Literary Economy Research Articles

The Economy of Critical Attention: A Computational Analysis of Roland Barthes’s S/Z

Abstract This article argues for the importance of analyzing distributions of literary-critical attention to understand the shape of our discipline and how it has evolved. The article sees critical attention as a scarce resource in literary economies, both within a single text and at much larger scales—even across time. Circulations of critical attention are directed by filtering models, a concept borrowed from cognitive psychology that refers to how competing demands for attention are prioritized. The accrual of critical attention implicitly signals the location of value in a literary economy. When this accrual (or lack thereof) is quantified using computational methodologies, we can track where critical attention goes, how much of it, and why. As a proof of this concept, the article offers a quantitative analysis of critical attention in Roland Barthes’s S/Z. This work reveals the hidden logics of Barthes’s distribution of critical attention and demonstrates how such analyses can identify the filtering models that operate in our critical tools and practices.

New northern voices: Black British writing and the devolving politics of prize culture

ABSTRACTRepresentations of Black British life have long been concentrated in London. The capital occupies the centre of Britain’s post-imperial imaginary and its literary economy, with Manchester at the fore of attempts to address cultural inequalities, from George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse agenda to regional outposts of the BBC and major publishers. Amidst increasing decentralizing momentum, this article proposes that literary awards are key in what James Procter and Corinne Fowler call the “devolution” of Black British writing. Focusing on Manchester’s Portico Prize for the book that “best evokes the spirit of the North of England”, I trace the award’s approach to “racial diversity” and “the North” since 1985, identifying a creative economy framework in which a “placed” literary northernness exists in tension with the centralized Black British discourse. Overall, this article suggests that literary awards articulate in new ways the spatial imbalances within Britain’s literary and political economies.

Inter-imperial, Ecological Interpretations of the “Five Coolies” Myth in Penang and Medan

Abstract This article proposes resource extraction politics as a lens to analyze the relationship between Malaysian Chinese (or Mahua) literature and the global literary economy. Rather than ascribe Mahua literature to its present national boundaries and diasporic communities, the article locates its formation in inter-imperial nodes of trafficked labor and art production, as well as a global system of colonial plantations. The article revisits Zeng Huading's 曾華丁 (1906–1942) short story (1928) and Ba Ren's 巴人 (1901–1972) historical drama (1949) about the myth of five Chinese coolies and their execution in 1871 for murdering a Dutch foreman in a Deli tobacco plantation in East Sumatra. The Anglo-Dutch migration corridor, or the cross-straits coolie trade between the two imperial jurisdictions of Penang (Straits Settlements) and Medan (East Sumatra), now part of Malaysia and Indonesia respectively, was one Nanyang connection, but these writers have been discussed separately within Mahua and Yinhua 印華 (Indonesian Chinese) contexts. Ba Ren, in particular, is studied as a leftist writer who contributed artistically to the Indonesian and Chinese revolutions in the 1940s and 1950s. Here, the article rethinks Ba Ren's legacy within a Mahua corpus, and Zeng Huading's fiction within a cross-straits history of labor. This ecological reading of their works also highlights their critique of Mahua's peripheralization within a world economy and global literature.

A Geography of Blood Meridian: Primitive accumulation on the frontier of space

The attempted extirpation of Indigenous populations has been an enduring condition of the ‘idyllic proceedings’ of primitive accumulation. For Marx, such acts of evisceration characterised the dawn of the era of capitalist production. Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness of the West, is read here as one such ‘annal of mankind’ written in ‘letters of blood and fire’. More pointedly, by contributing to an interdisciplinary approach to world literature covering literary studies, geographical studies and political economy, it is argued that Blood Meridian should be considered a quintessential novel of the racial and historical geography of the frontier economy and its spatial expansion within the uneven conditions of capitalist development. This is evidenced through the real spaces and historical occurrences that shaped capitalist expansion recounted in the novel. The latter include the racialised acts of scalping Native Americans licensed by the state between the 1840s and 1850s in Mexico through the actions of the Glanton Gang; the slaughtering of the buffalo that reached its peak in the 1870s marked in the novel by bonepickers that trawl the calcined architecture for skeletons to turn into commodities for the West; and the systematic mapping and simplifying practices conducted through outposts of appropriation on the frontier, such as Fort Griffin, which signal the barbed-wire fencing of rangeland into ranches. The meridian of bloodiness marked by these racialised acts is therefore revealed as an intrinsic aspect of the literary economy of primitive accumulation.

