This article revisits, analyzes and critiques Bruce Chatwin’s 1987 bestseller, The Songlines,1 more than three decades after its publication. In Songlines, the book primarily responsible for his posthumous celebrity, Chatwin set out to explore the essence of Central and Western Desert Aboriginal Australians’ philosophical beliefs. For many readers globally, Songlines is regarded as a—if not the—definitive entry into the epistemological basis, religion, cosmology and lifeways of classical Western and Central Desert Aboriginal people. It is argued that Chatwin’s fuzzy, ill-defined use (...) of the word-concept “songlines”2 has had the effect of generating more heat than light. Chatwin’s failure to recognize the economic imperative underpinning Australian desert people’s walking praxis is problematic: his own treks through foreign lands were underpropped by socioeconomic privilege. Chatwin’s ethnocentric idée fixe regarding the primacy of “walking” and “nomadism,” central to his Songlines thématique, well and truly preceded his visits to Central Australia. Walking, proclaimed Chatwin, is an elemental part of “Man’s” innate nature. It is argued that this unwavering, preconceived, essentialist belief was a self-serving construal justifying Chatwin’s own “nomadic” adventures of identity. Is it thus reasonable to regard Chatwin as a “rogue author,” an unreliable narrator? And if so, does this matter? Of greatest concern is the book’s continuing majority acceptance as a measured, accurate account of Aboriginal belief systems. With respect to Aboriginal desert people and the barely disguised individuals depicted in Songlines, is Chatwin’s book a “rogue text,” constituting an act of epistemic violence, consistent with Spivak’s usage of that term? (shrink)

This paper deals with the identity problems of fictional objects, focusing on Anthony Everett's and Stuart Brock's leading criticisms against fictional creationism, the view that fictional objects are abstract objects created by our acts involving literary practices. My primary aim is to argue that creationism based on referentialism has enough resources to individuate fictional objects and hence can address the alleged identity problems: every alleged problematic case regarding the identity of fictional objects is well explained in terms of the notions (...) of authorial intention, gappy proposition, inadvertent creation, and reference shift. (shrink)

Authorial and artistic declarations would seem to be a boon to interpreters who favor actual intentionalism. However, because they believe there are limits on the power of authors and artists to embody their intentions in their works, moderate actual intentionalists hold that some intentions are irrelevant. Looking closely at authorial declaration about the sexuality of Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter novels, I argue in favor of the extreme actual intentionalist position that genuine authorial declarations should not (...) be ignored because authorial intention always determines meaning. The answer to the question in the subtitle is that we do not know with certainty, even though there is a definite right answer. We can argue for the answer we think is most likely, however. And aided by the distinction between meaning and significance, extreme actual intentionalism provides a clear and consistent way of making such arguments while avoiding the problem of being stuck with an interpretation we find aesthetically displeasing. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Intention Authorial Intention Varieties of Intentionalism The Utterance Model Hypothetical Intentionalism Hypothetical Intentionalism and Actualist Intentionalism Compared Success Conditions and the Dilemma Argument.

Authorial Ethics is a study of the ways in which writers abrogate their implicit and explicit commitment to honesty and truth. It encompasses all disciplines and is both theoretical and applied.

Abstract creationism about fictional characters is the view that fictional characters are abstract objects that authors create. I defend this view against criticisms from Stuart Brock that hitherto have not been adequately countered. The discussion sheds light on how the number of fictional characters depends on authorial intention. I conclude also that we should change how we think intentions are connected to artifacts more generally, both abstract and concrete.

