Exploring Textual Action questions how we analyse works of art after the performative turn and shows how the interplay of performativity (textual action), space and topography, and the converging of genres and art forms is essential in modern drama, theatre, prose fiction, poetry and film. The volume also fosters a keen concern for the development of congenial theory. Its 14 detailed essays analyse works of art ranging from Balzac, Melville and George Eliot, to Breton, Kafka, Benjamin, Blixen and (...) Woolf; and from W.C. Williams, Bresson and Scorsese, to Sarraute, Duras, Reygadas, Dumont and Waltz. The approach of these studies discloses the art works as creative and dynamic utterances with active and shaping forces so powerful, and consequential, that they have the potential to transform human perception and blur clear distinctions between art and real life. Using an alternative and dynamic method and suggesting a direction towards the detailed analysis of literature, art, media and culture, Exploring Textual Action addresses current debates within the humanities. (shrink)

Via a hermeneutics focused on Chinese numerology and concentric arrangements, the book offers a novel construal of the textual universe proper to early China writings. The author lays bare distinguishable patterns of textual composition while relating them to corresponding patterns of thinking. He differentiates rhetorical variants through detailed studies of the Zhuangzi's Inner chapters, the Laozi, the Analects, and the Huainanzi. The philosophical depth and relevance of the Chinese ancient worldview appear in a fresh light when one unearths (...) the patterns into which its content is embedded. The focus on textual patterns and rhetorical arrangements also facilitates the reading of Chinese classics alongside other traditions. The book will be a valuable reference for scholars and graduate students studying Chinese literary criticism, Chinese philosophy, and comparative philosophy. (shrink)

This paper considers the use of textual analysis of oral histories as a method for historians of nursing. Fifty‐three oral histories of retired nurses in midwestern USA were analyzed for the purpose of historical reconstruction of past education experiences in nursing. Textual analysis was used to determine how nurses made sense of their educational experiences, and it involved gathering data, analyzing the information, and using a different method of interpreting the data. Although the participants responded to specific questions, (...) the oral histories in this study are more than mere answers to the researchers’ queries. The participants’ memories are narratives that are the joint product of both the historian and the participant. As such, the oral history becomes a text to be stored along with other primary sources for future historians’ use. The research also suggests decentering oral histories from an exclusively academic agenda and focusing more on what the participants choose to remember and why they make those choices. (shrink)

This book addresses the question of deconstruction by asking what it is and discussing its alternatives. To what extent does deconstruction derive from a philosophical stance, and to what extent does it depend upon a set of strategies, moves, and rhetorical practices that result in criticism? Special attention is given to the formulations offered by Jacques Derrida and by Paul de Man . And what, in deconstructive terms, does it mean to translate from one textual corpus into another? Is (...) it a matter of different theories of translation or of different practices? And what of difference itself? Does not difference already invoke the possibility of deconstruction’s “others”? Althusser, Adorno, and Deleuze are offered as exemplary cases. The essays in this volume examine in detail these differences and alternatives. The Textual Sublime is particularly concerned with how a text sets its own limits, borders, and margins, how it delimits what constitutes the text per se and how it invokes at the same time what is not determinately in the text. The textual sublime is that aspect of a text that deconstruction shows to be both an element of the text and what surpasses the text, what takes it outside itself and what ties it to differing philosophical, rhetorical, historical, and critical practices. (shrink)

Dōgen: Textual and Historical Studies is an impressive volume that marks a significant leap forward in the study of Zen Master Eihei Dōgen, founder of the Japanese Sōtō School. Dōgen’s life and thought are closely examined in light of the wider historical and religious contexts of Song dynasty China and the Kamakura era in Japan. This collection offers a careful consideration of Dōgen’s rich literary legacy by examining his significance situated as he was at the historical crossroads between the (...) Chinese Chan tradition and the birth of Japanese Zen. In particular, the volume contemplates the manner in which Dōgen’s historical — perhaps mythological — figure has been endorsed and cultivated by the Sōtō.. (shrink)

The Textual Criticism of Sumerian Literature. By Paul Delnero. The Journal of Cuneiform Studies Supplemental Series, vol. 3. Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research, 2012. Pp. viii + 230. $89.95. [Distributed by ISD, Bristol, Conn.].

