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Augustine. On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees. Unfinished literal commentary on Genesis. The Literal Meaning of Genesis. Edited by Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo, Hill Edmund, Rotelle John E, and Augustinian Heritage Institute. Hyde Park, N.Y: New City Press, 2002.
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Mining the meaning of the Bible: Beyond the literal word. Liguori, MO: Liguori Publications, 2011.
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Linden, Erik-Jan Van der. Idioms, non-literal language and knowledge. Tilburg: Tilburg University, 1992.
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Smith, Viktor. The literal meaning of lexical items: Some theoretical considerations on the semantics of complex and transferred nominals with special reference to Danish and Russian. Frederiksberg: Institut for Fransk, Italiensk og Russisk, Handelshøjskolen i København, 2000.
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Linden, Erik-Jan Van Der. Idioms, non-literal language and knowledge represention. Tilburg: Tilburg University, 1992.
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Waloszczyk, Konrad. Dosłowna i niedosłowna interpretacja wierzeń religijnych: The literal and non-literal interpretation of religious beliefs. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN, 2012.
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Richards, Eve Michelle. Metaphor and other non-literal language in the primary school classroom. Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 1992.
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Ev̳e lododo ad̳ewo go̳med̳ed̳e kple wo n̳udo̳wo̳wo̳: (Some Ev̳e proverbs and their literal meanings in English). [Accra]: Stephen Worlanyo Tsra, 2005.
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The difference between hearing and reading about Jesus: Aural versus literal meanings of biblical texts (Mark 6:30-8:27a). Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008.
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T.S. Eliot Materialized: Literal Meaning and Embodied Truth. Palgrave Pivot, 2012.
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Wingerter, Bernard. The Ideas Of God: Spiritual Meaning In A Literal World. Aventine Press, 2004.
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Islam And Literalism Literal Meaning And Interpretation In Islamic Legal Theory. Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
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Islam and Literalism: Literal Meaning and Interpretation in Islamic Legal Theory. Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
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Augustine. On Genesis: A Refutation of the Manichees, Unfinished Literal Commentary on Genesis, The Literal Meaning of Genesis (Works of Saint Augustine, a Translation for the 21st Century). New City Press, 2004.
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de Almeida, Roberto G. Composing Meaning and Thinking. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198791492.003.0012.
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If there is a line between semantics and pragmatics, where is it drawn? In this essay I propose that appreciating a sentence is subject to two sets of processes: linguistic (viz., syntactic, semantic) driving the composition of shallow propositions, and unbounded pragmatic (viz., thinking). In section 1, I discuss some guiding assumptions on cognitive architecture, which constrain the nature of linguistic and cognitive representations and processes—and by implication, the conception of the semantics/pragmatics divide I have to offer. The phenomena I examine in section 2, relying on linguistic arguments and experimental evidence, suggest that for certain constructions there is an early “literal” process of interpretation followed by a period of uncertainty, indicating that the early linguistic computations produce a “shallow” semantic representation, not a fully enriched one. The cases I discuss, culminating in metaphors and so-called indeterminate sentences, challenge the prowess of linguistic computations for resolving—even suggesting—interpretations.
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Sturdee, David. On the distinction between literal and non-literal language. 1999.
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Barcelona, Antonio. Metaphor and Metonymy in Language and Art. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190636647.003.0014.
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Interpreting sacred notions of the Hebrew Bible in a non-literal sense was part of the hermeneutical manoeuvres of Early Christian writers. They proceeded by deliteralization and metaphorization, meta-linguistic speech acts by which a word usually understood in its literal sense receives a non-literal meaning. The author develops a two-phase model of Paul’s notion of the ‘circumcision of the heart.’ First the initial values (Jewishness and ritual circumcision) are projected upon a newly created target, inwardness. Then the original value is abolished. This process can be termed a value-shift, versus similar instances which should be seen as value-extensions, the source value being preserved and extended to other realms. Corollaries of value-shift and value-extension are duty-shift and duty-extension. From a socio-religious perspective, metaphorization accompanies a widening of the religious community; it reveals itself to be a moment in the genesis of new philosophical concepts, such as inwardness as the locus of redemption.
