“Aixo era y no era”: онтологічний парадокс метафоричної референції

Recent attention to the institutionalization of English literature has reminded us that the academic study of literature has a short history, with literature entering the universities as a subject only at the end of the nineteenth century. It is worth remembering that what we do now in the classroom has a history, one that has consequences for our classroom practice. We take it for granted now, however much concern for context and culture has become part of our practice, that interpretation is one of the fundamental responsibilities of the critic. But widespread interpretation of secular texts has a relatively short history and grew out of a tradition of Biblical hermeneutics. In considering that secular transition, I want to suggest that our practice in teaching both the Victorians and the history of criticism needs to be modified to come to terms with the literary sophistication with which the Victorians are rarely credited, and, more important yet, to throw light on our current critical practice by showing the kinds of problems literary interpretation faced as it developed out of the religious hermeneutic tradition. It is sometimes assumed that interest in the theory of literary interpretation is a twentieth-century phenomenon. Anglo-American critics in earlier periods did not reflect on the problems of interpretation; they simply took meaning for granted and pushed on straightaway to make evaluative or ethical judgments on a text’s literary merits or content. Discussing eighteenthand nineteenth-century British criticism, for instance, K. M. Newton (1990: 1–2)

Emotional context modulates embodied metaphor comprehension

Since Aristotle, many writers have treated metaphors and similes as equals: any metaphor can be paraphrased as a simile, and vice-versa. This property of metaphors is the foundation of standard comparison theories of metaphor comprehension. On this view, metaphors such as “my job is a jail” are literally false, and so cannot be directly interpreted. Instead, such “irrational” assertions are converted to similes (i.e., my job is like a jail) and understood as any literal comparison would be. Comparison theories rely on three assumptions: (1). Literal interpretations have unconditional priority; (2). Metaphor interpretation is optional, triggered whenever a literal interpretation fails to make sense in context; (3). Following assumptions (1) and (2), metaphor processing is not only more difficult than literal, but involves different processing mechanisms. I argue that none of the above assumptions hold. In addition, I show that metaphors cannot always be paraphrased as similes. The different forms of a metaphor – the comparison and categorical forms – have different referents. In comparison form, the metaphor vehicle refers to the literal concept, e.g., in my lawyer is like a shark, the term “shark” refers to the literal fish. In categorical form, my lawyer is a shark, “shark” refers to an abstract (metaphorical) category of predatory creatures. This difference in reference makes it possible for a metaphor and its corresponding simile to differ (a) in interpretability and (b) in meaning. Because a metaphor cannot always be understood in terms of its corresponding simile, I conclude that comparison theories of metaphor are fundamentally flawed. Metaphors can be processed directly as categorization assertions. Furthermore, when such metaphors are novel, they create new categories that are available for public discourse.KeywordsFigurative languageMetaphorSimilarityCatergorization

Processing of metaphor has long been studied due to implications on human cognition. But less has been explored as to its relationship with lexical access. This is important, because comprehension of conventional metaphors fundamentally hinges on activation of lexicalized metaphorical meanings, but early lexical access models rarely consider a distinction between literal and metaphorical meanings. This study attempts to bring these two lines of research together by investigating processing of lexical metaphors, i.e., metaphorical polysemy (e.g., “pressure”) based on Giora’s (2003) graded salience hypothesis. The graded salience hypothesis states that salient meanings, i.e., “more frequent, more familiar, or more conventional” meanings, are always initially accessed in context. Giora’s model differs from previous models because it comprehensively interprets lexical access as well as figurative language processing, thus receiving much attention in literature (Gibbs, 2001). But it has two major problems: (1) Vague definition of salience, particularly its relationship with frequency, and (2) Unclear criteria for semantic analysis and meaning distinction. To address these issues, this thesis combined a corpus linguistic approach and recent cognitive semantic theories with psycholinguistic experiments. I distinguished sense-level meanings from facet-level meanings based on Chinese Wordnet and calculate their sense frequencies in corpus. In one offline word association task and two online cross-modal lexical priming tasks, I found: Salient, sense-level literal meanings cannot be sufficiently activated in metaphorically-biased contexts. This contradicted the graded salience hypothesis’s prediction but corresponded to Ahrens et al.’s (1998) and Croft and Cruse’s (2004) lexical semantic theories that sense-level meanings cannot coexist in the same context. The study thus has significant implications on the graded salience hypothesis and for metaphor and lexical access research in general; particularly, a refined lexical semantic analysis based on cognitive linguistic theories is necessary. Besides, the results shed light on the relationship between frequency and salience, i.e., how corpus reflects human cognition, as well as how cognitive semantic theories can refine interpretations in psycholinguistic studies. Therefore, the study is expected to have a cross-domain contribution to the general field of cognitive science.

