This monograph deals with the ‘aboutness’ of language. First, the sense in which language ‘is about’ or ‘reflects’ both reality and a mental picture of reality is turned into a cornerstone of a reflectionist or ‘Speculative Grammarian’ semantics and pragmatics. Second, the ‘Speculative Grammar’ idea is made concrete in a logico-linguistic account of the way language ‘is about’ the whole of reality as well as about certain fractions of it. Third, the reflectionist perspective is used for a universalist account of the way speech acts ‘are about’ their subjects, topics, and foci.
In order to bring some minimal amount of order to the chaos that almost inevitably attends the use of the word ‘existential’ in a linguistic investigation, the author reserved the term existential sentence (ES) to designate all and only those English sentences in which there appears an occurrence of the unstressed, non-deictic, ‘existential’ there.
Fresh, original and compelling, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies.
Starting at ‘the beginning’ and concluding with ‘the end’, the book covers topics that range from the familiar (character, narrative, the author) to the more unusual (secrets, pleasure, ghosts). Eschewing abstract isms, Bennett and Royle successfully illuminate complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works – so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, whilst Chaucer, Raymond Chandler and Monty Python are all invoked in a discussion of literary laughter.
This book is an introduction to the “Science of translation”, if ever such a science existed. Professor Nida's ‘Toward a Science of Translation’ (I & II) may have drawn the attention of linguists to the possibility of engaging in a process of formalizing, generalizing and rule-setting which, for most of them, should constitute a solid enough ‘scientific’ basis for translation; but the many books produced in the 1990s on translation have shown that the possibility of that process remains just that — only a possibility.
This exuberant guide is special among the many books on relationships because of Serge King’s seasoned perspective as a master Huna shaman and alternative healer. “The problem between two people is never a ‘relationship’ that isn't working,” he says. “It is always that one or both of them don’t know how to relate in a better way.