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Moran, Richard. Seeing and Believing. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190633776.003.0002.
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Metaphor is classed among the “figurative” uses of language, and the idea of “imagery” is associated with metaphor in both literary and philosophical discussions. But why should what is conveyed by metaphor be thought to be any more closely related to imagery or anything experiential than the understanding of literal language or other tropes such as irony? Relatedly, the vividness metaphor is also often associated with an idea of “force” or power, and the ability of metaphor to persuade. Both of these thoughts are in tension with a traditional philosophical notion of the content or meaning of a statement or proposition. This paper explores these two ideas in connection with a critical examination of Donald Davidson’s denial that a metaphor should be seen as saying or meaning anything at all beyond the literal meaning of the words employed.
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Lepore, Ernie, and Matthew Stone. Explicit Indirection. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198738831.003.0007.
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Our goal in this chapter is to contest the traditional view of indirection in utterances such as, ‘Can you pass the salt?’ by developing a very different way of characterizing the interpretations involved. We argue that the felt “indirection” of such utterances reflects the kind of meaning the utterances have, rather than the way that meaning is derived. So understood, there is no presumption that indirect meanings involve the pragmatic derivation of enriched contents froma literal interpretation; rather, we argue that indirect meanings are explicitly encoded in grammar. We build on recent work on formalizing declarative, interrogative, and imperative meanings as distinct but compatible kinds of content for utterances.
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Roling, Bernd. Critics of the Critics. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198806837.003.0018.
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Roling describes how vehemently religious orthodoxy in Germany and elsewhere resisted Spinoza’s denial of biblical miracles. Though scholars like Charles Blount, Thomas Pyle, and Jean Le Clerc adopted Spinoza’s explanation of the standstill of the sun at Gabaon (Joshua 10:12–14) as a natural phenomenon, viz. a ‘mock sun’, a parhelion, they did not break through the ramparts erected by academic theology. Quite the opposite: science was exploited to make miracles plausible again. An influential advocate of a literal interpretation was Johann Scheuchzer, in his Physica sacra (1731–1735). Many translations, commentaries, and summaries document the success of his defence. Deriving their arguments from the sciences, these theologians fought the reduction of the biblical text to a historical document. Scheuchzer offered a ready summary of all those exegetes who embraced the view that science was the handmaid of the scriptural text, not an instrument for re-evaluating its literal meaning.
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Cave, Terence, and Deirdre Wilson, eds. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198794776.003.0001.
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After initial remarks on the relations between literature, language, and communication, the Introduction outlines the main assumptions of relevance theory, explaining the distinctions between coded and ‘ostensive’ communication, between ‘meaning’ and ‘import’, and between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’. It considers the role of relevance and inference in comprehension; discusses how implicatures are derived in context and why words are not always used to convey their literal meanings; reflects on the nature of metaphor and irony, and examines the relation between processing effort, rhetoric, and style. It then turns to ways in which a relevance theory approach might question the tenets of modern literary theory (the ‘death of the author’, scepticism about intentions), to issues of historical and contextual interpretation, and to the notion of ‘intertextuality’. Finally, it reviews a range of evidence widely taken to support an ‘embodied’ conception of cognition, language, and communication which seems particularly well-adapted to literary studies.
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Currie, Gregory. Interpretation in Art. Edited by Jerrold Levinson. Oxford University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199279456.003.0016.
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Interpretation requires some degree of thought rather than the operation of merely subpersonal level processes, as with understanding literal meaning. It requires judgement applied to the object of interpretation. It requires creativity on the part of the interpreter. But the kind of creativity that contrasts with the application of mechanical procedures must be distinguished from the kind that contrasts with discovery. Some theorists have wanted to insist that interpretation creates meaning for the work rather than discovering meaning in it. So interpretation is meaning-assignment brought about in the right way, and we cannot tell whether an assignment of meaning is an interpretation without inquiring into its antecedents.
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Hansen, Gary Neal. John Calvin and the non-literal interpretation of scripture. 2001.
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Clasen, Mathias. Vampire Apocalypse. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190666507.003.0007.
