Download or read book More Than Discourse written by Donald A. Crosby and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the role of symbols in religion and suggests particular symbols appropriate to religious naturalism. Religious life involves more than prosaically stated beliefs. It also encompasses attitudes, emotions, values, and practices whose meanings cannot be adequately captured in verbal assertions but require effective expression in forceful images, portrayals, and enactments of a nonliteral sort. Indeed, the worlds religious traditions are each marked by rich and distinctive symbols. In More Than Discourse, Donald A. Crosby discusses the nature of symbols in religion and investigates symbols appropriate for religious naturalism or what he terms Religion of Nature. This is a religious outlook that holds the natural world to be the only world; it is sacred but without any supernatural domain or presence underlying it. Warning against a too-literalistic approach to any religion by either its adherents or its critics, Crosby discusses the nature and roles of religious symbols, how they work, and their particular kinds of truth or falsity. A set of criteria for evaluating the effectiveness and meaning of religious symbols is provided along with explorations of specific symbols Crosby finds to be highly significant for Religion of Nature.
Download or read book The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse written by Steven D. Smith and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-06 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book presses us to look harder at closely held beliefs and to question deeply rooted premises and commitments with which we are perhaps too comfortable."---Richard W Garnett Noire Dame Law School --
Download or read book Discourse Markers written by Deborah Schiffrin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discourse markers - the particles oh, well, now, then, you know and I mean, and the connectives so, because, and, but and or - perform important functions in conversation. Dr Schiffrin's approach is firmly interdisciplinary, within linguistics and sociology, and her rigourous analysis clearly demonstrates that neither the markers, nor the discourse within which they function, can be understood from one point of view alone, but only as an integration of structural, semantic, pragmatic, and social factors. The core of the book is a comparative analysis of markers within conversational discourse collected by Dr Schiffrin during sociolinguistic fieldwork. The study concludes that markers provide contextual coordinates which aid in the production and interpretation of coherent conversation at both local and global levels of organization. It raises a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues important to discourse analysis - including the relationship between meaning and use, the role of qualitative and quantitative analyses - and the insights it offers will be of particular value to readers confronting the very substantial problems presented by the search for a model of discourse which is based on what people actually say, mean, and do with words in everyday social interaction.
Download or read book Relevance Theory written by Agnieszka Piskorska and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-16 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume covers a variety of topics which are at the centre of interest in pragmatic research: understanding and believing, reference, politeness, communication problems, stylistics, metaphor, and humour. Next to innovative theoretical proposals, there are interesting analyses and discussions.
Download or read book Mastering Discourse written by Paul A. Bové and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mastering Discourse gathers and elaborates more than a decade of thought on the problems of the intellectual in contemporary society, by one of the most distinguished critics writing on these issues today. From Derrida and Foucault to Kristeva and Irigaray, Paul A. Bové looks at the practices of literary and cultural theory, and discusses the way theorists have produced their institutional positions and politics. Examining some of the major theories developed out of and in relation to the problems of discourse, Bové analyzes the limited successes and failures of these efforts. Mastering Discourses offers an account of why "theory" fails to deal adequately with the politics of discursive cultures and warns that unless critics take much more seriously their own disciplinary inscriptions they will always reproduce structures of power and knowledge that they claim to oppose. Moreover, Bové argues, they will not fulfill the main role of the post-enlightenment intellectual, namely: to respond effectively to the present, through new theoretical and historical formulations that address the changing world of transnational capitalism and its neoliberal ideologies.
Download or read book The Grammar of Discourse written by Robert E. Longacre and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In that The Anatomy of Speech Notions (1976) was the precursor to The Grammar of Discourse (1983), this revision embodies a third "edition" of some of the material that is found here. The original intent of the 1976 volume was to construct a hierarchical arrangement of notional categories, which find surface realization in the grammatical constructions of the various languages of the world. The idea was to marshal the categories that every analyst-regardless of theoretical bent-had to take account of as cognitive entities. The volume began with a couple of chapters on what was then popularly known as "case grammar," then expanded upward and downward to include other notional categories on other levels. Chapters on dis course, monologue, and dialogue were buried in the center of the volume. In the 1983 volume, the chapters on monologue and dialogue discourse were moved to the fore of the book and the chapters on case grammar were made less prominent; the volume was then renamed The Grammar of Discourse. The current revision features more clearly than its predecessors the intersection of discourse and pragmatic concerns with grammatical structures on various levels. It retains and expands much of the former material but includes new material reflecting current advances in such topics as salience clines for discourse, rhetorical relations, paragraph structures, transitivity, ergativity, agency hierarchy, and word order typologies.