Non-Textual Marking Systems in Ancient Egypt. Edited by Julia Budka; Frank Kammerzell; and Sławomir Rzepka. Lingua Aegyptia, Studia Monographica, vol. 16. Hamburg: Widmaier Verlag, 2015. Pp. x + 322, illus. €59.

The article provides textual evidence for the partial, subtle dependence of Theodore Daphnopates' sermon On the Birth of John the Baptist on Homily 42 on the same subject by Emperor Leo VI . This finding is then brought into correlation with Theodore's homiletic oeuvre and its production environment. Through its exploitation of the given source the sermon in question emerges as being directly related to Emperor Constantine VII and his literary preferences, as is the case with other works of (...) Theodore's as well. (shrink)

Exploring Textual Action questions how we analyse works of art after the performative turn and shows how the interplay of performativity (textual action), space and topography, and the converging of genres and art forms is essential in modern drama, theatre, prose fiction, poetry and film. The volume also fosters a keen concern for the development of congenial theory. Its 14 detailed essays analyse works of art ranging from Balzac, Melville and George Eliot, to Breton, Kafka, Benjamin, Blixen and (...) Woolf; and from W.C. Williams, Bresson and Scorsese, to Sarraute, Duras, Reygadas, Dumont and Waltz. The approach of these studies discloses the art works as creative and dynamic utterances with active and shaping forces so powerful, and consequential, that they have the potential to transform human perception and blur clear distinctions between art and "real" life. Using an alternative and dynamic method and suggesting a direction towards the detailed analysis of literature, art, media and culture, Exploring Textual Action addresses current debates within the humanities. (shrink)

This article examines the textual afterlives of Utopia in China and Taiwan by surveying titles published between 2016 and the first half of 2017. We are dealing with a massive array of titles pertinent to Utopia related to multiple disciplines. Indeed, not only has the sixteenth-century neologism Utopia become "a term of common parlance" that has taken on its own life,1 but the concept of Utopia representing the ideal has also been extensively adapted and appropriated.2 Since any articulation expressing (...) a particular ideal can be considered "utopian" in its own right, it is not my intention to take into account all the titles that border on the articulation of or the desire for an... (shrink)

In order to establish patterns of materialization of the beliefs we are going to consider that these have defined mathematical structures. It will allow us to understand better processes of the textual, architectonic, normative, educative, etc., materialization of an ideology. The materialization is the conversion by means of certain mathematical correspondences, of an abstract set whose elements are beliefs or ideas, in an impure set whose elements are material or energetic. Text is a materialization of ideology and it is (...) any representation of the Reality represented by symbolic means. In all text T we can observe diverse topological structures: Metric Textual Space, Textual Topology and a Textual Lattice. (shrink)

One of the most disputed issues in twentieth-century literary theories and critical studies is what literary textual meaning rests upon. A further question is whether textual meaning is ascertainable or not. The two questions are interrelated. The first one looks into the origin of textual meaning in literary texts: is it derived from authorial intent, or from sentences and rhetorical devices, or actualized in the process of readerly activities and critical interpretation? As John Searle sees it, three (...) theories focused on this matter during the twentieth century:Now, these three different claims—that meaning is a linguistic property of the text, that meaning is a matter of authorial intention, and that meaning is... (shrink)

The following notes concern textual problems in the prologue andparodosof Aeschylus’Seven against Thebes. The text and apparatus criticus are based on those of M.L. West,Aeschylus: Tragoediae(Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1990; corrected edition, 1998).