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Richard Matheson’s 1954 horror novel I Am Legend depicts the sole survivor of a vampire pandemic in his attempts to find companionship and meaning in a blasted apocalyptic world. Most literary critics engaging with the novel have interpreted the vampires as social or psychological symbols. They’ve overlooked their literal resonance as disease-bearing, unnatural predators well designed to activate evolved fears of predation and contagion. The chapter argues that the novel’s lasting power comes from the way Matheson taps into basic human anxieties—over predation, isolation, and a total loss of meaning—in his psychologically nuanced depiction of a flawed but sympathetic man’s struggles to survive and find fellow survivors after the apocalypse, and to find meaning in a secular antagonistic world. Matheson adapted the ancient vampire figure in his evocative exploration of one man’s psychological development in response to a hostile and meaningless world.
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Church, Thomas. Essay Towards Vindicating the Literal Sense of the Demoniacks in the New Testament by T. Church in Answer to a Late Enquiry into the Meaning of Them by A. A. Sykes. HardPress, 2020.
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Brownlee, Victoria. ‘By moste sweete and comfortable allegories’. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198812487.003.0005.
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The Song of Songs, as a poetic dialogue between two lovers, presented literally minded biblical commentators with a thorny exegetical dilemma: either accept the presence of a purely erotic text in scripture, or make the case for a literal reading that was figurative. Like early modern exegesis of the Song, poetic recapitulations of this biblical book, such as those by William Baldwin, Francis Quarles, and Robert Aylett, rely on complex figural reading practices to substantiate a spiritual meaning not directly implied by the biblical text. But this dependence on human words to secure the relationship between sign and spiritually signified exposes reformed anxieties about the inherently fallen nature of the human mind, and the broader inadequacy of language to articulate spiritual truth.
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Huber, Judith. General conclusion. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190657802.003.0010.
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Chapter 10 offers a general conclusion of the findings of the book: Old and Middle English are strongly satellite-framing languages, whose intransitive motion construction can also accommodate verbs which inherently do not evoke a meaning of motion. The size of the manner verb lexicon in medieval English, as well as the use of manner verbs in the texts analysed, point to a similar degree of manner salience as in Present-Day English. The path verbs from French and Latin are shown to be borrowed initially not for expressing general literal motion events, but mostly in abstract or manner-enriched uses more peripheral to their meaning in the donor languages. The study also points out effects of the intertypological contact situation with Middle English on motion verb use in Anglo-Norman. Potential further effects yet to be investigated are suggested in this chapter.
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Ossa-Richardson, Anthony. A History of Ambiguity. Princeton University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691167954.001.0001.
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Ever since it was first published in 1930, William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity has been perceived as a milestone in literary criticism—far from being an impediment to communication, ambiguity now seemed an index of poetic richness and expressive power. Little, however, has been written on the broader trajectory of Western thought about ambiguity before Empson; as a result, the nature of his innovation has been poorly understood. This book remedies this omission. Starting with classical grammar and rhetoric, and moving on to moral theology, law, biblical exegesis, German philosophy, and literary criticism, the book explores the many ways in which readers and theorists posited, denied, conceptualised, and argued over the existence of multiple meanings in texts between antiquity and the twentieth century. This process took on a variety of interconnected forms, from the Renaissance delight in the ‘elegance’ of ambiguities in Horace, through the extraordinary Catholic claim that Scripture could contain multiple literal—and not just allegorical—senses, to the theory of dramatic irony developed in the nineteenth century, a theory intertwined with discoveries of the double meanings in Greek tragedy. Such narratives are not merely of antiquarian interest: rather, they provide an insight into the foundations of modern criticism, revealing deep resonances between acts of interpretation in disparate eras and contexts. The book lays bare the long tradition of efforts to liberate language, and even a poet's intention, from the strictures of a single meaning.
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Collins, John. Linguistic Pragmatism and Weather Reporting. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198851134.001.0001.
