative Policy Analysis

Theory and Practice

Emery Roe

Duke University Press, 1994

Narrative Policy Analysis presents a powerful and original application of contemporary literary theory and policy analysis to many of today’s most urgent public policy issues. Emery Roe demonstrates across a wide array of case studies that structuralist and poststructuralist theories of narrative are exceptionally useful in evaluating difficult policy problems, understanding their implications, and in making effective policy recommendations.
Assuming no prior knowledge of literary theory, Roe introduces the theoretical concepts and terminology from literary analysis through an examination of the budget crises of national governments. With a focus on several particularly intractable issues in the areas of the environment, science, and technology, he then develops the methodology of narrative policy analysis by showing how conflicting policy "stories" often tell a more policy-relevant meta-narrative. He shows the advantage of this approach to reading and analyzing stories by examining the ways in which the views of participants unfold and are told in representative case studies involving the California Medfly crisis, toxic irrigation in the San Joaquin Valley, global warming, animal rights, the controversy over the burial remains of Native Americans, and Third World development strategies.
Presenting a bold innovation in the interdisciplinary methodology of the policy sciences, Narrative Policy Analysis brings the social sciences and humanities together to better address real-world problems of public policy—particularly those issues characterized by extreme uncertainty, complexity, and polarization—which, if not more effectively managed now, will plague us well into the next century.

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Narrative Theory Unbound

Queer and Feminist Interventions

Edited by Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser

The Ohio State University Press, 2015

Under the bold banner of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, editors Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser gather a diverse spectrum of queer and feminist challenges to the theory and interpretation of narrative. The first edited collection to bring feminist, queer, and narrative theories into direct conversation with one another, this anthology places gender and sexuality at the center of contemporary theorizing about the production, reception, forms, and functions of narrative texts.

Through twenty-one essays prefaced by a cogent history of the field, Narrative Theory Unbound offers new perspectives on narrative discourse and its constituent elements; on intersectional approaches that recognize race, religion, and national culture as integral to understanding sexuality and gender; on queer temporalities; on cognitive research; and on lifewriting in graphic, print, and digital constellations. Exploring genres ranging from reality TV to fairy tales to classical fiction, contributors explore the thorny, contested relationships between feminist and queer theory, on the one hand, and between feminist/queer theory and contemporary narratologies, on the other. Rather than aiming for cohesiveness or conclusiveness, the collection stages open-ended debates designed to unbind the assumptions that have kept gender and sexuality on the periphery of narrative theory.

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Narrative in the Anthropocene

Erin James

The Ohio State University Press, 2022

In Narrative in the Anthropocene, Erin James poses two complementary questions: What can narrative teach us about our current geological epoch, defined and marked by the irrevocable activity of humans on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems? and What can our current geological epoch teach us about narrative? Drawing from a wide range of sources—including Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Maria Popova’s collective biography Figuring, Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here, Indigenous and Afrofuturist speculative fiction, and more—James argues that a richer understanding of the forms and functions of narrative in the Anthropocene provides us with invaluable insight into how stories shape our world. At the same time, she contends that the Anthropocene alters the very nature of narrative. Throughout her exploration of these themes, James lays the groundwork for an “Anthropocene narrative theory,” introducing new modes of reading narrative in the Anthropocene; new categories of narrative time, space, narration, and narrativity; and a new definition of narrative itself as a cognitive and rhetorical tool for purposeful worldbuilding.

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Narratology and Ideology

Negotiating Context, Form, and Theory in Postcolonial Narratives

Divya Dwivedi

The Ohio State University Press, 2018

Narratology and Ideology: Negotiating Context, Form, and Theory in Postcolonial Narratives, edited by Divya Dwivedi, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Richard Walsh, brings together many of the most prominent figures in the interface between narratology and postcolonial criticism. While narrative theory has for some time recognized the importance of context in the analysis of fiction, this recognition has not quickly translated into substantial work in fields like postcolonialism, where situated questions of value and ideology have been brought to the fore. Postcolonial criticism, on the other hand, has often neglected the formal qualities of fiction in preference for ideological thematic interpretations, precisely because of the suspect legacy of formalism. The volume, then, stages a meeting between these two fields, negotiating both narratological and postcolonialist concerns by addressing specific features of narrative form and technique in the ideological analysis of key postcolonial texts.