Download or read book Toward a Civil Discourse written by Sharon Crowley and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2006-04-02 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toward a Civil Discourse examines how, in the current political climate, Americans find it difficult to discuss civic issues frankly and openly with one another. Because America is dominated by two powerful discourses—liberalism and Christian fundamentalism, each of which paints a very different picture of America and its citizens' responsibilities toward their country-there is little common ground, and hence Americans avoid disagreement for fear of giving offence. Sharon Crowley considers the ancient art of rhetoric as a solution to the problems of repetition and condemnation that pervade American public discourse. Crowley recalls the historic rhetorical concept of stasis—where advocates in a debate agree upon the point on which they disagree, thereby recognizing their opponent as a person with a viable position or belief. Most contemporary arguments do not reach stasis, and without it, Crowley states, a nonviolent resolution cannot occur.Toward a Civil Discourse investigates the cultural factors that lead to the formation of beliefs, and how beliefs can develop into densely articulated systems and political activism. Crowley asserts that rhetorical invention (which includes appeals to values and the passions) is superior in some cases to liberal argument (which often limits its appeals to empirical fact and reasoning) in mediating disagreements where participants are primarily motivated by a moral or passionate commitment to beliefs.Sharon Crowley examines numerous current issues and opposing views, and discusses the consequences to society when, more often than not, argumentative exchange does not occur. She underscores the urgency of developing a civil discourse, and through a review of historic rhetoric and its modern application, provides a foundation for such a discourse-whose ultimate goal, in the tradition of the ancients, is democratic discussion of civic issues.
Download or read book Discourse Markers written by Graham Ranger and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-02-10 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In our everyday speech we represent events and situations, but we also provide commentary on these representations, situating ourselves and others relative to what we have to say and situating what we say in larger contexts. The present volume examines this activity of discourse marking from an enunciative perspective, providing the first English-language study of the highly influential Theory of Enunciative and Predicative Operations. This semantic/pragmatic theory is popular among academics who specialize in linguistics, discourse analysis, translation studies and didactics in France, but has not yet been widely adopted elsewhere. The tools of this theory are applied to a variety of specific discourse markers in contemporary English and semantic hypotheses are tested using the data-based approach of corpus linguistics. This book therefore provides an English-speaking readership with the keys to understand the theory underlying the author’s analysis of a selection of markers (‘anyway’, ‘indeed’, ‘in fact’, ‘yet’, ‘still’, ‘like’ and 'I think'). This book will provide a valuable resource for students and researchers in linguistics with an interest in discourse markers, natural language argumentation, formal semantics, the interfaces between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, linguistic theorisation and French – or “poststructural” – models of discourse analysis.
Download or read book Keats s Odes written by Anahid Nersessian and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-02-10 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “When I say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things that cannot be gotten over—like this world, and some of the people in it.” In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them—“Ode to a Nightingale,” “To Autumn”—are among the most celebrated poems in the English language. Anahid Nersessian here collects and elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life—of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet—as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem. The book emerges from Nersessian’s lifelong attachment to Keats’s poetry; but more, it “is a love story: between me and Keats, and not just Keats.” Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nersessian celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own losses—and Nersessian, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved. Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the personal will find its home among the numerous fans of Keats’s enduring work.
Download or read book Natural Histories of Discourse written by Michael Silverstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996-07-15 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is culture simply a more or less set text we can learn to read? Since the early 1970s, the notion of culture-as-text has animated anthropologists and other analysts of culture. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban present this stunning collection of cutting-edge ethnographies arguing that the divide between fleeting discursive practice and formed text is a constructed one, and that the constructional process reveals "culture" to those who can interpret it. Eleven original essays of "natural history" range in focus from nuptial poetry of insult among Wolof griots to case-based teaching methods in first-year law-school classrooms. Stage by stage, they give an idea of the cultural processes of "entextualization" and "contextualization" of discourse that they so richly illustrate. The contributors' varied backgrounds include anthropology, psychiatry, education, literary criticism, and law, making this collection invaluable not only to anthropologists and linguists, but to all analysts of culture.
Download or read book Amusing Ourselves to Death written by Neil Postman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1986 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the effects of television culture on how we conduct our public affairs and how "entertainment values" corrupt the way we think.
