In this pioneering book Polish author Katarzyna Jaszczolt lays down the foundations of an original theory of meaning in discourse, reveals the cognitive foundations of discourse interpretation, and puts forward a new basis for the analysis of discourse processing. She provides a step-by-step introduction to the theory and its application, and explains new terms and formalisms as required. Dr. Jaszczolt unites the precision of truth-conditional, dynamic approaches with insights from neo-Gricean pragmatics into the role of speaker's intentions in communication. She shows that the compositionality of meaning may be understood as merger representations combining information from various sources including word meaning and sentence structure, various kinds of default interpretations, and conscious pragmatic inference.

 

his collection reflects the growing interest realist critics have shown towards forms of discourse theory and deconstruction. The diverse range of contributions address such issues as the work of Derrida and deconstruction, discourse theory, Eurocentrism and poststructuralism.

Towards a "Natural" Narratology makes an intervention into ongoing debates in literary theory and criticism. Monika Fludernik argues for a new narrative theory which builds on insights from conversational narrative while touching on key issues for poststructuralists. Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis and structuralist narratology, the author examines narrative structures as they have developed from oral storytelling to the realist novel and beyond.

Shakespeare, Theory and Performance is an exciting collection of essays, bringing a full range of contemporary critical perspectives to bear upon the practical questions of performing Shakespeare. During recent years, a new revolution in critical theory has called into question a number of assumptions about the performance of Shakespeare which had long gone unchecked.