Image, Music, Text
Roland Barthes
Hill and Wang, 1977
809 B2851
"The dominant perspective of the thirteen essays collected in Image-Music-Text is semiology. Barthes extends the 'empire of signs' over film and photography, music criticism . . . and writing and reading as historically situated activities. Several essays are frankly didactic. They review and expand the domain of a certain terminology: interpretive codes, narrational systems, functions and indices, denotation and connotation. Yet those impatient with special terms will not mind too much, for where else do they get, under the same cover, Beethoven and 'Goldfinger,' the Bible and 'Double Bang à Bangkok'? . . . Barthes is technical without being heavy, and a professional without ceasing to be an amateur. His precise yet fluent prose treats personal insight and systematic concepts with equal courtesy."—Geoffrey Hartman, The New York Times Book Review
contents:
The photographic message -- Rhetoric of the image -- The third meaning -- Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein -- Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives -- The struggle with the angel -- The death of the author -- Musica practica -- From work to text -- Change the object itself -- Lesson in writing -- The grain of the voice -- Writers, intellectuals, teachers.
On Argentina
Jorge Luis Borges
Penguin, 2010
864 B7320
"Borges' On Argentina provides vital information for anyone trying to come to grips with Latin American thought in the early twentieth century. The twenty selections chosen for this collection will flesh out the vision of the young Borges between 1925 and 1930. These essays constitute an important intellectual biography of one of the most influential Latin American authors of all time." -publisher
contents
On Argentina -- from Inquisitions [Inquisiciones] (1925) -- From Moon across the way [Luna de enfrente] (1925) -- from The full extent of my hope [El tama; o de mi esperanza] (1926) -- from The language of the Argentines [El idioma de los argentinos] (1928) -- from Evaristo Carriego (1930) -- Miscellany (1931-51).
Potentialities: collected essays in philosophy
Giorgio Agamben
Stanford, 1999
195 A259p
"The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy (such as Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, and Hegel) and twentieth-century thought (most notably Walter Benjamin, but also Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, the historian Aby Warburg, and the linguist J.-C. Milner). They also examine several general topics that have always been of central concern to Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality." -publisher
table of contents
Editor's note Editor's introduction Part I. Language: 1. The thing itself 2. The idea of language 3. Language and history: linguistic and historical categories in Benjamin's thought 4. Philosophy and linguistics 5. Kommerell, or on gesture Part II. History: 6. Aby Warburg and the nameless science 7. Tradition of the immemorial 8. *Se: Hegel's absolute and Heidegger's Ereignis 9. Walter Benjamin and the demonic: happiness and historical redemption 10. The messiah and the sovereign: the problem of law in Walter Benjamin Part III. Potentiality: 11. On potentiality 12. The passion of facticity 13. Pardes: the writing of potentiality 14. Absolute immanence Part IV. Contingency: 15. Bartleby, or on contingency Notes Index of names.