The interest in textuality from a hermeneutic perspective has its historical origins in Martin Luther's doctrine of Sola Scriptura, “Only Scripture”. Schleiermacher, who to liberated hermeneutics from the Bible, presented a scientific account of textuality that consists in establishing a dialectic between the grammatical and the psychological. The modern hermeneutic theory of textuality was first developed by Hans‐Georg Gadamer. To be a work, says Ricoeur, textual discourse must satisfy three criteria: it must be a sequence longer than a sentence; (...) it must be codified into a genre (a story, poem, essay, etc.); and it must be uniquely configured into a style. Ricoeur's analysis of work in this sense is an attempt to synthesize the romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher with what he sees as being its antithesis. The hermeneutics of both Ricoeur and Gadamer are returned to their Lutheran origins through this faith in textuality, or textual goodwill. (shrink)

In our research we use textual analysis techniques of speech analysis, to know the abandon representations from subjects whom has interrupted they therapy. Identify this group?s speech, enable us to delimitated significant aspects of they discourse and obtain significant elements from the language...

RESUMO Este estudo tem por objetivo compreender o processo criativo durante a gênese textual de títulos em histórias inventadas por alunos recém-alfabetizados. A partir da perspectiva teórico-metodológica oferecida pela Genética Textual, dentro de uma abordagem linguístico-enunciativa, analisamos as relações associativas constituídas na recuperação de informações advindas das memórias semântica e episódica desses alunos. Tomamos como unidade de análise o diálogo face a face, estabelecido durante um processo de produção textual colaborativa, no contexto ecológico da sala de aula. (...) Nossa análise, qualitativa e microgenética, permitiu mapear o modo como ideias e elementos linguísticos são articulados de forma imprevisível e inusitada, formando redes associativas, tanto por semelhanças semânticas, quanto por semelhanças sonoras. As redes associativas indicam que a criatividade se dá entre o reconhecimento do jogo de linguagem e, ao mesmo tempo, preservação das propriedades do gênero textual e da unidade de sentido do manuscrito escolar em construção. ABSTRACT This study aims to understand the creative process during the textual genesis of titles in stories invented by newly literate students. Based on the theoretical-methodological perspective offered by Textual Genetics, within a linguistic-enunciative approach, we analyze the associative relations constituted in the retrieval of information from the semantic and episodic memories of these students. We take as a unit of analysis the face to face dialogue, established during a collaborative textual production process, in the ecological context of the classroom. Our qualitative and microgenetic analysis allowed us to map the way ideas and linguistic elements are articulated in an unpredictable and unusual way, forming associative networks, both by semantic and sound similarities. The associative networks indicate that creativity occurs between the recognition of the language set while preserving the properties of the textual genre and the unity of meaning of the school manuscript under construction. (shrink)

BackgroundMental health is a public health problem of great concern. Previous studies show that textual features and individual psychological characteristics can influence the effect of receiving information.PurposeThis study explores whether textual features influence the persuasiveness of teenager students’ mental health education while considering the influence of risk preference.MethodsFrom November to December 2021, a cross-sectional study was conducted among 1,869 teenager students in grade 7–12 in Chongqing, China. Wilcoxon signed-rank test, multiple logistic regression, and subgroup analysis were used to (...) analyze the data.ResultsAmong the four textual features mentioned in this study, a significant difference was reported in the persuasive effects of information with and without numerical features. Combined with those from the risk preference analysis, results showed that the regulatory effect of risk preference was only reflected in emotional conflicts. Students who prefer having no emotional conflict in the text showed the characteristics of risk avoidance, or lower grades, or rural or school accommodation. Most teenager students are also risk averse, especially females and juniors.ConclusionThe numbers, symbols, and positive emotions in the text generate an active effect on teenager students receiving mental health education. Students avoiding risk are inclined to read texts without emotional conflicts. The probability of male choosing texts with positive emotional polarity is 33.5% lower than that of female. Female students and those from lower grades also demonstrate a higher inclination to risk avoidance compared with their male and higher grade counterparts. Therefore, educational materials with different text characteristics should be developed for teenager students with varying characteristics. (shrink)

