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Updating Roman Jakobson’s ‘Poetic Function’ with Vector Semantics
Read more: Updating Roman Jakobson’s ‘Poetic Function’ with Vector SemanticsKurzynski discusses how poetry extends beyond sound and rhythm and taps into a deeper network of meanings.
You Don’t Know Jacques: Speculative Realism, New Materialism, and the Denial of Deconstruction
Fifty years have passed since the publication of Of Grammatology, and the Oxford Literary Review has dedicated its July 2018 issue to marking “The Age of Grammatology”. In my contribution to this issue, Misreading Generalised Writing: from Foucault to Speculative…
Studying sixteenth-century France from inside and outside France
My guest edited special issue of Nottingham French Studies (NFS), explores ‘Text, Knowledge and Wonder in Early Modern France‘, fleshing out new aspects of the sense of wonder that permeates much literature, philosophy, culture, and ritual in the period. As Genevieve…
Rediscovering the Wonder of Philosophy
Wonder is largely absent as a topic of concern to contemporary philosophers. Yet ancient philosophers saw it as the source of what was distinctive in their way of thinking. Plato and Aristotle thought that it was the stirrings of wonder…
Q&A with Stephen Bowman, Author of The Pilgrims Society and Public Diplomacy, 1895–1945
Tell us a bit about The Pilgrims Society and Public Diplomacy, 1895–1945 My book is about the Pilgrims Society, which is an elite dining club that was founded in London in 1902 and in New York in 1903. Not many…
Warwick Ball on the cultural diversity of Afghanistan
It is a pleasure to see the launch of the first issue of Afghanistan, a journal to showcase the country’s exceptional cultural diversity. It is the first scholarly journal devoted to the country since the demise of Afghan Studies in…
Utopia: A round-table discussion
Sir Thomas More (1477 – 1535) was the first person to write of a ‘utopia’, a word used to describe a perfect imaginary world. The term was first published in 1516, and became the short title of his book about an…
Commercial Agriculture and Law Reform in Nigeria
My article “Promoting Commercial Agriculture in Nigeria Through a Reform of the Legal and Institutional Frameworks” in African Journal of International and Comparative Law examines the efficacy of the extant legal and institutional frameworks in addressing the challenges that have stifled the…
7 things you should know about the destruction of graves in the Islamic world
By Ondrej Beranek and Pavel Tupek 1) Over the past years and decades, various parts of the Islamic world – from Iraq, Syria, Mali and Tunisia, to Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Bangladesh – have faced virulent attacks targeting…
James Benning: A Cinema of Our Times
In James Benning’s film Concord Woods (2014), we watch a replica of Henry David Thoreau’s famous cabin at Walden Pond. The cabin is first shown during the summer solstice, graced by the golden sunlight. The shot lingers for sixty minutes…