The essay seeks to single out, describe, and analyze the main semiotic features that compose the fundamentalist understanding of authoriality. Given a definition of authoriality as the series of semiotic dynamics that induce a reader to posit a genetic relation between an author and a text, the fundamentalist authoriality is characterized as displaying six main traits. First, centrality of the written text: in order to postulate a perfect coincidence between a transcendent intentio auctoris and an immanent intentio lectoris, fundamentalist exegetical (...) and juridical hermeneutics must be anchored to a stable message, canonized into a written verbal text or into a corpus of written verbal texts. Second, fundamentalist authoriality rests on the assumption of the immutability and mono-centrism of the religious semiosphere that irradiates from the written text. Third, literalism, infallibility, and non-contradiction are attributed to the relation between the written text, its exegetical hermeneutics, and the pragmatic normative orders to which it gives rise. Fourth, fundamentalist authoriality rules out any potential duplicity of the operations that ‘extract’ meaning from religious texts. Fifth, the assumption of the immutability of the religious text leads to exclusion of any operation that might alter the form of both its expression and content, hence to stigmatization of translation. The sixth feature of fundamentalist authoriality encompasses all the previous ones: in fundamentalism, a religious text is not actually a text anymore, but a mirror, whose passive reflection of the exegete’s mind undermines the semiotic nature of the relation between the reader and the text. (shrink)

The essay seeks to single out, describe, and analyze the main semiotic features that compose the fundamentalist understanding of authoriality. Given a definition of authoriality as the series of semiotic dynamics that induce a reader to posit a genetic relation between an author and a text, the fundamentalist authoriality is characterized as displaying six main traits. First, centrality of the written text: in order to postulate a perfect coincidence between a transcendent intentio auctoris (intention of the author) and an immanent (...) intentio lectoris (intention of the reader), fundamentalist exegetical and juridical hermeneutics must be anchored to a stable message, canonized into a written verbal text or into a corpus of written verbal texts. Second, fundamentalist authoriality rests on the assumption of the immutability and mono-centrism of the religious semiosphere that irradiates from the written text. Third, literalism, infallibility, and non-contradiction are attributed to the relation between the written text, its exegetical hermeneutics, and the pragmatic normative orders to which it gives rise. Fourth, fundamentalist authoriality rules out any potential duplicity of the operations that ‘extract’ meaning from religious texts. Fifth, the assumption of the immutability of the religious text leads to exclusion of any operation that might alter the form of both its expression and content, hence to stigmatization of translation. The sixth feature of fundamentalist authoriality encompasses all the previous ones: in fundamentalism, a religious text is not actually a text anymore, but a mirror, whose passive reflection of the exegete’s mind undermines the semiotic nature of the relation between the reader and the text. (shrink)

Augustine held that scripture could have multiple true meanings, and scholars of Augustine have given this topic considerable treatment. Some have recognized the importance of divine authorial intention in this matter, but the relevance of ancient semantics to Augustine’s hermeneutics has not received sufficient attention. Ancient speakers would often explain a concept in varied ways that could all be considered true. This practice created the possibility that an author could intend for certain terms to be understood in multiple ways. (...) I call this a complex authorial intention. After describing some of the prominent views on Augustine’s multiple meanings of scripture, I will establish the concept of complex authorial intention from ancient semantic practice. In the light of these first two sections I will proceed to analyze three key texts in Augustine’s corpus: Confessions 12.30.41 and 13.24.37, as well as De Doctrina Christiana 3.2.2. I will argue that Augustine saw complex divine authorial intention as a theoretical justification for the multiplicity of meanings in scripture and that this view sets objective limits on the range of possible meanings. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur’s narrative and critical hermeneutics provides the conceptual resources to accommodate Barthes’ and similar critiques of subjectivity whilepositing a revised form of authorial intention similar to the “postulated author” of Alexander Nehamas and the “creative process” of Richard Wollheim. Though influenced by Barthian critiques, all three thinkers retain a notion of authorial intent*one distinct from the intentions of the historical author*necessary for the understanding of meaning in the philosophy of literature. Yet, the implications of this allow us (...) to reverse the Ricoeurian insight of understanding human action as a text, and show how human action provides clarification on authorial intention. Using Ricoeur and Nehamas, I would like to revisit the issue of authorialintention in order to show the insights this offers for hermeneutics and philosophy of literature. If authorial intention is properly reestablished as distinct from theintentions of the historical writer, we can turn to a minimalistic version of the analytic philosophy of action based on Ricoeur and Carlos Moya to provide auseful heuristic conceptual framework to look at both authorial and ‘readerly’ intention.In employing the philosophy of action, this conceptual framework will be used instrumentally in aid of interpreting the text and providing further analysisand conceptual clarity to the notion of authorial intention. Further, analyzing ‘writerly’ and ‘readerly’ intention as action*communicative action*sidesteps thephilosophical issue of the ‘artistic process’ which had absorbed the attention of aesthetics since Plato, without sidestepping the issues of authorial intention andreaderly intention.1 I will argue that in using variants of the philosophy of action, we can ignore psychological issues and instead focus on the broader issues ofmeaning-expression at the heart of both readerly and writerly intention. I will then demonstrate this heuristic framework using Hölderlin’s epic poetry and Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster. (shrink)