In this article, we use a mix of computational techniques to identify textual shifts in the Ottoman şeyhülislams’ fetvas between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Our analysis, supplemented by a close reading of these texts, indicates that the fetvas underwent multiple forms of transformation, a consequence of the institutional evolution of the şeyhülislam’s fetva office that aimed to speed up and streamline the production of the fetvas: over time, the texts appropriated a more uniform character and came to contain (...) shorter responses. In the compositions of the questions, we identified many “trigger terms” that facilitated reflexive responses independent of the fetvas’ jurisprudential contexts, a tendency that became stronger after the second half of the seventeenth century. In addition, we propose in the article a methodology that measures the relative strengths of textual and conceptual links among the fetva corpora of various Ottoman şeyhülislams. This analysis informs us about possible paths of long-term evolution of this genre of jurisprudential documents. (shrink)

Philosophizing is an activity a process carries on by mind-endeavored creatures. But philosophy itself the product of philosophy is an abstraction which, as such, exists in its own way. Like chemistry or poetry, the things it deals with may be ever so real, but it itself exists in the realm of textuality. However the nature of philosophy s textual domain is seldom studied as such. The present discussion will take one very small step towards filling this gap.".

We focus on the production of efficient descriptions of objects, actions and events. We define a type of efficiency, textual economy, that exploits the hearer’s recognition of inferential links to material elsewhere within a sentence. Textual economy leads to efficient descriptions because the material that supports such inferences has been included to satisfy independent communicative goals, and is therefore overloaded in the sense of Pollack [18]. We argue that achieving textual economy imposes strong requirements on the representation (...) and reasoning used in generating sentences. The representation must support the generator’s simultaneous consideration of syntax and semantics. Reasoning must enable the generator to assess quickly and reliably at any stage how the hearer will interpret the current sentence, with its (incomplete) syntax and semantics. We show that these representational and reasoning requirements are met in the SPUD system for sentence planning and realization. (shrink)

In The Textual Tradition of Plato's Timaeus and Critias, Gijsbert Jonkers presents a new examination of the medieval manuscripts of both Platonic dialogues, an overview of the ancient tradition and a vast collection of ancient testimonia.

In the thesis literature review, an engineering graduate student is expected to place original research in the context of previous work by other researchers. However, for some students, particularly those for whom English is a second language, the literature review may be a mixture of original writing and verbatim source text appropriated without quotations. Such problematic use of source material leaves students vulnerable to an accusation of plagiarism, which carries severe consequences. Is such textual appropriation common in engineering master’s (...) writing? Furthermore, what, if anything, can be concluded when two texts have been found to have textual material in common? Do existing definitions of plagiarism provide a sufficient framework for determining if an instance of copying is transgressive or not? In a preliminary attempt to answer these questions, text strings from a random sample of 100 engineering master’s theses from the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database were searched for appropriated verbatim source text using the Google search engine. The results suggest that textual borrowing may indeed be a common feature of the master’s engineering literature review, raising questions about the ability of graduate students to synthesize the literature. The study also illustrates the difficulties of making a determination of plagiarism based on simple textual similarity. A context-specific approach is recommended when dealing with any instance of apparent copying. (shrink)

Employing the concept of “layering,” this book seeks to rethink our relation to textual tradition against the background of the emergence of digital culture, the increasing spectacularization of psychic as well as social life, the renegotiation of historical thinking and the precarious position of the theoretical humanities within academia.

The article examines the role of discourse in organisational sensemaking. By building links between the theorising undertaken within organisational studies and the empirical analysis of multimodal social interaction, it argues for a relational view of sensemaking and investigates how sense is made in and through social interaction in real organisational situations where language use intertwines with embodied actions and the manipulation of artefacts. In particular, the article studies the use of discourse technologies of textual artefacts in sensemaking processes. The (...) data come from training workshops of a Finnish workplace organisation, conducted in order for the employees to delineate the history and future of their organisation with the help of writable papers. The results show how the papers exert agency in the situation by facilitating three specific discursive practices and by enabling and restricting the actions employed in constructing a shared understanding of the organisational reality. (shrink)

