The 22 essays combine papers selected from a 2010 international conference in Lodz, Poland with some invited contributions to explore mental processes accompanying the production of meaning, especiall
In this highly readable and provocative book, Thomas Newkirk explodes the long standing habit of opposing abstract argument with telling stories. Newkirk convincingly shows that effective argument is
What role do texts play in religious practice? What is the relationship between these texts and cognition? Are some texts more successful because they are better adapted to our cognitive structures? W
Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls investigates the creation of "obscene writings and images" as a category of print in nineteenth-century Germany. Sarah L. Leonard charts the process through which te
Changes in words, changes in the world, and changes in minds: transitions between states of speaking, writing, thinking, and being are the subjects of the 14 essays in this collection, which celebrate
This reader provides crucial political and religious texts that cover the past one hundred years of Iranian history. It introduces the chief issues preoccupying the minds of the most prominent thinker
Although modernism has traditionally been considered an art of cities, Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination claims a significant role for modernist texts in shaping environmental consciousness. Analyzing both canonical and lesser-known works of three key figures - E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and W. H. Auden - Sultzbach suggests how the signal techniques of modernism encourage readers to become more responsive to the animate world and non-human minds. Understanding the way these writers represent nature's agency becomes central to interpreting the power dynamics of empire and gender, as well as experiments with language and creativity. The book acknowledges the longer pastoral tradition in literature, but also introduces readers to the newly expanding field of ecocriticism, including philosophies of embodiment and matter, queer ecocriticism, and animal studies. What emerges is a picture of green modernism that reifies our burgeoning awareness of what it means to be human within
In early modern England, boxes furnished minds as readily as they furnished rooms, shaping ideas about the challenges of interpretation, and negotiations of the book itself as text and material object. Engaging with recent work on material culture and the history of the book, Lucy Razzall weaves together close readings of texts and objects, from wills, plays, sermons and religious polemic, to chests, book-bindings, reliquaries and coffins. She demonstrates how the material and imaginative possibilities of the box were dynamically connected in post-Reformation England, structuring modes of thought. These early modern responses to materiality offer ways in which the discipline of book history might reframe its analysis of the material text. In tracing the early modern significance of the box as matter and metaphor, this book reveals the origins of some of the enduring habits of thought with which we still respond to people, texts and things.
2014 Best Texts of Missiology, from Byron Borger, Hearts and Minds BookstoreMission--a driving force in the long Christian story--today is often cast as the embarrassing relative of tall-steeple relig
In the second half of the eighteenth century, several British East India Company servants published accounts of what they deemed to be the original and ancient religion of India. Drawing on what are recognised today as the texts and traditions of Hinduism, these works fed into a booming enlightenment interest in Eastern philosophy. At the same time, the Company's aggressive conquest of Bengal was facing a crisis of legitimacy and many of the prominent political minds of the day were turning their attention to the question of empire. In this original study, Jessica Patterson situates these Company works on the 'Hindu religion' in the twin contexts of enlightenment and empire. In doing so, she uncovers the central role of heterodox religious approaches to Indian religions for enlightenment thought, East India Company policy, and contemporary ideas of empire.
How do we read stories? How do they engage our minds and create meaning? Are they a mental construct, a linguistic one or a cultural one? What is the difference between real stories and fictional ones? This book addresses such questions by describing the conceptual and linguistic underpinnings of narrative interpretation. Barbara Dancygier discusses literary texts as linguistic artifacts, describing the processes which drive the emergence of literary meaning. If a text means something to someone, she argues, there have to be linguistic phenomena that make it possible. Drawing on blending theory and construction grammar, the book focuses its linguistic lens on the concepts of the narrator and the story, and defines narrative viewpoint in a new way. The examples come from a wide spectrum of texts, primarily novels and drama, by authors such as William Shakespeare, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Dave Eggers, Jan Potocki and Mikhail Bulgakov.
What do our assumptions about authorship matter for our experience of meaning? This book examines the debates in the humanities and social sciences over whether authorial intentions can, or should, constrain our interpretation of language and art. Scholars assume that understanding of linguistic and artistic meaning should not be constrained by beliefs about authors and their possible intentions in creating a human artifact. It is argued here that people are strongly disposed to infer intentionality when understanding oral speech, written texts, artworks, and many other human actions. Although ordinary people, and scholars, may infer meanings that diverge from, or extend beyond, what authors intend, our experience of human artifacts as meaningful is fundamentally tied to our assumptions of intentionality. This challenges the traditional ideas of intentions as existing solely in the minds of individuals, and formulates a new conceptual framework for examining if and when intentions infl
What do our assumptions about authorship matter for our experience of meaning? This book examines the debates in the humanities and social sciences over whether authorial intentions can, or should, constrain our interpretation of language and art. Scholars assume that understanding of linguistic and artistic meaning should not be constrained by beliefs about authors and their possible intentions in creating a human artifact. It is argued here that people are strongly disposed to infer intentionality when understanding oral speech, written texts, artworks, and many other human actions. Although ordinary people, and scholars, may infer meanings that diverge from, or extend beyond, what authors intend, our experience of human artifacts as meaningful is fundamentally tied to our assumptions of intentionality. This challenges the traditional ideas of intentions as existing solely in the minds of individuals, and formulates a new conceptual framework for examining if and when intentions infl