The aim of this text is to reconstruct the meanings of the concept of hermeneutical truth, as it has been defined and explained in the main projects of modern hermeneutics (Dannhauer, Chladenius, Meier, Schleiermacher, Fr. Schlegel). I will explore the epistemological side of this concept, different from its meaning in hermeneutic ontology. Understood as correctness by modern hermeneutics, truth has been related to the authorial intention. The thesis I am arguing is that the meanings of hermeneutical truth and, related (...) to them, the modern theories of authorial intention differ according to the metaphysical presuppositions that define the thought paradigms of modernity (Cartesianism, Kantianism, Romanticism and German Idealism): the centrality and activism of the self, the rationality of the self, the dependence of knowledge on the ideal of method, the discovery of the unconscious. Some modern hermeneutical theories express the tensions between these philosophical paradigms. However, I will argue that the authorial intention remains a limit of interpretation that prevents the risks of arbitrariness and hermeneutic relativism. Translated by Mariana Constantinescu. (shrink)

Artifactualism about fictional characters, positing Harry Potter as an abstract artifact created by J. K. Rowling, has been criticized on the grounds that the idea of creating such objects is mysterious and problematic. In the light of such qualms, it is worth homing in on an argument in favor of artifactualism, showing that it is the best way to include the likes of Harry Potter in our ontology precisely because it incorporates authorial creation. To that end, I will be (...) exploring Kripke’s fleeting remarks in the Addenda to his “Naming and Necessity” lectures about expressions like ‘unicorn’ and ‘Harry Potter’. Elsewhere, Kripke motivates artifactualism by suggesting that incorporating authorial creation (as artifactualism does) is a move that is intuitive and natural; but beyond this, he doesn’t provide any arguments in favor of such a move. My purpose in this paper is to construct such an argument based on considerations about Kripke’s general view about proper names, in particular, his seminal causal-historical chain account of reference determination, and its consequences for fictional names as well as nonfictional names without bearers such as ‘Vulcan’. (shrink)

Artifactualism about fictional characters, positing Harry Potter as an abstract artifact created by J. K. Rowling, has been criticized on the grounds that the idea of creating such objects is mysterious and problematic. In the light of such qualms, it is worth homing in on an argument in favor of artifactualism, showing that it is the best way to include the likes of Harry Potter in our ontology precisely because it incorporates authorial creation. To that end, I will be (...) exploring Kripke’s fleeting remarks in his “Naming and Necessity” lectures (1972, 156–7) about expressions like ‘unicorn’ and ‘Harry Potter’. Elsewhere, Kripke motivates artifactualism by suggesting that incorporating authorial creation (as artifactualism does) is a move that is intuitive and natural; but beyond this, he doesn’t provide any arguments in favor of such a move. My purpose in this paper is to construct such an argument based on considerations about Kripke’s general view about proper names, in particular, his seminal causal-historical chain account of reference determination. (shrink)

