Francis Jeffry Pelletier
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195382891
- eISBN:
- 9780199870493
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195382891.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Language
This chapter focuses on the differing ways that characterizing generic sentences can be expressed. For instance, we might hear ‘Birds typically fly’ or ‘Usually, birds fly,’ using adverbs. But ...
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This chapter focuses on the differing ways that characterizing generic sentences can be expressed. For instance, we might hear ‘Birds typically fly’ or ‘Usually, birds fly,’ using adverbs. But sometimes they are presented with adjectival modifiers, as in ‘The typical/normal.usual bird flies.’ Additionally, the quantifier most can be used: ‘Most birds fly.’ And finally, there is the bare plural form: ‘Birds fly.’ The author is interested in the question of whether these different forms give different information. For example, is the sentence ‘Most birds fly’ an “extensional” statement that compares the proportion of flying to nonflying birds? Is the sentence ‘Birds fly’ an “intensional” statement of some sort of “folk‐scientific necessity”? But how would one measure whether different information is conveyed? Pelletier's answer is that we can test how the differing forms are used in tasks that involve default or nonmonotonic reasoning.Less
This chapter focuses on the differing ways that characterizing generic sentences can be expressed. For instance, we might hear ‘Birds typically fly’ or ‘Usually, birds fly,’ using adverbs. But sometimes they are presented with adjectival modifiers, as in ‘The typical/normal.usual bird flies.’ Additionally, the quantifier most can be used: ‘Most birds fly.’ And finally, there is the bare plural form: ‘Birds fly.’ The author is interested in the question of whether these different forms give different information. For example, is the sentence ‘Most birds fly’ an “extensional” statement that compares the proportion of flying to nonflying birds? Is the sentence ‘Birds fly’ an “intensional” statement of some sort of “folk‐scientific necessity”? But how would one measure whether different information is conveyed? Pelletier's answer is that we can test how the differing forms are used in tasks that involve default or nonmonotonic reasoning.
Rita Barnard
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195112863
- eISBN:
- 9780199851058
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195112863.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This book is established, in the first instance, as an input to the study of South African literature of the period between 1948 and 2000—the period of the National Party's political domination, as ...
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This book is established, in the first instance, as an input to the study of South African literature of the period between 1948 and 2000—the period of the National Party's political domination, as well as the first few years of the country's democracy. In general terms, this project may be pointed out as an effort to elucidate the effect of apartheid on literary and cultural production through readings of a number of significant writers: J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fugard, Miriam Tlali, and Zakes Mda. Specifically, this chapter elaborates the cultural and political importance of certain key places, including the farm, the white suburban home, the black township, the shack settlement, and the theater, from the perspective of theoretical work on the interconnections between spatial relations, systems of power, and ideological and generic forms. It will manifest in these chapters that the author was not merely interested in questions of setting, but also in the place of the text.Less
This book is established, in the first instance, as an input to the study of South African literature of the period between 1948 and 2000—the period of the National Party's political domination, as well as the first few years of the country's democracy. In general terms, this project may be pointed out as an effort to elucidate the effect of apartheid on literary and cultural production through readings of a number of significant writers: J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fugard, Miriam Tlali, and Zakes Mda. Specifically, this chapter elaborates the cultural and political importance of certain key places, including the farm, the white suburban home, the black township, the shack settlement, and the theater, from the perspective of theoretical work on the interconnections between spatial relations, systems of power, and ideological and generic forms. It will manifest in these chapters that the author was not merely interested in questions of setting, but also in the place of the text.
Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780813033495
- eISBN:
- 9780813038315
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813033495.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
It has long been accepted that film helped shape the Modernist novel and that Modernist poetry would be inconceivable without the typewriter. Yet radio, a key influence on Modernist literature, ...
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It has long been accepted that film helped shape the Modernist novel and that Modernist poetry would be inconceivable without the typewriter. Yet radio, a key influence on Modernist literature, remains the invisible medium. The contributors to this book argue that radio led to changes in textual and generic forms. Modernist authors embraced the emerging medium, creating texts that were to be heard but not read, incorporating the device into their stories, and using it to publicize their work. They saw in radio the same spirit of experimentation that animated Modernism itself. Because early broadcasts were rarely recorded, radio's influence on literary Modernism often seems equally ephemeral in the historical record. This book helps fill this void, providing a new perspective for Modernist studies even as it reconfigures the landscape of the era itself.Less
It has long been accepted that film helped shape the Modernist novel and that Modernist poetry would be inconceivable without the typewriter. Yet radio, a key influence on Modernist literature, remains the invisible medium. The contributors to this book argue that radio led to changes in textual and generic forms. Modernist authors embraced the emerging medium, creating texts that were to be heard but not read, incorporating the device into their stories, and using it to publicize their work. They saw in radio the same spirit of experimentation that animated Modernism itself. Because early broadcasts were rarely recorded, radio's influence on literary Modernism often seems equally ephemeral in the historical record. This book helps fill this void, providing a new perspective for Modernist studies even as it reconfigures the landscape of the era itself.
Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199698233
- eISBN:
- 9780191803772
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199698233.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
Biography appears to thrive as never before; and there clearly remains a broad readership for literary biography. But the methods and approaches of recent criticism which have contributed rich ...
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Biography appears to thrive as never before; and there clearly remains a broad readership for literary biography. But the methods and approaches of recent criticism which have contributed rich insights and asked new questions about the ways in which we interrogate and appreciate literature have scarcely influenced biography. Biography as a form has been largely unaffected by either new critical or historical perspectives. For early-modern scholars the biographical model, fashioned as a stable form in the eighteenth century, has been, in some respects, a distorting lens onto early-modern lives. In the Renaissance and early-modern period rather than the biography’s organic and developmental narratives of a coherent subject, lives were written and represented in a bewildering array of textual sites and generic forms. And such lives were clearly imagined and written not to entertain or even simply to inform, but to edify and instruct, to counsel and polemicise. It is only when we understand how early moderns imagined and narrated lives, that is through a full return to history and an exact historicising, that we can newly conceive the meaning of those lives and begin to rewrite their histories free of the imperatives and teleologies of Enlightenment. This book reflects on the problems of writing lives from the various perspectives of their own research and in the form of case studies informed by new questions.Less
Biography appears to thrive as never before; and there clearly remains a broad readership for literary biography. But the methods and approaches of recent criticism which have contributed rich insights and asked new questions about the ways in which we interrogate and appreciate literature have scarcely influenced biography. Biography as a form has been largely unaffected by either new critical or historical perspectives. For early-modern scholars the biographical model, fashioned as a stable form in the eighteenth century, has been, in some respects, a distorting lens onto early-modern lives. In the Renaissance and early-modern period rather than the biography’s organic and developmental narratives of a coherent subject, lives were written and represented in a bewildering array of textual sites and generic forms. And such lives were clearly imagined and written not to entertain or even simply to inform, but to edify and instruct, to counsel and polemicise. It is only when we understand how early moderns imagined and narrated lives, that is through a full return to history and an exact historicising, that we can newly conceive the meaning of those lives and begin to rewrite their histories free of the imperatives and teleologies of Enlightenment. This book reflects on the problems of writing lives from the various perspectives of their own research and in the form of case studies informed by new questions.