With the rapid development in communication technology nowadays, humanities disciplines have become closer and interconnected, which led to the flourishing of interdisciplinary fields. This paper attempts to survey the relationship between modern literary criticism and communication theories; it can be said that the progress that modern linguistics have witnessed in considering the poetic function among other communication functions has contributed to frame a literary theory based on the fundamental acts of communication. The works of Arab critic Mur?d Mabr?k could serve as a good example in this matter; he has been, in his hundred books and papers, interested in literary communication theory, which he thinks could be a comprehensive framework for the critics to analyse literary works, in regard to the texts, and in regard to their creators and readers. Mabr?k’s interest in this theory began in the early years of the current AD century, as he published several books and articles trying to draw a clear image of literary communication theory. He traces the roots of the theory in ancient Greek philosophy, classical Arabic criticism and rhetorics. He also follows the theory’s dimensions and concepts in other fields such as Anthropology, Sociology, and Information Science. Not only that, but Mabr?k suggests his own reading strategy of literary works, applying it on classical and modern poems, novels, and even commercial adds. It is the aim of this research to study Mabr?k’s project in order to understand the nature of the relationship between concepts of communication and modern critical theories.

Problems with pragmatic aspects of language are well attested in individuals on the autism spectrum. It remains unclear, however, whether figurative language skills improve with language status and whether problems in figurative language are no longer present in highly verbal individuals with autism. To investigate whether highly verbal individuals with autism perform similarly as age-, intelligence- and verbal comprehension-matched controls on the processing of one of the most common types of figurative language, metaphors. The goal was to establish whether the participants with autism are primed similarly to controls by figurative expressions (metaphors) presented in different conditions. The experiment was designed as a cross-modal lexical-decision task where metaphors served as primes for target words related to their figurative or literal meaning. Our findings show that both ASD and control participants made very few errors in the experimental task. However, the participants with ASD presented with problems in performance on the task, reflected in significantly slower reaction times compared with the typically developing peer groups. The similar response speed observed between the younger typical control children and the adult ASD participants suggests that the mechanisms underlying metaphor processing (e.g., selection of metaphorical versus literal interpretation) are still developing in high-functioning autism, very much like in typical children. These results may suggest that metaphor processing requires more than adequate language competences. The findings are also suggestive of a delay in developing sensitivity to figurative language, rather than sheer inability. This suggests that a timely training programme can be implemented to improve figurative language abilities in ASD.

Since the emergence of the modern criticism theories, the aim of these theories was the focus on research and the analysis of literary texts scientifically and academically and according to specific data. The historical criticism theory is one of the first modern criticism theories adopted by many of pioneers of literature and has a group of scientific constituents that investigate the relationship between the text and its external aspects. Generally, there are three stages of criticism theories: the first stage deals with the external aspects of the text .For example writer's life, social situation, conditions and historical events. These external aspects are tools for structuralists and formalists. The second stage deals with the internal context of the literary text. This stage appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century as constructional criticism, modern criticism and structuralism. The last stage pays attention to the readers' role as semiology criticism, deconstruction criticism, reception theory …..etc. This theory is connected to external aspects of the text and it takes historical, political and social events as a means to analyze the literary text. According to this theory, the literary text is reflection of writer's life conditions and the writer is a mirror for the social situations predominant during his era and education emerges from environment which is a part of the history. Therefore, the theory of historical criticism in the process of criticism emphasizes the writer's life, predominant conditions and the environment that the literary text is their outcome. The present study focuses on two collections of poems, namely "The songs and Snow and Fire " by Muaaed Taeeb and "I will not retreat " by Rekesh Amedy . The two collections were analyzed according to the three bases of historical criticism (Time, Environment, and Race). The aim of this study is the explanation of the historical dimension of two collections of poems namely "The songs and Snow and Fire " by Muaaed Taeeb and "I will not retreat " by Rekesh Amedy . As a result of the analysis conducted on these two collections, it turned out that the historical criticism was one of the essential pillars of the creation of the theme and ideology of those poems.