The critical literary world has spent a wealth of thought and words on the question of Hawthorne himself: Where does he stand in his works? In history? In literary tradition? In this major new study, G. R. Thompson recasts the "Hawthorne question" to show how authorial presence in the writer's works is as much a matter of art as the writing itself. The Hawthorne who emerges from this masterful analysis is not, as has been supposed, identical to the provincial (...) narrator of his early tales; instead he is revealed to be the skillful manipulator of that narrative voice, an author at an ironic distance from the tales he tells. By focusing on the provincial tales as they were originally conceived--as a narrative cycle--Thompson is able to recover intertextual references that reveal Hawthorne's preoccupation with framing strategies and variations on authorial presence. The author shows how Hawthorne deliberately constructs sentimental narratives, only to deconstruct them. Thompson's analysis provides a new aesthetic context for understanding the whole shape of Hawthorne's career as well as the narrative, ethical, and historical issues within individual works. Revisionary in its view of one of America's greatest authors, The Art of Authorial Presence also offers invaluable insight into the problems of narratology and historiography, ethics and psychology, romanticism and idealism, and the cultural myths of America. (shrink)

This book explores the logic and historical origins of a strange taboo that has haunted literary critics since the 1940s, keeping them from referring to the intentions of authors without apology. The taboo was enforced by a seminal article, "The Intentional Fallacy," and it deepened during the era of poststructuralist theory. Even now, when the vocabulary of "critique" that has dominated the literary field is under sweeping revision, the matter of authorial intention has yet to be reconsidered. This work (...) explains how "The Intentional Fallacy" confused different kinds of authorial intentions and how literary critics can benefit from a more up-to-date understanding of intentionality in language. The result is a challenging inventory of the resources of literary theory, including implied readers, poetic speakers, omniscient narrators, interpretive communities, linguistic indeterminacy, unconscious meaning, literary value, and the nature of literature itself. (shrink)

What follows is a revised version of Dauenhauer's original response to the panelist's presentations.

Taking an authorial stance is essential in academic writing but remains a challenge for novice researchers, especially EFL/ESL writers. This study explores how authors of English and Arabic research article discussions employ evaluative language resources while commenting on their results. To this end, the study investigated the employment of Engagement resources within Appraisal Theory. The findings exhibited a great divergence between the two language groups as Arabic discussions relied more on Contracting strategies, which indicate the tendency to close down (...) the space for dialogic alternatives, while their English counterparts preferred Expanding resources, which open up the dialogic space for alternative voices. The study, therefore, bears some pedagogical implications for L2 learners. (shrink)

Before burying philosophical postmodernism, let me briefly appreciate its important contributions: its emphasis on human voices and human subjectivities—however, disagreeable, incomprehensible, inc...

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 203 Seiten: 39-51.

Strictly speaking this is not an essay whose sole subject is music. For what I have to say here can be extrapolated to any other art that possesses the kinds of aesthetic properties that I am referring to, in music, as the ‘pure musical parameters’. But I shall not attempt such an extrapolation here, and leave it to the reader. So for all intents and purposes, this is an essay on music , more particularly, absolute music, music alone, without text, (...) title, program, dramatic setting, or any other extra-musical baggage. (shrink)

In a series of papers (two of them in previous ESA Proceedings), I have been defending a fictional artifactualist position according to which fictional characters (like Prince Bolkonsky in Tolstoy’s War and Peace are non-concrete, human created objects (which are commonly labeled abstract artifacts). In this paper, I aim to bring together from my previous work two lines of defending fictional artifactualism: that (for the fictional artifactualist) making room for (i) authorial creation and for (ii) inadvertent authorial creation (...) are tenable moves. Indeed, instances of authorial creation (intentional or inadvertent) are what we expect if we accept Saul Kripke’s general view about what determines the reference of proper names, and this view’s consequences for fictional names. Fictional artifactualism emerges as our best choice if we want to admit fictional characters in our ontology and are sympathetic to Kripke’s general view about proper name reference. Fictional artifactualists having taken these two conditions on board need not worry about these features of their view: that authors sometimes create fictional characters and sometimes do so inadvertently. (shrink)