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Linguistic pragmatism claims that what we literally say goes characteristically beyond what the linguistic properties themselves mandate. In this book, John Collins provides a novel defence of this doctrine, arguing that linguistic meaning alone fails to fix truth conditions. While this position is supported by a range of theorists, Collins shows that it naturally follows from a syntactic thesis concerning the relative sparseness of what language alone can provide to semantic interpretation. Language–and by extension meaning–provides constraints upon what a speaker can literally say, but does not characteristically encode any definite thing to say. Collins then defends this doctrine against a range of alternatives and objections, focusing in particular on an analysis of weather reports: ‘it is raining/snowing/sunny’. Such reporting is mostly location-sensitive in the sense that the utterance is true or not depending upon whether it is raining/snowing/sunny at the location of the utterance, rather than some other location. Collins offers a full analysis of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of weather reports, including many novel data. He shows that the constructions lack the linguistic resources to support the common literal locative readings. Other related phenomena are discussed such as the Saxon genitive, colour predication, quantifier domain restriction, and object deletion.
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Figdor, Carrie. Literalism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198809524.003.0004.
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Chapter 4 elaborates and provides an initial defense of Literalism. Updated versions of the inference to the best explanation argument for other minds provide a familiar framework for thinking about the plausibility of Literalism, as well as an additional argument for it as the default interpretation of the predicates as they are used in contemporary science. The chapter articulates what Literalism does not claim and what would falsify it. It also presents a series of initial objections to Literalism by means of a dialogue between the Literalist and an imaginary interlocutor, the Implicit Scare Quoter. The ISQ represents the broad range of intuitive objections to Literalism that follow from the initial response that the uses involve implicit scare quotes, indicating an implicit difference in meaning. The dialogue shows the strength of the Literal position in response to common objections.
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Byers, Sarah Catherine. Augustinian Puzzles about Body, Soul, Flesh, and Death. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190490447.003.0005.
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Augustine’s employment of some (ultimately) Aristotelian concepts and distinctions, such as from the work On the Soul, helped him to develop his own account of the human being as a single-substance body-soul compound, and a correlative theory of death. The recovery of his view involves some work, because he does not always explain how he thinks the core theses to which he is committed play out in detail. Nevertheless it is possible when we use his Literal Meaning of Genesis to illuminate the City of God, Book 13. The former text contains the most extended presentation of Augustine’s natural philosophy. It employs concepts from classical metaphysics—such as matter, body, form, and potentiality—which, along with some of the Aristotelian categories, are recognizable again in the City of God, a work that he commenced as he was completing the Genesis commentary.
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Hamilton, Michael W. The Bible and Christian Scientists. Edited by Paul C. Gutjahr. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190258849.013.29.
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Christian Scientists read and study the Bible in conjunction with Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, a book first published in 1875. Eddy’s Puritan heritage, including her rebellion against the doctrine of predestination, and the convergence of Eddy’s religious commitments with her desire to regain her own health and to more generally relieve human suffering, influenced her approach to the Bible and supplied the dominant motifs for her teaching, writing, preaching, and organizing. Eddy’s ideas were rooted in the bible, but she promoted the same individual agency toward the bible as she did for her readers’ lives in general. This agency would allow readers of her book to make the Bible their own. Her experience demonstrated that the scriptures became more authoritative when it was the spiritual, not the literal meaning that really counted.
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Weiss, Shira. The Hardening of Pharaoh’s Heart. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190684426.003.0004.
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Albo focuses his exegetical interpretation on his conception of free choice in a unique reading of the Exodus narrative. In the biblical description of the plagues that God brought upon the Egyptians, it is written that God “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” so that he would not agree to allow the Israelites to leave his land. The literal meaning of the narrative implies that God restrained Pharaoh’s free will. Such an interpretation calls God’s justice into question, since Pharaoh is held morally responsible for his refusal to liberate the Israelites. In an effort to reconcile the seeming conflict, Albo creatively interprets this enigmatic narrative, concluding that God did not deprive Pharaoh of his free choice, but rather preserved his volitional will, thereby maintaining divine justice. By hardening Pharaoh’s heart, God gave Pharaoh the fortitude to withstand the pressures of the plagues and exercise free choice whether or not to liberate the Israelites.
