Signs of change : premodern-->modern-->postmodern / edited by Stephen Barker. [electronic resource]

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Barker, Stephen, 1946- editor.

International Association for Philosophy and Literature. Meeting 1991 : Université de Montréal)

Series:

Contemporary studies in philosophy and literature ; 4

Contemporary studies in philosophy and literature Signs of change

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature--Philosophy--Congresses.

Literature.

Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc--Congresses.

Genre:

Conference papers and proceedings.

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xix, 440 pages) illustrations ;

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, [1996]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book examines the nature of change in history, philosophy, and culture. Precisely because the idea of change is so vast, the book's strategy is to exercise some control over it by organizing itself as a structured progression of theoretical, political, and ideological concerns whose focus is on change. Barker begins with the idea of history and historicity and proceeds through an investigation of the relationship of semiotics and hermeneutics to change, to topography and topology as functions of change, to sexuality and gender as political aspects of a hypothetical theory of change, and to the seemingly culminative issue of life and death themselves as functions of change. Finally, the book concludes with a "coda" concerning alterity both as concept and as lived and literary phenomenon ranging from the avant-garde's "drunkenness" to the alterity of the characters in Chinese poetry.

Not only does the book not attempt to make categorical statements about the nature of change, but it delights in an open-ended discussion of the implications and reverberations of change throughout the world of human experience.

Contents:

The semiotics of laughter / Ib Johansen

Silence and the rehabilitation of beauty : twentieth century German perspectives on the poet's task / Erdmann Waniek

Postmodernism and the scene of theatre / Elinor Fuchs

Theoretical invention and the contingency of critique : the example of postmodern semiotics / John Johnston

From Wittgenstein's house to morphosis : deconstructing "forms of life" / Roger Bell

Nietzsche's trees

and where they grow / Eva Geulen

A misreading of maps : the politics of cartography in Marxism and poststructuralism / Bruno Bosteels

Speaking for nothing : Michel de Certeau on narrative and historical time / Michael Beehler [for Joseph Riddel]

The revolution of a trope : the rise of the new science and the divestment of rhetoric in the seventeenth century / Joseph Chaney

Memory, history, discourse / Patrizia Calefato.

The loss of language within imperial liberalism : the United States' political structure as differend / Steve Martinot

Spinning ethics in its grave : tradition and rupture in the theory of Roland Barthes / Sharon Meagher

Célan's poetics of address : how the dead resist their history / James Hatley

A union forever deferred : sexual politics after Lacan / Barbara Claire Freeman

Love and reproduction : plagiarism, pornography, and Don Quixote's abortions / Sylvia Söderlind

Writing the body as social discourse : prolegomena to carnal hermeneutics / Hwa Yol Jung

The intoxication of the avant-garde in Benjamin and Habermas / Soraya Tlatli

Foucault, conventions, and new historicism / David F. Bell

Irreconcilable similarities : the idea of nonrepresentation / Jeremy GIlbert-Rolfe

The impossible limit / Cynthia Pon.

Notes:

Selected papers, most revised, from the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature (IAPL), held May 1991 at the Université de Montréal, in collaboration with Concordia University and other institutions.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-7914-9577-9

0-585-04264-0