Before the popularization of the printing press, the circula­tion of commentarial texts across regional borders, especially of Islamic texts outside of the Middle East, remains largely unexplored. This article focuses on the movement of Islamic manuscripts in the Indian Ocean world, from South and East Africa to South and East Asia. Together with merchants, sail­ors, travelers, and commodities, the books also traveled long distances, replete with ideas, stories, dreams, myths, norms, manners, and emotions. What was the role of manuscripts in (...) the expansion of Islam into the premodern oceanic world and in religio-cultural exchanges between central Islamic lands and the larger world? What sorts of books did people access, read, and use, and what did the circulation of these texts imply? I address these questions with a broad focus on the oceanic littoral and Islamic manuscripts and a specific focus on one of the ports and a legal commentary. Based on this analytical exercise of zooming-out and zooming-in between macro- and micro-maritime textual histories anchored in the sixteenth century, I argue that the citations of specific manuscripts reveal the prominence of a transregional circula­tion of certain texts, along with their contextual cultures of reading, writing, producing, and circulating commentaries. (shrink)

In the present paper I analyze some relevant textual keys of Plato's Apology to show the many strands underlying Socrates' claims of ignorance. I advocate a position that seeks to reevaluate the use of epistemic lexica by considering other evidence, such as cultural and dramatic context, the use of hypothetical clauses, the comparative and the rhetoric of the pair real/apparent. From this approach, I hope to show that there are good reasons to interpret Socrates' claims of ignorance in the (...) light of amiable irony, whereby the use of language and other literary devices create layers of meaning to express the full sense of Socratic wisdom for the audience without resorting to the charge of contradiction or insincerity. Against a position that reduces Socrates' message to the use of epistemic lexica to interpret it either by synonymy, equivocity or low/high cognitive grading, I propose to read Socrates' claims of ignorance, always in comparison to others' claim of wisdom, as a sort of cultural appropriation and revaluation of the traditional title σοφία/σοφός. (shrink)

Recently, dynamic text presentation, such as scrolling text, has been widely used. Texts are often presented at constant timing and speed in conventional dynamic text presentation. However, dynamic text presentation enables visually presented texts to indicate timing information, such as prosody, and the texts might influence the impression of reading. In this paper, we examined this possibility by focusing on the temporal features of digital text in which texts are represented sequentially and with varying speed, duration, and timing. We call (...) this “textual prosody.” We used three types of textual prosody: “Recorded,” “Shuffled,” and “Constant.” Recorded prosody is the reproduction of a reader’s reading with pauses and varying speed that simulates talking. Shuffled prosody randomly shuffles the time course of speed and pauses in the recorded type. Constant prosody has a constant presentation speed and provides no timing information. Experiment 1 examined the effect of textual prosody on people with normal hearing. Participants read dynamic text with textual prosody silently and rated their impressions of texts. The results showed that readers with normal hearing preferred recorded textual prosody and constant prosody at the optimum speed. Recorded prosody was also preferred at a low presentation speed. Experiment 2 examined the characteristics of textual prosody using an articulatory suppression paradigm. The results showed that some textual prosody was stored in the articulatory loop despite it being presented visually. In Experiment 3, we examined the effect of textual prosody with readers with hearing loss. The results demonstrated that readers with hearing loss had positive impressions at relatively low presentation speeds when the recorded prosody was presented. The results of this study indicate that the temporal structure is processed regardless of whether the input is visual or auditory. Moreover, these results suggest that textual prosody can enrich reading not only in people with normal hearing but also in those with hearing loss, regardless of acoustic experiences. (shrink)

