Stories of Words. Words used as misunderstanding, satire that goes straight over the wall and the secret of why words hurt so much.Words go deep inside us. Children are proud when they learn to read, then they find out how much words that are their's hurt them. The stories are funny and sad and lonely and scared and brash and boasting. They are objects we invented that along the way became our soul and our heart that are used against us. And that we use against them.

A unique study of lectionaries and graphic design as a site of biblical reception How artists portrayed the Bible in large canvas paintings is frequently the subject of scholarly exploration, yet the presentation of biblical texts in contemporary graphic designs has been largely ignored. In this book Amanda Dillon engages multimodal analysis, a method of semiotic discourse, to explore how visual composition, texture, color, directionality, framing, angle, representations, and interactions produce potential meanings for biblical graphic designs. Dillon focuses on the artworks of two American graphic designers—the woodcuts designed by Meinrad Craighead for the Roman Catholic Sunday Missal and Nicholas Markell’s illustrations for the worship books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—to present the merits of multimodal analysis for biblical reception history.

One of the most phenomenally acclaimed and successful books of recent years is now available as a paperback—with three just-discovered stories Here, gathered in one volume, are the stories that made Clarice a Brazilian legend. Originally a cloth edition of eighty-six stories, now we have eighty- nine in all, covering her whole amazing career, from her teenage years to her deathbed. In these pages, we meet teenagers becoming aware of their sexual and artistic powers, humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies, old people who don’t know what to do with themselves— and in their stories, Clarice takes us through their lives—and hers—and ours.

Grenzen, ihre Überschreitung, ihre Auflösung und ihre Wiederherstellung sind ein bisher nicht systematisch erforschtes Schlüsselkonzept für das Verständnis romantischer Literatur. Diese semiotisch-komparatistische Grundsatzstudie analysiert über drei Kulturräume hinweg vergleichend eine Vielfalt heterogener literarischer Entgrenzungsphänomene in der Romantik und entwickelt auf der Basis der romantischen Zeichentheorie ein Modell für die Analyse transepochaler Entgrenzungsphänomene. Dabei geht sie über bekannte Konzepte des paradoxen Subjekts hinaus, indem Entgrenzung als Interdependenz von Subjekt, Raum und Zeichen umfassend in detaillierten Lektüren literarischer Texte aus Deutschland, den USA und Großbritannien sowie in theoretischen Exkursen untersucht wird - von Novalis und Coleridge über Melville bis hin zu Deleuze und Guattari. Die Arbeit ist somit nicht nur ein Beitrag zur Romantikforschung, sondern lotet auch die methodologischen Möglichkeiten derselben neu aus. Die Studie wurde 2012 mit dem von der Ernst-Reuter-Gesellschaft der Freunde, Förderer und Ehemaligen der Freien Universität Berlin e.V. gestifteten Ernst-Reuter-Preis als herausragende und zukunftsweisende Promotionsarbeit ausgezeichnet. Boundaries constitute a key concept in Romanticism: their transgression, their elimination, but also their reconstruction. By analyzing the triad of sign, subject, and space, this study provides a comprehensive analysis of boundaries in German, English, and American Romanticism. Its trans-epochal approach reveals a shared dynamic of a multiplicity of heterogeneous boundary phenomena ranging from the late 18th century to postmodern Romantic texts and constructs a model for the examination of limits: a theory of a-limitation. The known concept of the transgressive Romantic subject is integrated into this triadic model whose primordial site of a-limitation, however, is the semiotics of Romanticism. With a creative theoretical design that allows the reader to survey readings of individual texts as well as broader theoretical frameworks, "Liminal Semiotics" offers a new perspective on a variety of literary texts and theories ranging from Novalis and Coleridge to Melville and finally to Deleuze and Guattari. The thesis was awarded the Ernst-Reuter-Prize 2012 for outstanding dissertations at Freie Universität Berlin.

