Download or read book Performatively Speaking written by Debra J. Rosenthal and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Performatively Speaking, Debra Rosenthal draws on speech act theory to open up the current critical conversation about antebellum American fiction and culture and to explore what happens when writers use words not just to represent action but to constitute action itself. Examining moments of discursive action in a range of canonical and noncanonical works—T. S. Arthur's temperance tales, Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick—she shows how words act when writers no longer hold to a difference between writing and doing. The author investigates, for example, the voluntary self-binding nature of a promise, the formulaic but transformative temperance pledge, the power of Ruth Hall's signature or name on legal documents, the punitive hate speech of Hester Prynne's scarlet letter A, the prohibitory vodun hex of Simon Legree's slave Cassy, and Captain Ahab's injurious insults to second mate Stubb. Through her comparative methodology and historicist and feminist readings, Rosenthal asks readers to rethink the ways that speech and action intersect.
Download or read book Performative Linguistics written by Douglas Robinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Douglas Robinson introduces a new distinction between 'constative' and 'performative' linguistics, arguing that Austin's distinction can be used to understand linguistic methodologies. Constative linguistics, Robinson suggests, includes methodologies aimed at 'freezing' language as an abstract sign system, while performative linguistics explores how language is used or 'performed' in those speech situations. Robinson then tests his hypothesis on the act of translation. Drawing on a range of language scholars and theorists, Performative Linguistics consolidates the many disparate action-approaches to language into a new paradigm for the study of language.
Download or read book Excitable Speech written by Judith Butler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-29 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘When we claim to have been injured by language, what kind of claim do we make?’ - Judith Butler, Excitable Speech Excitable Speech is widely hailed as a tour de force and one of Judith Butler’s most important books. Examining in turn debates about hate speech, pornography and gayness within the US military, Butler argues that words can wound and linguistic violence is its own kind of violence. Yet she also argues that speech is ‘excitable’ and fluid, because its effects often are beyond the control of the speaker, shaped by fantasy, context and power structures. In a novel and courageous move, she urges caution concerning the use of legislation to restrict and censor speech, especially in cases where injurious language is taken up by aesthetic practices to diminish and oppose the injury, such as in rap and popular music. Although speech can insult and demean, it is also a form of recognition and may be used to talk back; injurious speech can reinforce power structures, but it can also repeat power in ways that separate language from its injurious power. Skillfully showing how language’s oppositional power resides in its insubordinate and dynamic nature and its capacity to appropriate and defuse words that usually wound, Butler also seeks to account for why some clearly hateful speech is taken to be iconic of free speech, while other forms are more easily submitted to censorship. In light of current debates between advocates of freedom of speech and ‘no platform’ and cancel culture, the message of Excitable Speech remains more relevant now than ever. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Preface by the author, where she considers speech and language in the context contemporary forms of political polarization.
Download or read book Literary Theory written by Jonathan Culler and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is Literary Theory? Is there a relationship between literature and culture? In fact, what is Literature, and does it matter?These are the sorts of questions addressed by Jonathan Culler in a book which steers a clear path through a subject often perceived to be complex and impenetrable. It offers discerning insights into theories about the nature of language and meaning, whether literature is a form of self-expression ora method of appeal to an audience, and outlines the ideas behind a number of different schools: deconstruction, semiotics, postcolonial theory, and structuralism amongst them.
Download or read book Geography Speaks Performative Aspects of Geography written by Rob Sullivan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Geography Speaks is an investigation of how geography is informed by speech act theory and performativity. Starting with a critical analysis of how J.L. Austin's speech act theory probed the permeability between fact and fiction, it then assesses oppositional interpretations by John Searle and Jacques Derrida, and in doing so, it explores the fictional aspects within scientific knowledge. The book then focuses on five key aspects of the geographical discipline and analyses them using the theories of speech acts and performance: the performative aspects of the creation of place; speech act performances and geopolitics; acts of cartographical construction as variations of speech act performance; the performative aspects of the creation of public and private space, and, finally; the history of the discipline as a sequence of performative acts that attempt to establish geography as being constitutive of this or that type of disciplinary method or scientific viewpoint. Geography Speaks is an interdisciplinary text with a distinct and clear focus on cultural geography while also synthesizing into geography ideas germane to historiography, the philosophy of language, the history of science, and comparative literature.