The book presents the outcomes of an innovative research programme in the history of science and implements a Text Act Theory which extends Speech Act Theory, in order to illustrate a new approach to texts and textual communicative acts. It examines assertives (absolute or conditional statements, forecasts, insurance, etc.), directives, declarations and enumerations, as well as different types of textual units allowing authors to perform these acts: algorithms, recipes, prescriptions, lexical templates for terminological studies and enumerative structures. The (...) book relies on the study of a broad range of documents of the past dealing with various domains: mathematics, zoology, medicine, lexicography. The documents examined come from scholarly sources from different parts of the world, such as China, Europe, India, Mesopotamia and are written in a variety of European languages as well as Chinese, Cuneiform and Sanskrit. This approach proves fruitful in both history of science and Text Act Theory. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to elucidate how nurses are positioned in Canadian news stories regarding their salaries. While the image of nursing in mass media has been widely studied, few studies explore how nurses are constructed in news stories. Drawing on ideas from institutional ethnography together with discourse analysis, this discussion highlights public textual discourses about nurses’ salaries in Canadian news stories. The media discourse was found to distort the issues by focusing attention on nurses. Recognizing how (...) these textual distortions mediate and construct messages is important in understanding how nurses and their work are constructed in the media. This discussion seeks to inform readers about how nurses are situated within commonly circulated discourses in the media. It also seeks to contribute to the literature about the nurse's image and how nurses and their work are portrayed in the public realm. It concludes by recommending increased awareness about how nurses are talked about in mass communication and the need to disrupt these messages and their underlying assumptions. (shrink)

This research paper focuses on the comprehensive description and analysis of the structure of judgments from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Despite the growing interest in examining the rhetorical and linguistic aspects of legal texts, the genre structure of judgments has remained a little-explored area. While headings and paragraph enumeration provide a systematic reference system for citation and cross-referencing they do not reveal the dynamic relations between individual text chunks in judgments. The current analysis combines Swales (...) and Bhatia's genre theory with Hoey's approach to patterning in discourse and corpus linguistics analyses. The findings show that the complexity of CJEU judgments extends beyond surface-level information with linguistic expressions playing a crucial role in highlighting dynamic relations and discourse patterning. The results reveal how the structure of CJEU judgments has changed over time and point to the intratextual relations between different sections. Additionally, the study provides a detailed description of the textual organisation of CJEU judgments in terms of move structures and conventionalised discourse patterns. (shrink)

‘Text’ has been a frequent notion in analytical conceptualizations of landscape and the city. It is mostly found in analyses of textual representations or suggestions concerning a metaphor of “reading” an (urban) landscape. In the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics the idea of the text of St. Petersburg has also been applied in analysing particular cities as organizing topics in literature and in culture more widely, but it has not happened to an equal degree in studies of actual urban spaces. (...) The understanding of text as a semiotic system and mechanism is, however, more promising than revealed by these conceptions. Some potential can be made apparent by relating this textual paradigm to a more pragmatic understanding of the city and its planning. My project in this paper is to uncover an analytical framework focusing on the concepts of ‘text’, ‘textualization’ and ‘texting’ in studying the planning of urban environment. The paper observes the case of the urban planning process of the Tartu city centre in Estonia during 2010–2016, and is particularly concerned with the roles that urban nature has acquired in the process of this “textualization” of the local environment, societal ideals, practices and possible others. (shrink)

Employing the concept of “layering,” this book seeks to rethink our relation to textual tradition against the background of the emergence of digital culture, the increasing spectacularization of psychic as well as social life, the renegotiation of historical thinking and the precarious position of the theoretical humanities within academia.

En este artículo, se exponen los resultados obtenidos de la investigación Mecanismos de cohesión textual en las conversaciones en Facebook, elaborada para optar por el grado maestría en Lingüística de la Universidad de Costa Rica. Su objetivo es describir y analizar los mecanismos de cohesión textual utilizados por los usuarios de Facebook, en español, en sus conversaciones. El análisis se realiza a partir de los aportes teóricos de la lingüística textual, de Beaugrande y Dressler, sobre las normas (...) de textualidad; además, toma en cuenta el concepto de hipertexto y su impacto sobre las nuevas formas de comunicación. El estudio evidencia que existen mecanismos textuales especializados en vincular distintas intervenciones en una misma conversación, mientras que otros se orientan a vincular elementos textuales presentes en una misma intervención. Además, en el estudio, se detalla la frecuencia de uso de los distintos mecanismos de cohesión analizados (conexión, referencia, elipsis y cohesión léxica). (shrink)