Women's Labor in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century English Literary Economy

Women's Labor in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century English Literary Economy

Deborah McGrady, The Writer’s Gift or the Patron’s Pleasure? The Literary Economy in Late Medieval France. Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2019, 321 pp., 16 illustrations.

Deborah McGrady, <i>The Writer’s Gift or the Patron’s Pleasure? The Literary Economy in Late Medieval France.</i> Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2019, 321 pp., 16 illustrations.

The Writer's Gift or the Patron's Pleasure? The Literary Economy in Late Medieval France. Deborah McGrady. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. xiv + 322 pp. $85.

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The Charisma of ‘The Second Coming’

First published in 1920, W. B. Yeats's apocalyptic poem, 'The Second Coming', is a contender for the most famous poem of the twentieth century. It is surely the most quoted. Celebrated books by Chinua Achebe and Joan Didion are but the most well-known examples of its titular appeal, which extends to travel books, social commentary, science fiction and fantasy. Journalists and political analysts have frequently declared some 'centre' or other ‘cannot hold’, that some allegedly hate-filled horde is filled with ‘passionate intensity’. The poem seems enduring, resonant and relevant, including in an age of supposed post-truth and twitter mobs. Readers have long been struck by the poem's compelling visionary power. It braids together familiarity and vagueness, creating a tremendously effective counterpoint between certainty and bewilderment, hubris and humility. Its careful abstraction allows its lines to be recycled easily; but its cultural aura provides the motive to do so. This essay will try to account for its charisma, mindful of the literary economy in which it succeeded. It will look closely at the poem's language, including some of the decisions Yeats made at the editing stage, at its early appearance in The Dial and Yeats's collection, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). It will also consider its cultural afterlives, where the falcon most certainly flew out of earshot of the falconer.

The Charisma of ‘The Second Coming’

First published in 1920, W. B. Yeats's apocalyptic poem, 'The Second Coming', is a contender for the most famous poem of the twentieth century. It is surely the most quoted. Celebrated books by Chinua Achebe and Joan Didion are but the most well-known examples of its titular appeal, which extends to travel books, social commentary, science fiction and fantasy. Journalists and political analysts have frequently declared some 'centre' or other ‘cannot hold’, that some allegedly hate-filled horde is filled with ‘passionate intensity’. The poem seems enduring, resonant and relevant, including in an age of supposed post-truth and twitter mobs. Readers have long been struck by the poem's compelling visionary power. It braids together familiarity and vagueness, creating a tremendously effective counterpoint between certainty and bewilderment, hubris and humility. Its careful abstraction allows its lines to be recycled easily; but its cultural aura provides the motive to do so. This essay will try to account for its charisma, mindful of the literary economy in which it succeeded. It will look closely at the poem's language, including some of the decisions Yeats made at the editing stage, at its early appearance in The Dial and Yeats's collection, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). It will also consider its cultural afterlives, where the falcon most certainly flew out of earshot of the falconer.

The Writer’s Gift or the Patron’s Pleasure? The Literary Economy in Late Medieval France. By Deborah McGrady

The Writer’s Gift or the Patron’s Pleasure? The Literary Economy in Late Medieval France. By Deborah McGrady

Penguin Classics and the Canonization of Chinese Literature in English Translation

This article examines the process by which translated Chinese literature becomes ‘canonical’ in the anglophone literary system. Adopting a notion of the ‘classic’ that takes into account both essentialist and historical stances, it conducts a study of Penguin Classics originally written in Chinese under the aspects of choice of texts, translations, publishing, and literary-critical reception. It addresses the questions: What is the current canon of Chinese literature in English translation? What are the forces that certify some Chinese works as deserving canonical status in anglophone culture? And what consequences might the politics of recognition have for the understanding of world literature at large? It argues that translated texts are valorized by multiple mediators within institutional frameworks, and the status they are accorded reflects the structures of the global literary economy.