Download or read book The Performance Tradition of the Medieval English University written by Thomas Meacham and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a truly paradigm-shifting study that reads a key text in Latin Humanist studies as the culmination, rather than an early example, of a tradition in university drama. It persuasively argues against the common assumption that there was no "drama" in the medieval universities until the syllabus was influenced by humanist ideas, and posits a new way of reading the performative dimensions of fourteenth and fifteenth-century university education in, for example, Ciceronian tuition on epistolary delivery. David Bevington calls it "an impressively learned discussion" and commends the sophistication of its use of performativity theory.
Download or read book The Romantic Performative written by Angela Esterhammer and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Romantic Performative" develops a new context and methodology for reading Romantic literature by exploring philosophies of language from the period 1785-1835. It reveals that the concept of the performative, debated by twentieth-century theorists from J. L. Austin to Judith Butler, has a much greater relevance for Romantic literature than has been realized, since Romantic philosophy of language was dominated by the idea that something "happens" when words are spoken. By presenting Romantic philosophy as a theory of the performative, and Romantic literature in terms of that theory, this book uncovers the historical roots of twentieth-century ideas about speech acts and performativity. Romantic linguistic philosophy already focused on the relationship between speaker and hearer, describing speech as an act that establishes both subjectivity and intersubjective relations and theorizing reality as a verbal construct. But Romantic theorists considered utterance, the context of utterance, and the positions and identities of speaker and hearer to be much more fluid and less stable than modern analytic philosophers tend to make them. Romantic theories of language therefore yield a definition of the "Romantic performative" as an utterance that creates an object in the world, instantiates the relationship between speaker and hearer, and even founds the subjectivity of the speaker in the moment when the utterance occurs. The author traces the Romantic performative through its diverse development in the moral, political, and legal philosophy of Reid, Bentham, Kant and the German Idealists, Humboldt, and Coleridge, then explores its significance in literary texts by Coleridge, Godwin, Holderlin, and Kleist. These readings demonstrate that Romantic writers mounted a deeper investigation than previously realized into the way the act of speaking generates subjective identity, intersubjective relations, and even objective reality. The project of the book is to read the language of Romanticism as performative and to recognize among its achievements the historical founding of the discourse of performativity itself.
Download or read book Analysis of Performative Language Use at the Nzema Taditional Courts in Ghana written by Seth Nretia Essien and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Master's Thesis from the year 2023 in the subject African Studies - Linguistics, , language: English, abstract: This thesis examines language use in the Nzema Traditional courts. It specifically identifies performative use of Nzema language using the Speech Act and the Discourse Analyses theory to analyse ten texts, which were recorded from various Chief Palaces in Elembele and Jomoro Districts. Having transcribed the text into written form and translated into English, the researcher applies two theories for the analyses and the findings obtained indicate that many people lack the concept of performative expressions of language, in which utterances constitute acts or doings. These usually put them into trouble among themselves, during which the case is settled at the traditional courts. Among such performative use of language that bring litigations are the most common ones such as; cursing a fellow, threatening, accusing someone, making false allegation. The study finally recommends that society should be educated by the elders on the implications of such uses of language so that members of the society become aware and avoid them.
Download or read book Performance Studies written by Richard Schechner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this second edition, the author opens with a discussion of important developments in the discipline. His closing chapter, 'Global and Intercultural Performance', is completely rewritten in light of the post-9/11 world. Fully revised chapters with new examples, biographies and source material provide a lively, easily accessible overview of the full range of performance for undergraduates at all levels in performance studies, theatre, performing arts and cultural studies. Among the topics discussed are the performing arts and popular entertainments, rituals, play and games as well as the performances of everyday life. Supporting examples and ideas are drawn from the social sciences, performing arts, post-structuralism, ritual theory, ethology, philosophy and aesthetics. User-friendly, with a special text design, Performance Studies: An Introduction also includes the following features: numerous extracts from primary sources giving alternative voices and viewpoints biographies of key thinkers student activities to stimulate fieldwork, classroom exercises and discussion key reading lists for each chapter twenty line drawings and 202 photographs drawn from private and public collections around the world.