Early Americans have long been considered "A People of the Book" Because the nickname was coined primarily to invoke close associations between Americans and the Bible, it is easy to overlook the central fact that it was a book-not a geographic location, a monarch, or even a shared language-that has served as a cornerstone in countless investigations into the formation and fragmentation of early American culture. Few books can lay claim to such powers of civilization-altering influence. Among those which can are sacred books, and for Americans principal among such books stands the Bible. This Handbook is designed to address a noticeable void in resources focused on analyzing the Bible in America in various historical moments and in relationship to specific institutions and cultural expressions. It takes seriously the fact that the Bible is both a physical object that has exercised considerable totemic power, as well as a text with a powerful intellectual design that has inspired everything from national religious and educational practices to a wide spectrum of artistic endeavors to our nation's politics and foreign policy. This Handbook brings together a number of established scholars, as well as younger scholars on the rise, to provide a scholarly overview--rich with bibliographic resources--to those interested in the Bible's role in American cultural formation.

“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

Roy Peter Clark, one of America's most influential writing teachers, offers writing lessons we can draw from 25 great texts. Where do writers learn their best moves? They use a technique that Roy Peter Clark calls X-ray reading, a form of reading that lets you penetrate beyond the surface of a text to see how meaning is actually being made. In The Art of X-Ray Reading, Clark invites you to don your X-ray reading glasses and join him on a guided tour through some of the most exquisite and masterful literary works of all time, from The Great Gatsby to Lolita to The Bluest Eye, and many more. Along the way, he shows you how to mine these masterpieces for invaluable writing strategies that you can add to your arsenal and apply in your own writing. Once you've experienced X-ray reading, your writing will never be the same again.

Walt Disney World is a pilgrimage site filled with utopian elements, craft, and whimsy. It’s a pedestrian’s world, where the streets are clean, the employees are friendly, and the trains run on time. All of its elements are themed, presented in a consistent architectural, decorative, horticultural, musical, even olfactory tone, with rides, shows, r

It has been nearly 150 years since Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and his theory of natural selection still ignites a forest of heated debate between scientific fundamentalists on the one hand and religious fundamentalists on the other. But both sides actually agree more than they disagree, and what has long been needed is a third way to view evolution, one that focuses more on the aspect of life and “being alive”, one that can guide us through, and perhaps out of, the fiery thicket. This book, a seminal work in the burgeoning field of Biosemiotics, provides that third way, by viewing living beings as genuine agents designing their communication pathways with, and in, the world. Already hailed as the best account of biological hermeneutics, Life As Its Own Designer: Darwin’s Origin and Western Thought is a wholly unique book divided into two parts. The first part is philosophical and explores the roots of rationality and the hermeneutics of the natural world with the overriding goal of discovering how narrative can help us to explain life. It analyzes why novelty is so hard to comprehend in the framework of Western thinking and confronts head-on the chasm between evolutionism and traditional rationalistic worldviews. The second part is scientific. It focuses on the life of living beings, treating them as co-creators of their world in the process of evolution. It draws on insights gleaned from the global activity of the Gaian biosphere, considers likeness as demonstrated on homology studies, and probes the problem of evo-devo science from the angle of life itself. This book is both timely and vital. Past attempts at a third way to view evolution have failed because they were written either by scientists who lacked a philosophical grounding or New Age thinkers who lacked biological credibility. Markoš and his coworkers form an original group of thinkers supremely capable in both fields, and they have fashioned a book that is ideal for researchers and scholars from both the humanities and sciences who are interested in the history and philosophy of biology, biosemiotics, and the evolution of life.

Christian theology has concentrated too much on issues around guilt and the needs of the perpetrator of sin, but ignored the strong biblical theme of shame and the needs of the sinned-against. This book seeks to address this lack of serious engagement with shame in scripture. Tracing the story of shame through the biblical story of creation, exodus and exile the author shows how key narratives in the Hebrew scriptures, such as those of David and Job can be read as offering commentary on shaming abuse of privilege and power. Ultimately, the book argues, the culmination of scripture is with the ultimate shaming moment – that of God, on the cross. Provocative and timely, the book demonstrates a crucial lens through which to understand scripture, and is a vital resource for preachers and biblical scholars alike.