Historical Criticism and Literary Interpretation: Is There Any Common Ground

What was from the Beginning (I Jn 1:1-4)

All scientific endeavours require researchers to develop an understanding of the available methodological tools to perform the needed studies. These tools can be applied depending on the field, purpose and context of the study. This article outlines and argues for ways to construct methodological framework appropriate for an in-depth interdisciplinary analysis of a literary text. The purpose of this study is to build the interdisciplinary methodological framework for literary text analysis using approaches of two humanities sciences – pedagogy and philology (linguistics and literature). The material for the research is a contemporary fairy tale Bunny Non-Hopper and His Brave Mommy by Oksana Drachkovska, Ukrainian writer and journalist. Relevance, innovation, importance and complexity of the author’s fairy tale theme, which appears both in the field of modern pedagogy and current philological interpretations justified our choice. Among the methods applied in the paper are literary studies interpretation that outlines a place of the fairy tale in the context of similar Ukrainian and foreign literature and reveals features of the its gender constructions; linguistic analysis based on communicative-pragmatic and conceptual approaches that focus on the text-discursive level along with pedagogical approaches that enable the representation of the text’s educational potential. The suggested framework consists of two levels – general scientific and specific scientific. On the general scientific level, it deploys systematic, synergetic, and paradigmatic approaches, whereas on the specific scientific level – linguistic approaches (communicative pragmatic and conceptual), literary studies approaches (intertextual and gender), and pedagogical approaches (integrated, inclusive, humanistic, empowerment), thus employing knowledge and specifics of each science. Besides a system-building function aimed to obtain comprehensive information about the object of the study, the proposed methodological framework for the interdisciplinary literary text analysis embraces an anthropocentric paradigm centred on children with special educational needs.

This chapter traces the influence of Wilde’s synthesis of science and philosophy from the notebooks on his published criticism and fiction. He adapted his idealist and evolutionary theory of Hellenic-inspired historical criticism in “The Rise of Historical Criticism” (now called “Historical Criticism”) into what he called “art-criticism.” This invented genre symbolizes a return to the original synthetic unity of creative and critical instincts in various dialectical forms where Wilde becomes a creative critic who integrates critical analyses and theory with fictional, dramatic, discursive, and narrative forms, creating “art-criticism.” Wilde created self-consciously subversive dialectical negations, challenges to moralistic Victorian beliefs about the relation of art, artists, and critics to each other and to cultural progress. That is, Wilde presented a counter-cultural criticism in imaginative, entertaining literary forms for a growing educated audience.

Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in Marcuse's critical theory. This can be partly ascribed to Marcuse's interdisciplinary approach to humanities and social sciences. Many of Marcuse's ideas and concepts are tacitly present in contemporary social and ecological movements. Contemporary literature on Marcuse is positively inclined to his theory while the critique of Marcuse dates back to the '70s, and remains largely unimpaired. This fact poses significant challenges to the revival of Marcuse's critical theory. This study sets out to report on current interest in Marcuse's critical theory trying to correct past injustices by responding to negative criticism. The main flaw of such criticism - as we see it - is in failing to perceive interdisciplinary character of Marcuse's critical theory. Marcuse's renaissance cannot be complete without, to use dialectical term, sublating the history of negative criticism.