Publishers, “Pirates,” and the Formation of Regency Authorship

The author's right to intellectual property is both historically conditioned and highly qualified by the interests of others. In common with most laws, those governing intellectual property necessarily entail balancing of competing rights, specifically the claim of publishers to fair return on their investment on the one hand and, on the other, the benefit to readers from open access to and enjoyment of printed materials. Furthermore, the right to intellectual property is not absolute. Its development is enmeshed with the history of print culture and the growing dissemination of books in Britain and abroad, and it was far from uncontested. Although London publishers were the first to lay claim to intellectual property rights, their exclusive control over printed matter was challenged by pirates, independent reprint publishers who acted to break monopoly that distorted the literary marketplace. Assertions of authors' rights came comparatively late in this process. An author's claim to ownership over the fruits of his or her labours began to be conceptualized only after the middle of the eighteenth century, and only in the first decades of the nineteenth century did authors attempt to implement it. Our modern conception of authorship was formed within the relationships among publishers, the changing literary marketplace, and Regency writers like Byron and Jane Austen. It was constructed at the intersection of socio-economic practices and artistic creativity. The Romantic construction of the author as autonomous genius has been called into question by study of the social and economic contexts in which the real of art was actually done. Jerome McGann long ago warned against accepting Romanticism's self-representations at face value and elsewhere draws attention to the distortions inherent in a Romantic conception of literary production (Critique 8). Pointing the way to a socialized concept of he argues that literary work of art is fundamentally social rather than personal, process that inevitably entails interchanges with other writers, with editors and publishers, and ultimately with readers and the institutions that support their activities (Critique 8, 44). McGann's views have strong kinship with D. F. McKenzie's reinscription of bibliography as sociology of texts, in which book is not merely an object but social product whose history must include both its making and use. (1) Authorship in the Romantic era was formed within these exchanges, and its genius in large measure was subject to material conditions. Any adequate understanding of authorship, then, must take into account the commercial environment in which it operates, because the circulation of texts occurs within literary economy governed by structures of law, financial interests, and social practice. Copyright vs. Authors For much of the Restoration and the eighteenth century, the firm of Jacob Tonson was one of the foremost publishers of literary texts in England. Asked which author had earned him the greatest profits, Tonson replied without hesitation, Milton. (2) But at the time authors seldom enjoyed the economic benefits of their work to the same extent that the booksellers did. Copyright began as legal device to protect the interests of those involved in the book trade and to provide printers and publishers with return on their capital investment. Authors sold their work to publisher, and it was the publisher who exercised copyright, which they regarded as their own property as recognized at common law. On that basis, publishers claimed the right in perpetuity to copy the works they had acquired, to make as many editions as they chose, and to sell off their copyright in work to the highest bidder. Samuel Johnson, who took close interest in the conditions under which books were produced, tells in detail how Milton contracted to sell Paradise Lost to Samuel Simmons for 20 [pounds sterling]. …

Authorship, Genre, and Copyright in the Romantic Period: Introduction

Authorship, Genre, and Copyright in the Romantic Period: Introduction Anthony John Harding (bio) The three essays that follow, on authorship, genre, and copyright in the Romantic period, are grouped together because they mutually illuminate each other and because they have a common origin in the two panels co-sponsored by accute and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism at the 2011 accute conference in Fredericton. One of the panels, proposed and chaired by Julia M. Wright, was on “Romanticism and Genre”; the other, which I proposed and chaired, was on “Authorship during the Regency.” Each of the essays, taken on its own terms, enlarges our understanding of print culture in the early 1800s and, more especially, demonstrates the relevance of this moment in literary history to current debates about who can or should claim ownership of cultural products. Taken as a group, the essays reveal how productive and illuminating print culture studies—particularly the re-examination of the concept of authorship—have proved for recent work on what we persist in calling the “Romantic period.” From the perspective of print culture studies, indeed, the very concept of a “Romantic period” is at issue, since one key romantic notion—that of the creative originality of the author—can be shown to have evolved and achieved prominence alongside, and partly as a result of, the changes [End Page 25] in copyright law during the late 1700s and early 1800s on which modern ideas of authorship are based. As Ronald Tetreault argues in his essay, “Any adequate understanding of authorship […] must take into account the commercial environment in which it operates, because the circulation of texts occurs within a literary economy governed by structures of law, financial interests, and social practice.” The crucial date here is not 1798, nor even 1789, but 1774, when the British House of Lords ruled on the case of Donaldson v. Becket, a case referred to in two of the essays. The ruling handed down by their lordships effectively threw out the notion of perpetual copyright, on which the London booksellers had based their arguments, and established the legality of the affordable “Scottish” editions. However, by reaffirming that copyright, as established by the 1710 “Statute of Anne,” was a grant of a limited monopoly, the Lords effectively forced those publishers who could not compete with Scottish printers’ prices to seek new, publishable work, of which they could own exclusive copyright, albeit for a limited period. This decision gave some bargaining power to authors, especially the more popular ones such as Walter Scott and Lord Byron. Their dealings with publishers, as Tetreault shows, exemplify the early nineteenth-century transition to an “entrepreneurial model of authorship.” The unintended consequence, however, was the forbiddingly high prices charged for works by living authors. No one outside the ranks of the very wealthy could afford to spend several guineas each month buying the latest editions of contemporary poets. Tetreault, then, asks us to consider if enterprising publishers like Galignani, who challenged the complacency and elitism of the London cartel by printing affordable editions of these living poets, are justifiably referred to as “pirates” or if they were not actually performing a great service not only to readers, who were naturally grateful for the cheap editions, but, in the long run, to authors as well. Twentieth-century scholarship rather uncritically sided with the authors, accepting without much question their idea of authorial autonomy and their view of Galignani and his ilk as unscrupulous, if not criminal. Tetreault asks us to take a more nuanced approach. (And, as Mark McCutcheon’s essay shows, the issue has a certain resonance with the battle currently raging on the Internet, and in the law courts, over users’ rights versus the claims of corporate “rights holders.”) The increased bargaining power that some writers could exercise in their dealings with publishers was not the only result of the new status given to the “author-function.” It was now possible, as Robert K. Lapp shows, for an author to leverage her public reputation, not for immediate [End Page 26] financial benefit but to serve a more altruistic purpose. Lapp’s example—one that may come as a...

