Descrizione

Aus der Bibliothek von Prof. Wolfgang Haase, langj�igem Herausgeber der ANRW und des International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT) / From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - sehr guter Zustand / very good condition - This book investigates a cluster of related concepts as they gather around the central question of topography. The other topics include the initiating efficacy of speech acts, ethical responsibility, political or legislative power, the translation of theory from one topographical location to another, the way topographical delineations can function as parable or allegory, the relation of personification to landscape. The way speech acts operate in literature and in life is the most pervasive of these additional topics. All are approached from the perspective of topography. How do topographical descriptions or terms function in novels, poems, and philosophical texts? Just what, in a given text, is the topographical component and how does it operate? -- The topographical terms in each work create an imaginary landscape for the reader that generates both narrative and conceptual meaning. Such words include place names in both the generic and proper senses: river, mountain, house, path, field, hedge, road, bridge, shore, cemetery, tumulus, boundary, horizon, but also �Key West,� �Egdon Heath,� �The Quiet Woman Inn,� �Sutpen�s Hundred,� �the old bridge at Heidelberg,� and so on. Though the texts are primarily by nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets (Tennyson, Hopkins, Stevens), novelists (Kleist, Dickens, Hardy, Faulkner), philosopher-theorists (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida), readings of Plato�s Protagoras and the Book of Ruth from the Bible are also included. -- These readings reach in different ways within each topography the atopical. This is a place that is everywhere and nowhere, a place vou cannot get to from here. Sooner or later, in a different way in each case, the effort of mapping is interrupted by an encounter with the unmappable. The topography and the toponymy in each example, in a different way in each case, hide an unplaceable place. This strange locus is another name for the ground of things, the preoriginal ground of rhe ground, something other to any activity of mapping. The atopical inhabits the individual psyche. Why can my circuit of selfconsciousness never be completed in a happy coincidence of self and its supposed hidden support, the self beneath the self? It haunts language. Why cannot language ever be wholly clear? It interferes with interpersonal relations, relations with the �other.� Why can they never be wholly satisfactory or fulfill desire? It underlies society and history. Why are they so often a panorama of violence and injustice? It generates the opacities of story-telling. Why can no story ever bring the things it narrates wholly into the open? All these questions, Topographies demonstrates, can be approached, if not answered, by way of the road marked �Topography.� ISBN 9780804723787