His theories about syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations are significant in studying a metaphor. Mikhail Bakhtin is a critic who is influential in aesthetics, semio-tics, and intertextuality. He elaborates the dialogic aspect of texts. Words or utterances associate with other words and utterances, and they enter into a "dialogic interaction" (Bakhtin, 1984: 90). Therefore, Bakhtin's (1984: 21) "polyphony" shows the plurality of meaning of signs in William Shakespeare's sonnets.
Perhaps the most important idea in the book is, as Levitt and Dubner state, “Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so” (14). Freakonomics uses many different rhetorical strategies to show the importance of looking deeper into seemingly commonplace things. Levitt and Dubner use comparison to achieve the purpose. Comparisons are used to form a basis for an investigation into certain topics. For example, the authors say, “What do
It is still initially based on his own experiences, but he brings up a problem that plagues most students: a constant fear of intellectual inadequacy. Personally, this is a fear that kept me silent during my first years as an English major. I felt that I had ideas, but the ability to intellectually convey them. Graff claims that literary theory can help a student gain confidence by exposing them to the style of discourse they need to contribute to a scholarly conversation. As a person who likes structure, I agree that reading criticism can help one frame his or her own writing.
Bohannan goes on to share an experience in which elders encouraged her to explain the meaning behind the papers she was reading. This was a daunting task since storytelling is very important to the Tiv, but Bohannan does her best to stay composed and present the story of Hamlet in terms that the elders will understand. As Bohannan tells the story, she is interrupted at several points, often as a result of the elders telling her the true meaning behind the story, even though it is not the way the story is universally
British cultural materialists emphasized the need to “pursue the literary work through its 'sleep' in cultures different from that in which it first saw the light of day.”(Hawthorne, p33) In other words, the emphasis of literary study should be “…not to awaken texts from their present sleep…to rediscover the flash of their birth; on the contrary, its function is to follow them through their sleep, or rather take up the related themes of sleep, oblivion, and lost origin, and to discover what mode of existence may characterize statements, independently of their enunciation, in the density of time in which they are preserved, in which they are reactivated, and used, in which they are also - but this was not their original destiny - forgotten, and possibly even destroyed.” (Foucault,
Despite his groundbreaking theory in postcolonial studies, Bhabha, as a controversial postcolonial theorist, has received a number of criticisms since the appearance of his seminal work The Location of Culture. I would like to illuminate this part mainly drawing from the book, Postcolonial Theory: Context, Practices, Politics, in which Bart Moore-Gilbert has, relatively, at large, criticized Bhabha’s theory, from his writing style to his application of theories. Among those criticisms, the obvious one, to which almost all the people who have read his book has reached a consensus, is his “characteristically teasing, evasive, even quasi-mystical mode of expression” (Moore-Gilbert 114). His poetic language became well known after he won the second place of Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest in 1998. For his complex and fragmented language which “seems designed to appeal primarily to the reader’s intuition,” the most well-intentioned explanation is that Bhabha uses this style of writing in purpose of making a strange feeling, avoiding the familiar “parameters of Western knowledge” (Huddart 10).
With the resurgence of feminist ideas in education, and the subsequent formation of a feminist literary canon, Speght’s works were ultimately rediscovered. The neglect of this crucial early feminist document serves as a message to all students of literature: to be aware of the biases which influenced the formation of the Western literary canon. Without the broadening of the literary canon which was experienced in the last millennia, Speght herself may have been
As always, the historical context is of great importance to better understanding the framework within which these novels were written, as Le Guin has danced to the song of her days, dealing with issues such as feminism and racism when these were just emerging. The main reason for which I have chosen this particular topic of study is neatly contained
Burckhardt considers humanism not merely as educational curriculum, but as a cultural phenomenon. This same concept of humanism was later reaffirmed by John Addington Symonds in 1877. According to him, “The essence of humanism consisted in a new and vital perception of the dignity of man as a rational being apart from theological determinations, and in the further perception that classical literature alone displayed human nature in the plenitude of intellectual and moral freedom” (52).
It has also been claimed that much of Heidegger's later philosophy, particularly the sacredness of Being, bears a distinct similarity to Taoist ideas. There are clear parallels between Heidegger and the work of Kyoto School, and ultimately,