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Huang, Chichung, and Laozi. Tao Te Ching: A Literal Translation With an Introduction, Notes, and Commentary. Asian Humanities Press, 2003.
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Tao Te Ching: A Literal Translation With an Introduction, Notes, and Commentary. Jain Publishing Company, 2003.
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Huber, Judith. Motion and the English Verb. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190657802.001.0001.
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This book is a study of how motion is expressed in medieval English. It provides extensive inventories of verbs used in intransitive motion meanings in Old and Middle English and discusses these in terms of the manner-salience of early English. It shows that also several non-motion verbs can receive contextual motion meanings through their use in the intransitive motion construction. In addition to this type-based analysis, the book also focuses on which verbs and structures are frequent in talking about motion: It analyses motion expression in selected Old and Middle English texts, showing that while satellite-framing is stable, the degree of manner-conflation is strongly influenced by text type and style. After establishing the satellite-framing, manner-salient nature of medieval English, the book investigates how in the intertypological contact situation with medieval French, a range of French path verbs (entrer, issir, descendre, etc.) are borrowed into Middle English, in whose system of motion encoding they can be seen ‘semantic misfits’. The various cognitive and contact-linguistic aspects of their integration into Middle English are investigated in an innovative approach of analysing their usage contexts in autonomous Middle English texts as opposed to translations from French and Latin. It shows that initially these verbs are borrowed not primarily for expressing general literal motion, but in more specific, often metaphorical and abstract contexts. The book is therefore both a diachronic contribution to the typology of motion encoding and to research on the process of borrowing and loanword integration.
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Nicholson, Rowan. Statehood and the State-Like in International Law. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198851219.001.0001.
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If the term were given its literal meaning, international law would be law between ‘nations’. It is often described instead as being primarily between states. But this conceals the diversity of the nations or state-like entities that have personality in international law or that have had it historically. This book reconceptualizes statehood by positioning it within that wider family of state-like entities. An important conclusion of the book is that states themselves have diverse legal underpinnings. Practice in cases such as Somalia and broader principles indicate that international law provides not one but two alternative methods of qualifying as a state: subject to exceptions connected with territorial integrity and peremptory norms, an entity can be a state either on the ground that it meets criteria of effectiveness or on the ground that it is recognized by all other states. Another conclusion is that states, in the strict legal sense in which the word is used today, have never been the only state-like entities with personality in international law. Others from the past and present include imperial China in the period when it was unreceptive to Western norms; pre-colonial African chiefdoms; ‘states-in-context’, an example of which may be Palestine, which have the attributes of statehood relative to states that recognize them; and entities such as Hong Kong.
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Martinich, A. P. Hobbes's Political Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197531716.001.0001.
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Hobbes’s Political Philosophy: Interpretation and Interpretations extends a position first explained in The Two Gods of Leviathan (1992). Hobbes presented what he believed would be a science of politics, a set of timeless truths grounded in definitions. In chapters on the laws of nature, authorization and representation, sovereignty by acquisition, and others, the author explains this science of politics. In addition to the timeless science, Hobbes had two timebound projects: (1) to eliminate the apparent conflict between the new science of Copernicus and Galileo and traditional Christian doctrine, and (2) to show that Christianity, correctly understood, is not politically destabilizing. The strategy for accomplishing (1) was to distinguish science from religion and to understand Christianity as essentially belief in the literal meaning of the Bible. The strategy for accomplishing (2) was to appeal to biblical teachings such as “Servants, obey your masters,” and “All authority comes from God.” Criticisms of the author’s interpretations are the occasion for (a) fleshing out Hobbes’s historical context and (b) describing the nature of interpretation in dialogue with opposing interpretations by scholars such as Jeffrey Collins, Edwin Curley, John Deigh, and Quentin Skinner. Interpretation is updating one’s network of beliefs in order to re-establish an equilibrium upset by a text. Interpretations may be judged according to prima facie properties of good interpretations such as completeness, consistency, simplicity, generality, palpability, and defensibility.
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Pappas-Kelley, Jared. Solvent Form. Manchester University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9781526129246.001.0001.