Digital games can be considered as composed of two main components: the props, i.e. visual, textual, and aural elements such as codes, 3D models and animations; and the form, specially the interaction between players and games, the act of playing itself. This dichotomy thus begs the question whether digital games are indeed games if nobody plays them, and ultimately: who is the owner of the gameplay and any by-product of the interaction between the game and the players? This paper explores (...) the copyright status of content created by users with digital games, such as gameplay videos and images, for example art based on digital game assets, namely virtual photography; as well as customized in-game objects. Many modern digital games offer considerable freedom to players, in terms of how the action on screen evolves and the visual outcomes that the game can produce. Scholars have asserted that digital games avatars, the characters created in games, should be considered a joint work between players and the game developers and some game companies allow the commercial use of videos created from their games. Conversely, other companies expressly prohibit such use, and issue DMCA takedown notices to infringers. Attention will be devoted to specific games as authorial tools, such as _SpaceEngine_ and _Townscaper_, where there are neither objectives nor challenges, but they are rather tools that enable players’ creativity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Authorial Authority in Ancient ChinaMartin SvenssonWriting and Authority in Early China. By Mark Edward Lewis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Pp. vii + 544. Paper.The appearance of Mark Edward Lewis' second book, Writing and Authority in Early China, is a long-awaited event in the sinological world. Divided into eight chapters and with the main text running 365 pages, (...) this book is an exceptionally rich study of the intellectual world(s) of the Warring States period and the Han dynasty, approaching its objects of investigation from a variety of different positions. The implicit questions "How do texts speak 'with authority'?" and "How, and for what reasons, are certain texts canonized or deemed apocryphal?" allow Lewis to demonstrate the different strategies used by state bureaucrats, writers of history, diviners, philosophical schools, poets, and reciters of poetry to "authorize" their discourse. The interrelationship and interdependence of Text and State is an all-pervasive theme excellently dealt with in the two crowning chapters here on the establishment of the Confucian canon during the Han dynasty.Lewis has a clear and concise style, a keen sense for spotting significant connections between seemingly disparate phenomena, and a most impressive grasp of primary and secondary sources—even if the absence, in the bibliography, of the Guodian texts, Martin Kern's 1997 Die Hymnen der Chinesischen Staatsopfer, David Schaberg's 1996 thesis "Foundations of Chinese Historiography," Shirakawa Shizuka's 1976 Kanji no sekai (in a new 1997 edition), and, perhaps, Christopher Connery's very recent The Empire of the Text (1998) suggests that we may have been forced to wait for this book for some time. (Christoph Harbsmeier's 1995 article "Notions of Time and History" also offers some important musings on the notion of writing in early China.) Considering its breadth, the book has very few factual errors, one being the use of "Mao commentary" to refer to the entire commentarial section included in the Mao Edition of the Odes, another being the claim that the Odes themselves use tropes such as bi and xing, when in fact these concepts were inventions of the scholastic commentators. Arthur Waley's important 1933 article "The Book of Changes" could have been mentioned in the discussion of Richard Kunst's and Edward Shaughnessy's works on the Changes.In what follows I will do no more than make a few remarks in order to initiate the reader into the organizing principles of what, in the final analysis, can only be described as a first-rate scholarly work. I will then endeavor a small contribution, [End Page 614] inspired by some of Lewis' theses, to the discussion about textuality and power in early China.Before anything else, the reader should be informed about the two peculiarities that shape the book's line of argument. Let us first consider the relation between the title and the contents of the book. "Writing" is used not only in the sense of "the act of putting brush (or any other instrument of writing) to silk (or any other medium)," or merely in the sense of "(physical) text," but also in the sense of the "contents of a text." Similarly, "authority" refers to governmental, bureaucratic, or imperial "power," as well as to the "authority" invested in a discourse by way of its rhetorical force, by its intertextual references to ancient sagely texts, or by its function as mouthpiece for institutions of power (e.g., the ruler or the philosophical master). The polysemic title thus allows the author to shift focus several times and, without contradiction, speak simultaneously of the uses of (physical) writing as a means of bureaucratic communication during the early Zhou and of the interaction of State canon (qua the dogmatic contents of the canonical texts) and the imperial exercise of power during the Han. And, indeed, since Chinese philosophy is eminently occupied with theories of governmental power, one sometimes suspects that Lewis uses the long-standing academic buzzwords "writing" and "authority" in this vague fashion as a foil for creating what is arguably the best general introduction to early Chinese thought available in Western languages today. However, despite the Foucauldian... (shrink)