Download or read book Discourse on Free Will written by Desiderius Erasmus and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-06-27 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Desiderius Eramsus (1466/9-1536) was the most renowned scholar of his age, a celebrated humanist and Classicist, and the first teacher of Greek at Cambridge. An influential figure in the Protestant Reformation, though without ever breaking from the Church himself, he satirised both human folly and the corruption of the Church. Martin Luther (1483-1546) was the founder of the German Reformation. His 95 Theses became a manifesto for reform of the Catholic Church and led to his being tried for heresy. He remained in Germany, Professor of Biblical Exegesis at the University of Wittenburg, until his death, publishing a large number of works, including three major treatises and a translation of the New Testament into German. Comprising Erasmus's "The Free Will" and Luther's "The Bondage of the Will", Discourse on Free Will is a landmark text in the history of Protestantism. Encapsulating the perspective on free will of two of the most important figures in the history of Christianity, it remains to this day a powerful, thought-provoking and timely work.
Download or read book Discourse written by Sara Mills and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-10-19 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sara Mills offers an accessible and comprehensive analysis of the term 'discourse' and explores the theoretical assumptions underlying it. This handy, easy to follow pocket guidebook for students provides: straightforward working definitions historical developments of the term studied analysis of Michel Foucault discussion of the appropriation of the term 'discourse' by feminist, colonial and post-colonial discourse theorists examples of literary and non-literary texts to illustrate the use of 'discourse'.
Download or read book Critique of Religious Discourse written by Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important work of contemporary Islamic thought argues against the programmatic use of Islamic religious texts to support fundamentalist beliefs First published in Arabic in 1994, progressive Muslim scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd's controversial essay argued that conventional fundamentalist interpretations of the Quran and other Islamic religious texts are ahistorical and misleading. Conservative religious leaders accused him of apostasy. Marking the first time a work by Abu Zayd is available in its entirety in any Western language, this English edition makes his erudite interpretation of classical Islamic thought accessible to a wider audience at a critical historical moment.
Download or read book More Than a Memory written by Johan Leemans and published by Peeters Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout its history, persecutions and martyrdom have been Christianity's faithful companions. Remarkably enough, Christians have always valued martyrdom in a positive way. This positive evaluation of martyrdom most certainly has to do with the absolute, uncompromising nature of it. The martyrs' lives and deaths represent the most uncompromising of answers to the divine call. The focus of the contributions in this volume is not in the first place on reconstructing the historical events of the martyr's life and death "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist," but on the discourse generated by this event as mediated in texts. More than a Memory aims to explore the reciprocal relationship between this discourse of martyrdom and the construction of Christian identity. It will do so by presenting a number of test cases in which this dynamic can be seen at work. They will lead the reader through the entire history of Christianity, starting with the Martyrdom of Lyons and Vienne in the second century and ending in the Latin America of the 1960's. Each article will present a test case of discourse-analysis, attempting to explore the issue of how a document or coherent group of documents contributed to create a distinct Christian identity. Taken together, the essays provide an array of examples of how martyrdom impinged on the way Christian identity has been negotiated in the Christian past. In doing this, the volume at the same time illustrates the sheer importance of martyrdom and the reflection and writing about it throughout the history of Christianity until today.
Download or read book Masters of Discourse written by Israel Shamir and published by Booksurge Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcome to the new world order, where mass media, a fully integrated public-opinion-forming machine of mind control had rendered the Left and Right obsolete and subservient to Zionism. Who are the people who own and operate this machine? Are they actually the Jewish Lobby? No, says Shamir. The formidable Jewish Lobby is just the visible tip of the iceberg, while below there are miles and miles of solid ice: media lords, chief editors, their favourite university pundits – in short, the Masters of Discourse. In this third volume of his writing, Israel Shamir travels around the world to find the reason for their captive hold over our thinking.
Download or read book Manufacturing Religion written by Russell T. McCutcheon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-06-19 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new book, author Russell McCutcheon offers a powerful critique of traditional scholarship on religion, focusing on multiple interrelated targets. Most prominent among these are the History of Religions as a discipline; Mircea Eliade, one of the founders of the modern discipline; recent scholarship on Eliade's life and politics; contemporary textbooks on world religions; and the oft-repeated bromide that "religion" is a sui generis phenomenon. McCutcheon skillfully analyzes the ideological basis for and service of the sui generis argument, demonstrating that it has been used to constitute the field's object of study in a form that is ahistoric, apolitical, fetishized, and sacrosanct. As such, he charges, it has helped to create departments, jobs, and publication outlets for those who are comfortable with such a suspect construction, while establishing a disciplinary ethos of astounding theoretical naivete and a body of scholarship to match. Surveying the textbooks available for introductory courses in comparative religion, the author finds that they uniformly adopt the sui generis line and all that comes with it. As a result, he argues, they are not just uncritical (which helps keep them popular among the audiences for which they are intended, but badly disserve), but actively inhibit the emergence of critical perspectives and capacities. And on the geo-political scale, he contends, the study of religion as an ahistorical category participates in a larger system of political domination and economic and cultural imperialism.
