As critic, Kenneth Burke's preoccupations were at the beginning purely esthetic and literary; but after Counter-Statement (1931), he began to discriminate a "rhetorical" or persuasive component in literature, and thereupon became a philosopher of language and human conduct. In A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), Burke's conception of "symbolic action" ...(展开全部)

Differentiation from animals helped to establish the notion of a human being, but the disappearance of animals now threatens that identity. This is the argument underlying Electric Animal, a probing exploration of the figure of the animal in modern culture. Akira Mizuta Lippit shows us the animal as a crucial figure in the definition of modernity—essential to developments in th...(展开全部)

Exploring key concepts and metaphors, Bernard Faure guides readers to an appreciation of some of the more elusive aspects of the Chinese traditions of Chan Buddhism and Japanese Zen. Faure focuses on Chan's insistence on "immediacy"--its denial of all traditional meditations, including scripture, ritual, good works--and yet shows how these mediations have always been present in...(展开全部)

The first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms—such as "the implied au...(展开全部)

When Leviathan first appeared in 1651, it was recognized as a work of extraordinary scope, uniting metaphysical, theological, and political arguments into a single distinctive outlook. Contending that modern readers do the book an injustice by neglecting its metaphysical and theological themes, David Johnston supports his claim with a detailed examination of the text as a whole...(展开全部)

Our communication is limitedby misunderstanding. Rhetoric, as Professor Richards defines it, is the study of misunderstanding and its remedies. The conventional rules of the old rhetoric and the formulations of scientific language have narrow application to conversational speech; Professor Richard's definition of rhetoric is based on a practical question: how do words work in d...(展开全部)

The first edition of "The Rhetoric of Fiction" transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms--such as "the implied...(展开全部)

A classic in its field, this pathbreaking book humanized the scientific rhetoric of economics to reveal its literary soul. In this completely revised second edition, Deirdre N. McCloskey demonstrates how economic discourse employs metaphor, authority, symmetry, and other rhetorical means of persuasion. The Rhetoric of Economics shows economists to be human persuaders, poets of ...(展开全部)

Is legal reasoning rationally persuasive, working within a discernible structure and using recognisable kinds of arguments? Does it belong to rhetoric in this sense, or to the domain of the merely 'rhetorical' in an adversative sense? Is there any reasonable certainty about legal outcomes in dispute-situations? If not, what becomes of the Rule of Law? Neil MacCormick's book...(展开全部)