In this masterful experiment in truly comparative literary criticism, Alfred J. Mac Adam establishes Latin America's place in the Western literary tradition. By juxtaposing Latin American and Anglo-American texts, he shows how Latin American literature has gone beyond the context of Hispanic letters to borrow from, exploit, and finally extend the Western tradition. Mac Adam describes the changes that have taken place in Latin American literature since the time of Modernismo (roughly 1880-1920), when Spanish American writers tried to update their literary language by imitating foreign, mostly French, literature. Since then, as he demonstrates, Latin American writing has achieved a pioneering status by means of a different kind of imitation—parody—whereby it gives back to the former centers of Western culture their own writing, now distorted and reshaped into something new.

In an innovative contribution to the challenging of disciplinary boundaries, Edward J. Ahearn juxtaposes works of literature with the writings of social scientists to discover how together they illuminate city life in ways that neither can accomplish separately. Ahearn's argument spans from the second half of the nineteenth century in Western Europe to the present-day United States and encompasses a wide range of literary genres and sociological schools. For example, Charles Baudelaire's essays on the city are viewed alongside the work of Emile Durkheim and Georg Simmel; Bertolt Brecht's Jungle of Cities heightens the arguments of Louis Wirth and Robert Park; Richard Wright's Native Son and Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March are re-visioned in tandem with works by William Julius Wilson and others; Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" poses a challenge to James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy; Toni Morrison's historical novel Jazz is buttressed by the career of Robert Moses and the revisionist work of historians Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson; and Don DeLillos's Cosmopolis comes into brilliant focus in the light of arguments on world cybercities by David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, and Manuel Cassels. Resisting the temptation to ignore contradictions for the sake of interpretation, Ahearn instead offers the reader a view of the modern city as complex as his subject matter. Here the methodologies and knowledge generated by the social sciences are both complemented and subverted by the experience of city life as portrayed in literature. With its diverse narrative tactics and shifting points of view, which can be as disorienting to the reader as a foreign city is to an arriving immigrant, literature reinforces the importance of method and outlook in the social sciences. Ultimately, Ahearn suggests, neither literature nor the social sciences can capture the experience of urban misery.

A Stanford University Press classic.

Using conversation analysis to explore the nature of argument, asymmetry, and power on talk radio, this book focuses on the interplay between the structures of talk in interaction and the structures of participation on talk radio. In the process, it demonstrates how conversation analysis may be used to account for power as a feature of institutional discourse. To address a number of key issues in the study of institutional communication and conflict talk, a case study of a British talk radio show is presented, stimulating some penetrating questions: * What is distinctive about interaction on talk radio? * What is the basis of the communicative asymmetries between hosts and callers? * How are their arguments constructed, and in what ways does the setting enable and constrain the production of conflict talk? These questions are answered through the detailed study of conversational phenomena, informed by a critical concern for the relationship between talk and social structure. This book will be of interest to a wide readership consisting of academics, advanced undergraduates, and postgraduate students in a range of courses in sociology, linguistics, media/communication/cultural studies, anthropology, and popular culture.

1. Ontology. 2. Metaphysics. 3. Philosophy, German. 4.Thought and thinking. 5. Philosophy, Asian. 6. Philosophy, Indic. 7. Philosophy, Modern -- 20th century.8. Philosophy, Modern -- 19th century. 9. Practice (Philosophy). 10. Philosophy and civilization. 11. Postmodernism. 12. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. 13. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. 14. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976 -- Homes and haunts -- Germany -- Todtnauberg.15. Nagarjuna, 2nd cent. I. Ferrer, Daniel Fidel, 1952-. Written between 2005 and 2011.

To broaden the interpretive scope of critical theory and increase its usefulness, this text draws tradition-based views of language and anti-humanistic theories from their abstract frameworks into the field of cultural studies. It examines major thinkers and contemporary writers.

Radical abolitionist and freedom-fighter John Brown inspired literary America to confrontation during his short but dramatic career as a public figure in antebellum America. Emerging from obscurity during the violent struggle to determine how Kansas would enter the Union in 1856, John Brown captured the imagination of the most prominent Eastern literary figures following his dramatic, though failed raid on Harper’s Ferry. Impressed by Brown’s forthright defense of his attempt to initiate the end of slavery, Whittier, Whitman, Melville, Longfellow, and Howells responded to the abolitionist with poetic tributes suggesting that Brown was a liberating hero, while Emerson and Thoreau celebrated his effort to inspire the nation to a new moral awareness of the common humanity of all men. Responses, however, were not uniform, as these and other figures debated the merits and meanings of Brown’s actions. This exceptional book sheds new light on how John Brown inspired America’s most significant intellects to take a public stand against the inertia of moral compromise and social degeneracy, bringing the nation to the brink of civil war.

To broaden the interpretive scope of critical theory and increase its usefulness, this text draws tradition-based views of language and anti-humanistic theories from their abstract frameworks into the field of cultural studies. It examines major thinkers and contemporary writers.

This book-series, initiated in 1992, has an interdisciplinary orientation; it comprises research monographs, collections of essays and annotated editions from the 18th century to the present. The term German-Jewish literature refers to the literary work of Jewish authors writing in German to the extent that Jewish aspects can be identified in these. However, the image of Jews among non-Jewish authors, often determined by anti-Semitism, is also a factor in the history of German-Jewish relations as reflected in literature. This series provides an appropriate forum for research into the whole problematic area.

For over thirty years, Steven Mailloux has championed and advanced the field of rhetorical hermeneutics, a historically and theoretically informed approach to textual interpretation. This volume collects fourteen of his most recent influential essays on the methodology, plus an interview. Following from the proposition that rhetorical hermeneutics uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history, this book examines a diverse range of texts from literature, history, law, religion, and cultural studies. Through four sections, Mailloux explores the theoretical writings of Heidegger, Burke, and Rorty, among others; Jesuit educational treatises; and products of popular culture such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Star Trek: The Next Generation. In doing so, he shows how rhetorical perspectives and pragmatist traditions work together as two mutually supportive modes of understanding, and he demonstrates how the combination of rhetoric and interpretation works both in theory and in practice. Theoretically, rhetorical hermeneutics can be understood as a form of neopragmatism. Practically, it focuses on the production, circulation, and reception of written and performed communication. A thought-provoking collection from a preeminent literary critic and rhetorician, Rhetoric’s Pragmatism assesses the practice and value of rhetorical hermeneutics today and the directions in which it might head. Scholars and students of rhetoric and communication studies, critical theory, literature, law, religion, and American studies will find Mailloux’s arguments enlightening and essential.