Hebraizing Arthurian Romance: The Originality of Melech Artus

Ascribing its narrative shaping to its Hebrew author rather than a lost source corroborates Melech Artus's genuine originality and its uniqueness in the Arthurian tradition. (PRR) Melech Artus,1 'King Arthur,' is the only surviving fragment of a medieval Arthurian romance in Hebrew, as opposed to Yiddish in which there are several late- and post-medieval adaptations of the German Wigalois.2 This unique Hebrew text, contained in Vatican MS. Urbino 48, is dated 5039 by the author according to the Jewish calendar, the equivalent of AD 1279. Italian loan words in the text indicate that the author's source is a lost Italian version of a French prose romance which the author claims to have 'translated from the vernacular'3 into Hebrew. Apart from the fact that the text breaks off abruptly thirteen lines into the fifth folio, indicating that the author abandoned his endeavor for some unknown reason, the extant narrative is remarkably spare, suggesting abbreviation at some point in its history. Curt Leviant, who translated Melech Artus into English, writes, 'Since the Hebrew scribe's Italian source is lost, it is difficult to determine whether the Jewish translator abridged the text, or whether he already found [sic] an abbreviated version. Nevertheless, there is some ground for speculation that the Hebrew scribe's immediate Italian source was already shortened.'4 Here I refute this idea since, although Leviant remains speculative, his repetition of such assertions as 'Whether or not the scribe possessed an abbreviated Italian text'5 and 'If the Hebrew scribe worked from an already shortened Italian version'6 seems overly insistent. Moses Gaster, Florence Sandler, and Robert G. Warnock also seem to legitimize this proposition, at least implicitly, by referring to the writer as 'translator'7 or 'scribe'8 rather than author in their writings on the text. Leviant's 'ground for speculation' that it is the Italian author who has done the shortening is based on the observation that Malory's and the Hebrew versions of the story of Arthur's begetting by King Uter are equally brief: 'From the point of view of length and compression, Malory resembles the Hebrew Uter more than it does the long O[ld] F[rench].'9 He postulates that 'Malory's brief Uter story may be cited as possible evidence that a shortened O[ld] F[rench] version existed, and that the Italian translator, the Hebrew scribe's immediate source, also had access to a much condensed version of the Uter episode.'10 Even if this were true, it would then be the French rather than the Italian author who had done most of the cutting of material. However, that Malory and the Hebrew version of the Uter story, as Leviant puts it, 'agree in the technique of literary economy'11 is insufficient evidence for an unknown common source. Furthermore, Leviant is able to identify few specific points of agreement between Malory's and the Hebrew renderings of the tale that are not also found in the longer extant French version of the Suite du Merlin. The most specific distinguishing correlation he points out is that while 'the time lapse between Igerna's departure and the military action [against Duke Gorlois by Uter] is not mentioned' in the existing Old French version, it is specified in the other two-three months in the Hebrew and forty days in Malory.12 These are certainly not strong enough textual correspondences to be considered compelling evidence for a common source that has severely pared down the story, which is, of course, why Leviant rightly remains speculative. A more satisfying explanation than the possibility offered by Leviant that the Hebrew writer 'may have abridged even further' 'an already shortened Italian version'13 is that he is solely responsible for the radical alterations. Were this found to be so, it would make him more clearly worthy of the title author rather than 'translator,' which he humbly implies of himself, or 'scribe,' which Leviant calls him, and it would tell us a good deal more about his concerns and interests as a Jew in refitting the Arthurian tales to a non-Indo-European, non-Christian culture. …