Chariton’s novel, Chaereas and Callirhoe, is intensely interested not only in the emotional experience of the protagonists but also in the emotional effect the narrative has on readers. Among the many emotions depicted within the text, one stands out for its architectonic function: jealousy. Jealousy articulates the plot and propels it forward. Jealousy is also represented as a fundamentally “readerly” emotion: scenes of reading focus on the potential of written texts to stir jealous emotions. Similarly, scenes of embedded narration focus (...) on the jealous reactions of narratees. The plot achieves closure when Chaereas learns to manage his jealousy as narratee and narrator. His experience, however, has implications also for Chariton and his readers. The text’s representation of jealousy as a narrative and textual force speaks both to the experience of writing in a culture that prizes the imitation of prestigious models and to the experience of reading a text that self-consciously hybridizes those models. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the textual criticism of Achilles Tatius’ novel Leucippe and Clitophon by proposing a number of alterations to the text of the most recent edition of the complete novel (Les Belles Lettres) (Paris, 1991).

This note discusses the lacuna at Nemean 9.17, considers the supplements suggested to date and proposes a new one.

Utilizing the metaphor of the palimpsest, this paper looks at layering processes at work in the natural world and human perceptions of it, paying particular attention to the manifestations of the past visible in constructions in and of the landscape. History is made of constant reformations, in which pieces of the past make up the present. The palimpsest offers a useful tool for discussing a trans-temporal landscape. The layers of landscape construction go beyond the literal geological construction, encompassing human pasts (...) and presents as well. Engaging the palimpsestuous layers at work in physical and textual landscape construction allows us to place human endeavours into more expansive notions of temporality. (shrink)

In 1992, the much acclaimed prolific American writer Joyce Carol Oates publishes Black Water – a very harsh and condensed literary reenactment of a gruesome event having taken place more than twenty years before and known as the “Chappaquiddick incident”. Another twenty years later, through her 2012 novel Mudwoman, the author seems to revisit the topic that had haunted her for decades. This paper aims at establishing a certain narrative pattern connecting the two novels not only thematically, but also phantasmatically: (...) the sudden “resurrection” of Joyce Carol Oates’s character in the 2012 novel is, as we see it, far from being “incidental”. By “textual anastomosis”, we understand a subjective association of narratives in order to show how the disembodied consciousness “travels” from one character’s fictional body to another’s, triggering a whole bunch of personal memories which also resurrect in this other character’s fictional biography. (shrink)

Recent months have brought forth a new edition of Nemesianus and a 294-page study of the textual tradition that he shares with Calpurnius. The edition, prepared by P. Volpilhac for Budé , offers nothing new on the tradition beyond reports of a few manuscripts known to previous editors; but Luigi Castagna's book I bucolici latini minori: una ricerca di critica testuale makes an earnest attempt at solving once and for all the problems that survived the last contribution of any (...) weight, Giarratano's edition . Though most of what Castagna says is true, however, his readers may be cushioned against the sharper points by an undue amount of padding, which also fails to hide gaps. Before he proceeds to his own edition of Nemesianus, therefore, a few things can usefully be said. (shrink)

Textual representation of graphene in Sweden’s most circulated newspapers is analyzed in 229 articles from 2004 to 2018. What is and is not said about graphene is explored through systematically identifying the lexical and grammatical patterns of sentences using the word “graphene.” Graphene is said to be a super material with certain properties, to be an object of research, commercialization, and application, and to have societal significance. Given frequent classifications of graphene as a nanomaterial in scientific discourse, there is (...) notably limited reference to graphene as “nano” in the newspapers and only marginal reference to risk. This paper discusses the findings regarding this Swedish newspaper discourse on graphene in relation to its intertextuality, i.e., how texts draw upon and recontextualize other texts: the Swedish newspaper discourse on graphene echoes discourses of promise formulated elsewhere in society; it is not very diversified in terms of themes; it is dominated by positive and neutral representations rather than by risk; and it makes limited reference to the nano-discourse, even though, according to most definitions, graphene is a nanomaterial. (shrink)