Download or read book Introducing Performative Pragmatics written by Douglas Robinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This user-friendly introduction to a new ‘performative’ methodology in linguistic pragmatics breaks away from the traditional approach which understands language as a machine. Drawing on a wide spectrum of research and theory from the past thirty years in particular, Douglas Robinson presents a combination of ‘action-oriented approaches’ from sources such as J.L. Austin, H. Paul Grice, Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman. Paying particular attention to language as drama, the group regulation of language use, individual resistance to these regulatory pressures and nonverbal communication, the work also explains groundbreaking concepts and analytical models. With a key points section, discussion questions and exercises in every chapter, this book will be an invaluable resource to students and teachers on a variety of courses, including linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics and interpersonal communication.
Download or read book Language on Display written by Ingunn Lunde and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the effects of colonialism and independence on modern Arab autobiography written in Arabic, English and French.
Download or read book Learning from the Other written by Sharon Todd and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2003-10-23 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does ethics influence the myriad ways we engage difference within educational settings?
Download or read book Meaning and Force written by Frangois Recanati and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1987 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Performativity written by James Loxley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-11-22 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do our writings and our utterances reflect or describe our world, or do they intervene in it? Do they, perhaps, help to make it? If so, how? Within what limits, and with what implications? Contemporary theorists have considered the ways in which the languages we speak might be ‘performative’ in just this way, and their thinking on the topic has had an important impact on a broad range of academic disciplines. In this accessible introduction to a sometimes complex field, James Loxley: offers a concise and original account of critical debates around the idea of performativity traces the history of the concept through the work of such influential theorists as J. L. Austin, John Searle, Stanley Fish, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and Judith Butler examines the implications of performativity for fields such as literary and cultural theory, philosophy, performance studies, and the theory of gender and sexuality. emphasises the political and ethical implications that its most important theorists have drawn from the notion of performativity suggests ways in which major debates around the topic have obscured its alternative interpretations and uses. For students trying to make sense of performativity and related concepts such as the speech act, ‘ordinary language’, and iterability, and for those seeking to understand the place of these ideas in contemporary performance theory, this clear guide will prove indispensable. Performativity offers not only a path through challenging critical terrain, but a new understanding of just what is at stake in the exploration of this field.
Download or read book Philosophy and Language in the Islamic World written by Nadja Germann and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is language? How did it originate and how does it work? What is its relation to thought and, beyond thought, to reality? Questions like these have been at the center of lively debate ever since the rise of scholarly activities in the Islamic world during the 8th/9th century. However, in contrast to contemporary philosophy, they were not tackled by scholars adhering to only one specific discipline. Rather, they were addressed across multiple fields and domains, no less by linguists, legal theorists, and theologians than by Aristotelian philosophers. In response to the different challenges faced by these disciplines, highly sophisticated and more specialized areas emerged, comparable to what nowadays would be referred to as semantics, pragmatics, and hermeneutics, to name but a few – fields of research that are pursued to this day and still flourish in some of the traditional schools. Philosophy of language, thus, has been a major theme throughout Islamic intellectual culture in general; a theme which, probably due to its trans-disciplinary nature, has largely been neglected by modern research. This book brings together for the first time experts from the various fields involved, in order to explore the riches of this tradition and make them accessible to a broader public interested both in philosophy and the history of ideas more generally.
Download or read book Performative Criticism written by Gerry Brenner and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2004-02-03 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genre-bending experiments that appropriate, impersonate, and speak through already-created literary characters in order to offer fresh interpretations of well-known literary works.
Download or read book Judith Butler Ethics Law Politics written by Elena Loizidou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-04-11 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first to use Judith Butler’s work as a reading of how the legal subject is formed, this book traces how Butler comes to the themes of ethics, law and politics analyzing their interrelation and explaining how they relate to Butler’s question of how people can have more liveable and viable lives. Acknowledging the potency and influence of Butler’s ‘concept’ of gender as process, which occupies a well developed and well discussed position in current literature, Elena Loizidou argues that the possibility of people having more liveable and viable lives is articulated by Butler within the parameters of a sustained agonistic relationship between the three spheres of ethics, law and politics. Suggesting that Butler’s rounded understanding of the interrelationship of these three spheres will enable critical legal scholarship, as well as critical theory more generally, to consider how the question of life’s unsustainable conditions can be rethought and redressed, this book is a key read for all students of legal ethics, political philosophy and social theory.