The thirteen essays in Narratology and Ideology offer compelling readings of individual novels, with a focus upon South Asian literature, that provide a cumulative case study on the value of postcolonial narratology. The essays show not only how narrative theory can be productively applied in service of postcolonial criticism but also how such attention to postcolonial fictions can challenge and refine our theoretical understanding of narrative.

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Natural Histories of Discourse

Edited by Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban

University of Chicago Press, 1996

Is culture simply a more or less set text we can learn to read? Since the early 1970s, the notion of culture-as-text has animated anthropologists and other analysts of culture. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban present this stunning collection of cutting-edge ethnographies arguing that the divide between fleeting discursive practice and formed text is a constructed one, and that the constructional process reveals "culture" to those who can interpret it.

Eleven original essays of "natural history" range in focus from nuptial poetry of insult among Wolof griots to case-based teaching methods in first-year law-school classrooms. Stage by stage, they give an idea of the cultural processes of "entextualization" and "contextualization" of discourse that they so richly illustrate. The contributors' varied backgrounds include anthropology, psychiatry, education, literary criticism, and law, making this collection invaluable not only to anthropologists and linguists, but to all analysts of culture.

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Negative Life

The Cinema of Extinction

Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay

Northwestern University Press, 2024

How films help us understand the inevitable death of Earth and humanity

Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction brings cinema studies, queer theory, and psychoanalysis into novel configuration around the concept of negative life, a sundering of human and nonhuman relations. Engaging a philosophical and cinematic corpus that rejects the pastoralism of “entanglement” or “enmeshment,” Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay counter ecocritical pieties and cut a new path for theory. They examine films by Julian Pölsler, Kelly Reichardt, Lee Isaac Chung, Mahesh Mathai, Paul Schrader, and others that exemplify the existential contradictions currently intensifying amid the sixth mass extinction. Each case study testifies formally and thematically to negative life as a structural condition of thought and film. Together, the cases reveal the unlivable dimension of life and art, where form, desire, and nonbelonging tarry with the future-oriented promise of ecostudies—where all that lives connects. Negative Life militates against this promise, showing that faith in connection is a dead end.

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Never on Time, Always in Time

Narrative Form and the Queer Sensorium

Kate McCullough

The Ohio State University Press, 2024

Queer futures begin with the body. In Never on Time, Always in Time, Kate McCullough explores how writers summon queer bodily experiences by way of the senses: these experiences have much to tell us about the pasts, presents, and futures of queer life. The author discusses how narrative form and techniques represent the senses in order to open a more expansive temporality for writers and readers. Can queer futures contain the utopic, while also addressing the violence of the past and present? McCullough argues that a narratology that incorporates the senses is integral to conceptions of queer time, which in its most potent, palpable, and radical expression depends on a rendering of the senses. Never on Time, Always in Time looks at works by Monique Truong, Carol Rifka Brunt, Mia McKenzie, and Alison Bechdel to explore how they invoke the senses to narrate what otherwise seems to be non-narrativizable. McCullough thus reveals a vital queer narratology at work, a mode of reading and writing the senses toward a survivable future. She calls this cluster of contemporary texts “narratives of the queer sensorium” and argues that representations of the senses in these texts open new perspectives onto history, futurity, and relationality.

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New Digital Worlds

Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy

Roopika Risam

Northwestern University Press, 2019

The emergence of digital humanities has been heralded for its commitment to openness, access, and the democratizing of knowledge, but it raises a number of questions about omissions with respect to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and nation. Postcolonial digital humanities is one approach to uncovering and remedying inequalities in digital knowledge production, which is implicated in an information-age politics of knowledge.