Textual entailment is a relationship that obtains between fragments of text when one fragment in some sense implies the other fragment. The automation of textual entailment recognition supports a wide variety of text-based tasks, including information retrieval, information extraction, question answering, text summarization, and machine translation. Much ingenuity has been devoted to developing algorithms for identifying textual entailments, but relatively little to saying what textual entailment actually is. This article is a review of the logical and (...) philosophical issues involved in providing an adequate definition of textual entailment. We show that many natural definitions of textual entailment are refuted by counterexamples, including the most widely cited definition of Dagan et al. We then articulate and defend the following revised definition: T textually entails H = df typically, a human reading T would be justified in inferring the proposition expressed by H from the proposition expressed by T. We also show that textual entailment is context-sensitive, nontransitive, and nonmonotonic. (shrink)

This book addresses a central dilemma in critical theory today: how to theorize the subject as both a construct of oppressive discourse and as a dialogical agent. By engaging a wide range of leading philosophical and critical thinkers—James, Habermas, MacIntyre, Rorty, Taylor, Derrida and West are all critiqued—Meili Steele proposes linking language with human agency in order to develop an alternative textual and ethical theory of the subject. Developing this theory through readings that address issues of identity politics, race (...) and feminist theory, Steele argues that we do not have to choose between an idealized or demonized modernity, offering new ways of understanding the ethical and political dimensions of imaginative narratives. (shrink)

In this paper, we wish to explore the role that textual representations play in the creation of new mathematical objects. We do so by analyzing texts by Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813) and Évariste Galois (1811–1832), which are seen as central to the historical development of the mathematical concept of groups. In our analysis, we consider how the material features of representations relate to the changes in conceptualization that we see in the texts.Against this backdrop, we discuss the idea that new (...) mathematical concepts, in general, are increasingly abstract in the sense of being detached from material configurations. Our analysis supports the opposite view. We suggest that changes in the material aspects of textual representations (i.e., the actual graphic inscriptions) play an active and crucial role in conceptual change.We employ an analytical framework adapted from Bruno Latour’s 1999 account of intertwined material and representational practices in the empirical sciences. This approach facilitates a foregrounding of the interconnection between the conceptual development of mathematics, and the construction, (re-)configuration, and manipulation of the materiality of representations. Our analysis suggests that, in mathematical practice, distinctions between the material and structural features of representations are not permanent and absolute. This problematizes the appropriateness of the distinction between concrete inscriptions and abstract relations in understanding the development of mathematical concepts. (shrink)

The Dead Sea Scrolls have demonstrated the fluidity of biblical and early Jewish texts in antiquity. How did early Jewish scribes understand the nature of their pluriform literature? How should modern textual critics deal with these fluid texts? Centered on the Serekh ha-Yaḥad - or Community Rule - from Qumran as a test case, this volume tracks the development of its textual tradition in multiple trajectories, and suggests that it was not understood as a single, unified composition even (...) in antiquity. Attending to material, textual, and literary factors, the book argues that ancient claims for textual identity ought to be given priority in discussions among textual critics about the ontology of biblical books. (shrink)

Anthropologists often have fieldwork experiences that are not explicitly analysed in their writings, though they nevertheless contribute to and shape their ethnographic understandings, and can resonate throughout their work for many years. The task of this volume is precisely to uncover these layers of anthropological knowledge-making. Contributors take on the challenge of reconstructing the ways in which they originally entered the worlds of research subjects - their anthropological Others - by focusing on pre-textual and deeply phenomenological processes of perceiving, (...) noting, listening and sensing. Drawing on a wide range of research experiences - with the Dogon in Mali, immigrant football players in Spain, the Inuit of the Far North, Filipino transnational families, miners in Poland and students in Scotland - this book goes beyond an exploration of the development of increased ethnographic sensitivity towards words or actions. It also commences the foundational project of developing a new language for building anthropological works, one stemming from recurring acts of participation, and rooted primarily in the pre-textual worlds of the tacit, often non-visible, and intense experiences that exceed the limitations of conventional textual accounts. (shrink)