Monroe C. Beardsley's unavailability argument is one of the most underrated anti‐intentionalist arguments in the philosophy of interpretation. The main idea of this argument is that, since independent evidence of authorial intent is normally unavailable, the literary interpreter should focus on what a text means rather than on what the author intends it to mean. In this article I propose a revised version of the argument to show that the unavailability of authorial intent suffices to make actual intentionalism (...) untenable as a recommendation for finding out textual meaning. (shrink)

Long neglected as a focus of linguistic research, evaluation in its various guises is now being recognized as a crucial aspect of any study of discourse. In this book, writers coming from different standpoints are brought together, providing a unique profile of the topic from several perspectives. These perspectives include: Systemic Linguistics, Narrative, Corpus Linguistics, and Discourse Analysis.

ABSTRACTIn 1651, Alexander Ross published an attack on Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Bacon's Natural History and William Harvey's De generatione. Ross's work, Arcana Microcosmi, defended Aristotelian natural philosophy against the ‘new philosophy’ that figures like Bacon, Harvey and Browne represented. Though Ross's attacks on these authors make up no more than half of the treatise’s contents, the book’s paratextual materials emphasise scientific debate. While Ross's authorial approach advocates reading exclusively ancient authorities for the sake of glossing and transmitting their (...) knowledge to a wider public, in order to argue against the new philosophy Ross must engage with its textual production. Furthermore, his works advertise their focus on Bacon, Harvey and Browne, which would have attracted a readership drawn to new scientific approaches to knowledge formation. Ross's polemic represents an effort to model his devotion to ancient authority while also generating a reading public that would resist the new approach to reading that the new philosophy proposed. (shrink)

I argue that Herodotus consciously and cunningly incorporates elements of myth and initiatory ritual into his story of Cleobis and Biton. The brothers' "blessed" death takes place in the context of an Argive initiatory festival, at the unintentional bidding of their mother, who thus embodies the link between maternity and mortality attested in early Greek hexameter poetry. The posthumous dedication by their fellow citizens of statues of the brothers at Delphi signifies both an honorary initiation into the class of adult (...) male warriors and a mitigation of mortality (another fundamental concern of early Greek myth). (shrink)

Robert Coover’s Novel, The Public Buming, merges fantasy, history, and popular myth to respond to the American Cold War culture surrounding the trial of Ethal and Julius Rosenberg. While serving as a postmodern response to, and rewrite of, the Cold War ideological narratives, Coover’s novel also raises theoretical and practical questions concerning the author’s agency in the twentieth century. This article makes use of the language theories of Bruce Andrews, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Charles Peirce to consider how Coover’s fiction addresses (...) the conflict between the public and private self, authorial discourse and collective ideological discourse. Coover’s novel reflects on these tensions, foregrounding the erosion of an autonomous concept of self and a Romantic notion of autotelic creation. At the same time, it employs a range of strategies (recovery of alternative voices, dismantling of polarities, rewriting) as a form of resistance against the monologic narratives of the Cold War.Le roman de Robert Coover, The Public Buming, combine I’imaginaire, I’histoire, et le mythe populaire pour repondre ala culture de la guerre froide américaine dans laquelle baigne le procès d’Ethal et de Julius Rosenberg. Bien qu’il serve de reponse aux narrations ideologiques de la guerre froide et de réécriture de celles-ci, le roman de Coover soulève aussi des questions théoriques et pratiques relativement à I’action de I’auteur au vingtième siècle. Le présent article utilise les théories du langage de Bruce Andrews, Mikhail Bakhtin, et Charles Peirce afin d’analyser la façon dont le roman-fiction de Coover aborde le conflit entre le soi public et privé et entre le discours de I’auteur et le discours idéologique collectif. Le roman de Coover médite sur ces tensions en mettant I’accent sur I’erosion du concept autonome de soi et de la notion romantique de création autotélique. À la même occasion, il emploie un éventail de stratégies (recouvrement de contre-voix, démantèlement des polarités, réécriture) en tant que résistances aux narrations monoloqigues de la guerre froide. (shrink)