New Digital Worlds traces the formation of postcolonial studies and digital humanities as fields, identifying how they can intervene in knowledge production in the digital age. Roopika Risam examines the role of colonial violence in the development of digital archives and the possibilities of postcolonial digital archives for resisting this violence. Offering a reading of the colonialist dimensions of global organizations for digital humanities research, she explores efforts to decenter these institutions by emphasizing the local practices that subtend global formations and pedagogical approaches that support this decentering. Last, Risam attends to human futures in new digital worlds, evaluating both how algorithms and natural language processing software used in digital humanities projects produce universalist notions of the "human" and also how to resist this phenomenon.

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New Materialisms

Ontology, Agency, and Politics

Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds.

Duke University Press, 2010

New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions, contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing ethical and political challenges. In the introduction, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost highlight common themes among the distinctive critical projects that comprise the new materialisms. The continuities they discern include a posthumanist conception of matter as lively or exhibiting agency, and a reengagement with both the material realities of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures.

Coole and Frost argue that contemporary economic, environmental, geopolitical, and technological developments demand new accounts of nature, agency, and social and political relationships; modes of inquiry that privilege consciousness and subjectivity are not adequate to the task. New materialist philosophies are needed to do justice to the complexities of twenty-first-century biopolitics and political economy, because they raise fundamental questions about the place of embodied humans in a material world and the ways that we produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment.

Contributors
Sara Ahmed
Jane Bennett
Rosi Braidotti
Pheng Cheah
Rey Chow
William E. Connolly
Diana Coole
Jason Edwards
Samantha Frost
Elizabeth Grosz
Sonia Kruks
Melissa A. Orlie

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New World Maker

Radical Poetics, Black Internationalism, and the Translations of Langston Hughes

Ryan James Kernan, foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley

Northwestern University Press, 2022

In an ambitious reappraisal of Langston Hughes’s work and legacy, Ryan James Kernan reads Hughes’s political poetry in the context of his practice of translation to reveal an important meditation on diaspora. Drawing on heretofore unearthed archival evidence, Kernan shows how Hughes mined his engagements with the poetics of Louis Aragon, Nicolás Guillén, Regino Pedroso, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Federico García Lorca, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, as well as translations of his own poetry, to fashion a radical poetics that engaged Black left internationalist concerns. As he follows Hughes from Harlem to Havana, Moscow, Madrid, and finally to Dakar, Kernan reveals how the writer’s identity and aesthetic were translated within these leftist geographies and metropoles, by others but also collaboratively. As Kernan argues, we cannot know Hughes without knowing him in translation.

Through original research and close readings alert to the foreign prosody underlying Hughes’s work, New World Maker recuperates his political writing, which had been widely maligned by Cold War detractors and adherents of New Criticism, and affirms his place as a progenitor of African diasporic literature and within the pantheon of US modernists. Demonstrating the integral part translation played in Hughes’s creative process, this book challenges a number of common assumptions about this canonical thinker and offers important insights for scholars of African diasporic literature, comparative literature, and American, Caribbean, and translation studies.

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Niobes

Antiquity, Modernity, Critical Theory

Edited by Mario Telò and Andrew Benjamin

The Ohio State University Press, 2024

A marginalized but persistent figure of Greek tragedy, Niobe, whose many children were killed by Apollo and Artemis, embodies yet problematizes the philosophically charged dialectics between life and death, mourning and melancholy, animation and inanimation, silence and logos. The essays in Niobes present her as a set of complex figurations, an elusive mythical character but also an overdetermined figure who has long exerted a profound influence on various modes of modern thought, especially in the domains of aesthetics, ethics, psychoanalysis, and politics. As a symbol of both exclusion and resistance, Niobe calls for critical attention at a time of global crisis. Reconstructing the dialogues of Phillis Wheatley, G. W. F. Hegel, Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, and others with Niobe as she appears in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Ovid, and the visual arts, a collective of major thinkers—classicists, art historians, and critical theorists—reflect on the space that she can occupy in the humanities today. Inspiring new ways of connecting the classical tradition and ancient tragic discourse with crises and political questions relating to gender, race, and social justice, Niobe insists on living on. Contributors: Barbara Baert, Andrew Benjamin, drea brown, Adriana Cavarero, Rebecca Comay, Mildred Galland-Szymkowiak, John T. Hamilton, Paul A. Kottman, Jacques Lezra, Andres Matlock, Ben Radcliffe, Victoria Rimell, Mario Telò, Mathura Umachandran, Daniel Villegas Vélez