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Solvent form examines the destruction of art—through objects that have been destroyed (lost in fires, floods, vandalism, or similarly those artists that actively court or represent this destruction, such as Gustav Metzger), but also as a process within art that the object courts through form. In this manner, Solvent form looks to events such as the Momart warehouse fire in 2004 as well as the actions of art thief Stéphane Breitwieser in which the stolen work was destroyed. Against this overlay, a tendency is mapped whereby individuals attempt to conceptually gather these destroyed or lost objects, to somehow recoup in their absence. From this vantage, Solvent form—hinging on the dual meaning in the words solvent and solvency—proposes an idea of art as an attempt to secure and fix, which correspondingly undoes and destroys through its inception. It also weaves a narrative of art that intermingles with Jean Baudrillard’s ideas on disappearance, Georges Bataille and Paul Virilio’s negative or reverse miracle, Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the image (or imago as votive that keeps present the past, yet also burns), and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of art as an attempt to make the moment appear permeable. Likewise, it is through these destructions that one might distinguish a solvency within art and catch an operation in which something is made visible through these moments of destruction when art’s metaphorical undoing emerges as oddly literal.
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Debaise, Didier. Actualising Creativity. Translated by Tomas Weber. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474423045.003.0004.
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The description of the general components of creativity led to the following key proposition of Process and Reality: creativity exists only through its actualisations. But what does it mean to exist through actualisations? First of all, staying true to the literal meaning of what is posed, it implies that, strictly speaking, creativity does not exist, or at least, it does not exist outside of the operation of actualisation. As a result, creativity cannot be treated in itself, it cannot be considered in its own being, since this would presuppose its existence. This leads to a highly distinctive approach to existence with regard to creativity: it appears that existence is something added to creativity, something that happens to it within a process. If it were internal, Whitehead would have said that only one of the forms of creativity’s existence is to be found in its actualisations, which would imply other forms belonging to it, relativising existence through actualisation. Whitehead’s proposition, however, is the opposite: creativity’s existence is related to its actualisations; it is drawn towards distinct things. It could be said, then, and without getting too involved in this point for now, that there is a difference between creativity and existence. It is a common metaphysical error, according to Whitehead, to confuse the ultimate with existence, making the latter into an attribute of the ultimate (in the form of substance, for instance, or of an atom).
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Richetti, John. Non-Fictional Discourses and the Novel. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199580033.003.0021.
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This chapter looks at how readers of eighteenth-century British fiction seem to have possessed less carefully policed divisions between fact and fiction. It speculates that their credulity was more flexible than that of current critics and readers. Into the 1750s and beyond, many narratives that were obviously fictional featured titles or subtitles that gestured toward the kind of factuality to be found in such ‘news’: fiction that was somehow truthful or claimed a kind of non-literal truth. The chapter notes that, from antiquity onwards historians were ignorant of many things. And of course the classical tradition of historical writing allowed or indeed encouraged invented speeches and concocted descriptions.
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Segal, Robert A. Conclusion. bringing myth back to the world. Oxford University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780198724704.003.0010.
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The ‘Conclusion’ uses the myth of Gaia and scientist James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis to ask: given that present-day theories have not challenged the supremacy of science, why bother trying to reconcile myth with science? Why not simply accept the nineteenth-century view and dispense with myth in favour of science? The present-day answer has been that the restriction of myth to either a literal explanation or a symbolic description of physical events fails to account for the array of other functions and meanings that myth harbours. In the twenty-first century the question is whether myth can be brought back to the external world—without facilely dismissing the authority of science.
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Lloyd, Ian J. 16. Copyright protection. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198787556.003.0016.
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This chapter discusses protection under the law of copyright. Topics covered include copyright basics; obtaining copyright; forms of protected work; the requirement of originality; copyright ownership; copyright infringement; the nature of copying; other rights belonging to the copyright owner; the development of software copyright; and literal and non-literal copying.
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Bach, Kent. Reference, intention, and context. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198714217.003.0005.
