Search Results

This chapter talks about how stories drive the contemporary theory of knowledge. The practice is to tell a tiny story, use it to elicit an intuition about whether the subject has or lacks knowledge, and then draw a moral for the theory of knowledge. Some of the stories are stripped-down versions of familiar situations. Others depict unusual circumstances, and still others are beyond unusual. These stories, such as the ones so far related in this volume, make use of the common literary device of providing the audience with information that the subjects of the stories lack. Moreover, the stories are told in a way to suggest that the missing information is important.

This chapter examines certain hallmarks of Hawaiian literature by focusing on mo‘okū‘auhau (genealogy) as a key traditional meiwi that was adapted from oral traditions to ka palapala (literature). Drawing from Hiapo Perreira’s scholarship on Hawaiian oratory, the chapter explores literary devices, rhetorics, and aesthetics in various Hawaiian mele and Kanaka Maoli mo‘olelo (more specifically, non?ction writing) from the nineteenth century to the present. It analyzes a number of Kanaka ‘Ōiwi writings that highlight the importance of moʻokū‘auhau as a meiwi mo‘okalaleo that continues to be implemented in meaningful ways.

This chapter discusses further features concerning James Joyce's story “A Painful Case”. It is able to observe the physical exercise of walking as being Joyce's favourite form of exercise as evidenced when Joyce endows his alter ego, James Duffy, with a similar taste for healthy exercise. The discussion also pinpoints the literary devices used in the story and examines the different drafts Joyce made while writing the story. The reading of the story, then, depends on aesthetic considerations. These are a recognition of the relationship between the songs, their spirit and their content, the relationship between their performers, and the manifold distinctions between life and art.

This chapter discusses the literary devices Xenophon has employed in introducing himself as the hero of the Anabasis. The character of Xenophon has been carefully integrated into the story during a moment of crisis late in the narrative, to give the illusion of authorial objectivity. But Xenophon in the Anabasis does seem “too good to be true,” though it is after all in the nature of an autobiography for the author to assume the dominant role in the narrative. The idealized self-representation of Xenophon in the narrative appears to symbolize the epitome of good governance, in keeping with the fact that leadership is a central theme in the Anabasis.