A simple tool is provided to assist researchers in assessing contributions to a scientific publication, for ease in evaluating which contributors qualify for authorship, and in what order the authors should be listed. The tool identifies four phases of activity leading to a publication—Conception and Design, Data Acquisition, Analysis and Interpretation, and Manuscript Preparation. By comparing a project participant’s contribution in a given phase to several specified thresholds, a score of up to five points can be assigned; the contributor’s scores (...) in all four phases are summed to yield a total “contribution score”, which is compared to a threshold to determine which contributors merit authorship. This tool may be useful in a variety of contexts in which a systematic approach to authorial credit is desired. (shrink)

In 1848, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote a short yet highly significant theater review, titled “Mr. Phister as Captain Scipio.” This review deals with a seemingly prosaic problem: how can an actor convincingly play the role of a drunk police captain while simultaneously disclosing that this captain is deliberately concealing his intoxicated condition? This article argues that this ‘disclosure of concealment’ underlies Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. It elucidates this argument by illustrating that the three levels of theatrical performance highlighted in “Mr. (...) Phister as Captain Scipio” correspond to three parallel levels of authorial performance. Drawing inspiration from the actor, Kierkegaard adopts the persona of a pseudonym who conceals his true identity behind an incognito while simultaneously disclosing that this pseudonym is hiding something. Emulating the dramatic performativity of the actor, Kierkegaard developed a method of indirect communication that constantly works against itself and thus relies on a form of linguistic performativity. (shrink)

SUMMARYEarly modern printers, publishers and booksellers not only influenced readers to purchase particular books but continue to shape our reception of printed books today. Through title-page advertisements, prefaces and indexes, these ‘print agents’ forged unique relationships with new and returning readers. Paying attention to paratextual structures can uncover strategies for marketing new books, corralling readers and outlining new genres. A consideration of framing devices can also further our understanding of digital resources: much as print agents mediated printed books, digital humanists (...) help reinforce the value of new technologies for the study of early modern texts, guiding users to apply new methods of research, and helping establish new areas of scholarship. As a new kind of print agent, digital humanists must be more aware of their choices in curating, organising and labeling metadata. As we rethink what it means to read, edit and disseminate texts through the digital medium, we must also understand the degree to which modern and early modern editorial practices challenge and influence our scholarship and criticism. (shrink)

The abstract found at the beginning of most journal articles has increasingly become an essential part of the article. It tends to be the first part of the article to be read and, to some extent, it `sells' the article. Acquiring the skills of writing an abstract is therefore important to novice writers to enter the discourse community of their discipline. Based on 30 abstracts from three journals, the present study aims at exploring not only the rhetorical moves of abstracts (...) in the fields of applied linguistics and educational technology, but also the linguistic realizations of moves and authorial stance in different abstract moves. The results show that there are three obligatory moves in abstracts in these two disciplines — Presenting the research, Describing the methodology, and Summarizing the results. The results also indicate that a combination of certain linguistic features such as grammatical subjects, verb tense and voice can help distinguish moves in the abstract. The findings of the study have some pedagogical implications for academic writing courses for graduate students, especially students from non-English backgrounds. (shrink)