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This chapter takes up some recently published arguments that purport to show that a demonstrative, as used on a given occasion, refers either on account of certain features of the context or in virtue of a certain speaker intention, which is distinct from the sort of referential intention that is part of the speaker’s total communicative intention. After these arguments are disposed of, it is argued that there is no good rationale for maintaining that demonstratives refer in their own right. Rather, they have meanings that constrain their literal use. Speakers can and do use them to refer and to communicate what they use them to refer to without there being any referential role for demonstratives themselves to play. If this is right, it raises some interesting questions for standard conceptions of semantics.
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Siraganian, Lisa. Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198868873.001.0001.
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Long before the U.S. Supreme Court announced that corporate persons freely “speak” with money in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Court elaborated the legal fiction of American corporate personhood in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). Yet endowing a non-human entity with certain rights exposed a fundamental philosophical question about the possibility of collective intention. That question extended beyond the law and became essential to modern American literature. This book offers the first multidisciplinary intellectual history of this story of corporate personhood. The possibility that large collective organizations might mean to act like us, like persons, animated a diverse set of American writers, artists, and theorists of the corporation in the first half of the twentieth century, stimulating a revolution of thought on intention. The ambiguous status of corporate intention provoked conflicting theories of meaning—on the relevance (or not) of authorial intention and the interpretation of collective signs or social forms—still debated today. As law struggled with opposing arguments (corporate intention, pro versus con), modernist creative writers and artists grappled with interrelated questions, albeit under different guises and formal procedures. Combining legal analysis of law reviews, treatises, and case law with literary interpretation of short stories, novels, and poems, the chapters analyze legal philosophers including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Frederic Maitland, Harold Laski, Maurice Wormser, and creative writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, Charles Reznikoff, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Schuyler.
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McNaughton, James. Taking Them at their Word. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198822547.003.0005.
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This chapter works in two directions. First, it examines how Beckett’s artistic techniques reflect political aspiration. Beckett’s literalizing techniques—for instance, his making ironically literal, corporeal, and physical various rhetorics—partly reflect and engage a fear about political power: that authoritarian power aims to have the leader’s words enacted, something Beckett notes in Nazi Germany. Second, the chapter examines how Beckett has narrators perform the reverse: how they aim to preserve words and categories from denotations acquired by recent historical violence. In Malone Dies, the narrator seeks to contain connotations safely for aesthetic meanings that anesthetize the past. But Beckett has Malone fail. And this dynamic—where a narrator tries to neutralize violent history on the level of interpretation while sentences nevertheless have it resurface—expresses The Three Novels’ mistrust for aesthetic attempts to process trauma and dramatizes the complicity of art and language in covering up the past.
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Boehmer, Elleke. The Mind in Motion. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198794776.003.0002.
Full textAbstract:
Drawing on insights from relevance theory, the chapter explores how W.B. Yeats’s late poem ‘Long-legged Fly’ creates an exemplary occasion for reflecting first on cognition and then on the ways in which cognition might be made manifest in poetic language; in particular, here, in a dominant simile that repeats as a refrain through the poem. Processing the three stanzas’ different inferential, sensorimotor, and intertextual effects, we as readers at one and the same time contemplate in each case a body in thought, and we contemplate ourselves thinking. The poem in this sense repeatedly performs how a history-changing reflective moment holds a range of creative energies in dynamic tension. Relevance theory’s ‘loose’ sifting of literal and other meanings, in Deirdre Wilson’s words, allows us to become aware of these two processes unfolding at the same time, and in relation to each other, as is demonstrated in this close reading.
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Huber, Judith. Borrowed PATH verbs in Middle English. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190657802.003.0009.
Full textAbstract:
Chapter 9 analyses the use of the path verbs enter, ish/issue, descend, avale, ascend, mount, and amount in Middle English autonomous texts and translations from French and Latin, focusing on their recurrent contexts and their complementation patterns. It shows that these verbs are borrowed predominantly in specific, often non-literal or manner-enriched senses relating to discourse domains such as administration, military, religion, and the like, rather than being borrowed as verbs for describing general literal motion events. Their application for general literal motion events is shown to be less restricted in translations from French and Latin, in which translators often react to the presence of a path verb in the original by using the same verb in its Middle English form. This and the continued influence of French and Latin after Middle English may eventually have led to a wider application of the verbs in later stages of the language.