94ARTHURIANA she has identified earlier, rather she is concerned to investigate the lexicon ofseveral unattributed texts to establish their probability of having been written by Andrea. While establishing a canon based on an author's usage is a valuable and traditional occupation, it does not quite fulfill the promises implied in the title. Once it is clear what the author actually means, however, her study of the 'language of chivalry' in the works ofAndrea da Barberino is an impressive and careful study of the author's works. Her use ofthe Guerrino as a test ofauthenticity is a bit problematic, however, since she acknowledges that authorities do not universally attribute this work to Andrea. Through her examinarion of the undisputed works attribured to Andrea, the six books of / Reali di Francia, the Aspramente, the Storie Nerbonese, La Storia de Aiolfo del Barbicene, La Storia de Ugone d'Avernia, and Guerrino il Meschino, she argues that Andrea should also be credited with La Prima Spagna, La Seconda Spagna (also known as the Ansuigi), and Le Storie de Rinaldo da Monte Albano; to even the balance, she concludes with arguments that he did not write // Libro di Rambaldo (predictably, perhaps, because the quality is inferior). Her arguments seem persuasive. La Prima and Seconda Spagna fill in the missing bits in the Charlemagne cycle begun in the Reali de Francia and picked up in the Storie Nerbonese. Her careful examination ofthe language of the texts is minute and includes an examination of figures as well. A particularly charming example is her use ofelephant similes to draw a relationship between the Guerrino and the Rinaldo. Allaire provides a scrupulous examination ofthe language ofthe texts that may be attributed to Andrea da Barberino. Her book is not easy reading (and does not discuss the larger issues of ethos and language that she raises in her first chapter and title), but is a valuable prolegomena to a critical edition of Andrea's works, especially of those unedited works she now claims for him. This consequent giant step seems to be the project Allaire has in mind and the current book reads like the introduction to a pending edition. Considering the scope ofsuch a project, it would be unrealistic to suggest she also embark on a translation ofAndrea into English. Now that she has established his corpus and demonstrated his importance to an English-speaking audience, she might now want to make him accessible. Ifshe herselfdoes not wish to take on this Herculean task, she has done the groundwork for a succeeding generation of scholars and Ph.D. candidates. DON HOFFMAN Northeastern Illinois University Catherine s. cox. Gender andLanguage in Chaucer. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. Pp. 240. isbn: 0-8130-1519-7. $49.95. I recently listened to a colleague give a paper on Robert Frost at a departmental colloquium and was astonished at her intimate psychologizing of his intentions. It was a well-done ptesentation, certainly eloquent and well-reasoned—if one could accept her premises that, unfortunately, remained underexamined and unproblematized throughout her talk. I was amused that I, the lone medievalist among a host of REVIEWS95 Americanists, had the strongest reaction against the idea of author function and autonomy on display over the cheese and crackers. Like many medievalists traditionally trained but committed to contemporary litetary theory, I am perhaps more sensitive, if not actually neurotic, about how theory is or is not deployed by my peers. The afternoon demonstrated for me once again that all critical theories are equal, but some are more equal than others. First, poststructuralist theories have made it impossible to write about texts without writing about method and the problems of method; second, the recent turn to history (as we like to describe it) has made it impossible to write about texts without taking into consideration the history of criticism itself. Such developments have dictated a short shelf-life for certain kinds of approaches to texts. These are the thoughts that came to mind as I read GenderandLanguage in Chaucer, for Catherine Cox's readings of the Chaucerian oeuvre, finely calibrated as they are, represent a strain ofpoststructuralist French feminism which, while it may no longer require explanation...

This New Casebook contains ten essays written about Blake's poetry since 1970 selected to show the diversity of Blake criticism during the last twenty years and the ways in which contemporary critical theories open up new readings of his work. Essays representative of Marxist, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, feminist and new historicist criticism are included. David Punter's Introduction places these in the context of recent developments in critical theory and shows how today's student can best engage with Blake's complex and rewarding work.

This article argues that two distinct concepts of Enlightenment coexist uneasily in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. According to the first, genealogical concept, Enlightenment is a bewildered form of self-preservation that has existed since the dawn of Western civilization. The second, critical historicist concept views Enlightenment as the critical and anti-authoritarian ideals articulated—most radically in eighteenth-century France—during the uneven development of modern bourgeois society. After examining the origins of these two concepts in Adorno and Horkheimer’s early writings, the article demonstrates why the former became dominant in Dialectic of Enlightenment, while at the same time pointing to significant traces of the latter that remained. The article contends that a reconsideration of the latter concept reveals of a model of early Critical Theory that can still provide a compelling alternative not only to Dialectic of Enlightenment, but also to more recent attempts to place Critical Theory on normative foundations.