A Tale of Two Novels: Developing a Devolved Approach to Black British Writing

In October 2000, Penguin launched Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth. In the same month, Headline Review released a novel by Joe Pemberton. It was called Forever and Ever Amen. This article traces the differing fortunes of these two British novels and seeks to understand why Forever and Ever Amen, which was also a critical success, came nowhere near the sales or popular acclaim of White Teeth. It examines the commercial and (multi)cultural logic by which novels are coded as worthy of national and international readerships by corporate publishers and high street retail outlets. Emphasizing the significance of many black British novels that emerge from non-metropolitan glocalities, the author calls for a sustained focus by literary scholarship on the discomforting links between the political and literary economy. Most particularly, novels such as Pemberton's invite popular and critical engagement with what James Procter has described as “devolved” diasporic cultures throughout Britain.

Russian Hybrids: Identity in the Translingual Writings of Andreï Makine, Wladimir Kaminer, and Gary Shteyngart

Authors writing in a language other than their native tongue have become a common phenomenon in an era of increased international mobility. This article is devoted to three Russian-born émigré writers—Andreï Makine (b. 1957), Wladimir Kaminer (b. 1967), and Gary Shteyngart (b. 1972)—all of whom have achieved literary stardom with books written in French, German, and English, respectively. Although each of the three authors has a distinctive style and ideological position, in his own way each projects a “Russian” persona to the western public. Using the notion of cultural hybridity, Adrian Wanner explores the various strategies these authors have adopted in fashioning an identity for themselves that is tailored to meet the demands of the reading public in their respective host nations while exploiting the cachet of the Russian “brand name” in today's global literary economy.

Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England (review)

Reviews 243 detailed but unfortunately not only are they presented as endnotes, but the notes pages lack running headers referring back to the text, meaning that finding and keeping one's place between the notes and the text isfrustratinglydifficult. Overall this book gives a detailed and sustained account of Elizabeth de Burgh's life and would be useful as a text for upper level undergraduate and postgraduate students of women's history, economic and legal history because of its detailed explanations and examples of legal, economic and social circumstances. DiHall University of Melbourne Warren, Nancy Bradley, Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England (The Middle Ages Series), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001; cloth; pp. xii, 276; R R P US$55.00; ISBN 0812235835. Medieval English nunneries, until recently neglected, are now attracting from medievalists of all scholarly hues. In her contribution to this resurgence ofinterest, Nancy Bradley Warren argues that late medieval women's religious houses were in every way an integral part of society, 'enmeshed in material, symbolic, textual, political, and spiritual economies'. Consequently she uses varied source-materials, many of them unfamiliar, in thefirstpart of the book, 'Monastic Identities in Theory and Practice'. Her analysis of liturgical texts shows the different ways in which Benedictine, Franciscan and Brigittine profession ceremonies present the nun as bride of Christ. Her examination of regulatory texts argues that the various Middle English translations made for nuns of the Rule of St Benedict (originally written for men in Latin) and the contrast with the Brigittine mle (originally dictated to St Bridget in her vernacular, then translated into Latin, from which i t passed into English, but always aimed primarily at women) shaped nuns' identities. Accounts and legal documents illustrate the relative financial independence of Brigittine and Franciscan nuns in particular and the extent of their business dealings (sometimes abrasive) with the local community, while even conventual seals help present the nunneries' self-fashionings of maternal authority. In the second part, 'Beyond the Convent Wall: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval Culture', however, the book's focus becomes less tight This 244 Reviews section is more concerned with nuns as image or metaphor - or, as Warren puts it, the 'symbolic capital available from female monasticism and holy women'. Although she rightly stresses the 'permeability' of convent walls, one has to point out that to slide from nuns to 'holy women' is not really playing by the rules. If nuns had a particular identity (as Part 1 illustrates) this cannot be silently transferred to other women, however holy. But this elision enables Warren to consider at length Margery Kempe, who had 'many profitable interactions with w o m e n religious', particularly Brigittines and Franciscans, and was much influenced by the former and their foundress, and, more briefly, three noblewomen who had links with Syon. This 'symbolic capital' was open to exploitation by men, too, in various ways, and Warren reads the devotional treatise Book to a Mother in this light. She also has a suggestive and original chapter on the political uses made of 'holy women', both alive and dead, by powerful men. But once again one has to demur that the York recluse E m m a Rawghton and Bridget of Sweden, let alone Richard II's queen, Anne of Bohemia, or St Anne herself, are not nuns. A further shift occurs in the next chapter, on 'holy women and the literary economy'. This discusses Lydgate's Life of Our Lady and Bokenham's Legendys of Hooly Wummen, both texts that 'mobilize female saints in connection with political concerns'. So Warren's attention has now shifted from 'holy women' to 'female saints' (the Virgin Mary in particular), with the nuns coming a poor third. Lydgate's poem may well be a neglected text, but this book does not seem to be the obvious place to rectify that. Bokenham's less neglected poems have female patrons and dedicatees as well as subjects, but none of them are nuns. Finally, and most surprisingly, w e conclude with none other than Joan of Arc, one of 'theflip-sidesof the symbolic coin of female spirituality'. She had defied the authority of the Church on earth...