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None Like Us

Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life

Stephen Best

Duke University Press, 2018

It passes for an unassailable truth that the slave past provides an explanatory prism for understanding the black political present. In None Like Us Stephen Best reappraises what he calls “melancholy historicism”—a kind of crime scene investigation in which the forensic imagination is directed toward the recovery of a “we” at the point of “our” violent origin. Best argues that there is and can be no “we” following from such a time and place, that black identity is constituted in and through negation, taking inspiration from David Walker’s prayer that “none like us may ever live again until time shall be no more.” Best draws out the connections between a sense of impossible black sociality and strains of negativity that have operated under the sign of queer. In None Like Us the art of El Anatsui and Mark Bradford, the literature of Toni Morrison and Gwendolyn Brooks, even rumors in the archive, evidence an apocalyptic aesthetics, or self-eclipse, which opens the circuits between past and present and thus charts a queer future for black study.

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Nonsovereign Styles

Rhythms of Relation in Persian Modernism

Maziyar Faridi

Northwestern University Press, 2027

Exploring motifs in modern Persian literature and Iranian film that demand new forms of relationality from politics

Assembling an understudied corpus of literary and filmic texts at the intersection of Persian and global modernism, Maziyar Faridi traces a constellation of aesthetic motifs that resist colonially imported constructs of political relationality in order to argue for an intermedial poetics of nonsovereignty. Moving from the poetry of Nima Yushij and Ahmad Shamlou to the ciné-poems of Férydoun Rahnéma and Forugh Farrokhzad, Nonsovereign Styles charts the transformation of poetic language through its exposure to minor ethnic languages and the rhetorics of English, French, and Spanish modernist poetry and alternative film. Faridi centers two key motifs: ezterāb, a trembling rhythm in which the self encounters itself as difference, and mehr, an aporetic mode of relation beyond identity, community, and sovereignty. Against the state’s project of ethnonationalism, these motifs form a poetics that is both transhistorical and transnational, producing a translational link between Iranian and internationalist poets, such as Langston Hughes and Paul Éluard. By situating Persian modernism within the broader map of global modernism, this book invites us to consider what reading these texts can teach us today about styles of relating to the world and the very sense of the political.

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Novalis, Spinoza, and the Limits of Romantic Materialism

Siarhei Biareishyk

Northwestern University Press, 2026

Offering an innovative and illuminating new reading of Spinoza and Novalis

This rigorously researched study reframes our understanding of the intellectual currents in Germany around 1800 through a careful reinterpretation of its key thinker, Novalis, in conversation with Spinoza’s philosophy. Siarhei Biareishyk presents an alternative to the standard narrative that resolutely links emergent modernity and secularization to philosophical “idealism” by showing how Spinozan materialism informs the scientific experiments, metaphysical inquiries, and political debates of Novalis and his contemporaries. Shifting our focus away from the historical interpretation of Novalis as a mystic and theorist of subjectivity, Biareishyk elaborates on the Spinozan materialist strain in Novalis in three key domains: ontology and the conception of nature, theories of singularity and individuation, and the concept of the political. He brings current romanticist scholarship into conversation with contemporary discussions of Spinoza in continental philosophy, in the Marxist tradition particularly, demonstrating that the Spinoza–Novalis encounter provides a viable alternative—in its articulation of causality, dialectics, and the political—to the dominant conceptual apparatuses of both Kant and Hegel.

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