Word Made Flesh: Czech Women's Writing from Communism to Post-Communism

Abstract This article explores changes in from communism to post- communism, focusing in particular on women writers' relationship to literary discourse and feminism. It contends that women writers' rapport to ideological discourse and literary production under communism is a determining factor in relationship to both writing and feminism. It examines this literary legacy in terms of post-communism, surveying differences between a totalitarian socialist regime and that of a materialist, capitalist economy, as exemplified in literature. The article offers a survey major post-communist women writers, including Hodrova, Bouckova, Kriseova, as well as delving into a comparative close-reading analysis of two representatives of both communist and post-communist writing: Eva Kanturkova's Pritelkyne z domu smutku (Companions Of The Bleak House) and Iva Pekarkova's Kulaty svet (The World is Round). Both these texts offer a challenging vision of women's community for today's global order. Key Words: Czech, Women, literature ********** beginning was Word, and Word was with God, and Word was God And Word became flesh and lived among us ... (John 1:1; 1:14 NRSV) I begin with a rather revelationary quote, perhaps because my endeavor in this essay appears rather apocryphal: I will attempt a synoptic account of transition of from communist to post-communist era. At outset I faced with three seemingly eschatological dilemmas. First is difficulty I find in establishing a body of Czech fiction in corpus of literature when my belief is that good literature transcends all gender categorization, as it speaks of desires driving one's being and therefore tends towards universal human condition. Second, however, I am also convinced that, asymptotically, good writing is derived from an individual experience, which is gendered indeed, and so I must allow for a gendered women's experience which could be shared collectively. Finally, while oscillating between individualism and universalism, I must somehow take into account diversity of women writers that have contributed to literature over fifty year period but at same time positing a fundamental change revolving around of 1989 Velvet Revolution: communism and post-communism. Taking into account these dilemmas, I offer this revelationary parabolic parable: that from communism to post communism transformed from to flesh. The bare-bone skeleton of this argument may be structured as follows. In communism, language, both in its oppressive and resistant form, established Word as paradigm defining governing economy and resistant literary economy--the Word was God. In pre-revolutionary summer of 1989,Vaclav Havel drew from same Bible passage as I: can be said to be very source of our being, and in fact substance of cosmic life form we call human one thing would seem to be obvious: we have always believed in power of words to change history. (WW 377-378) Havel illustrates how under communism, power of words formulated itself in collective and generic terms, either as totalizing communalism of totalitarian system or in dissident denunciation advocating universal human rights. Conversely, in post-communism, the word became shift to a market economy, private property and democracy favored a turn to individualism, material concerns, and emphasis on body. In summer of 1991, in newly-formed Czechoslovak Federation, Havel's cautions against harmful effects of post-communism, which he submits are most saliently felt in flesh: the catastrophic decline in general cultural level, level of public manners, related to economic decline . …

:Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception

Contending that the hermeneutical tradition is not a purely modern German discipline, Kathy Eden argues instead that the historical grounding of modern hermeneutics is in the ancient tradition of rhetoric. Eden demonstrates how the early rhetorical model of reading, called interpretatio scripti by Cicero, has forget such enduring hermeneutical principles as meaning, context, and literary economy.

Trading words: Poetry, typography, and Illustrated books in the modern literary economy

Trading words: Poetry, typography, and Illustrated books in the modern literary economy