Antony Hudek is research fellow at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts, London. --

Writing is not like chemical engineering. The figures of speech should not be learned the same way as the periodic table of elements. This is because figures of speech are not about hypothetical structures in things, but about real potentialities within language and within ourselves. The "figurings" of speech reveal the apparently limitless plastic

This volume presents a reasoned study of the discourse connectives of attainment of the French language. For the most part, the studies on connectives are based on referentialist descriptive frameworks, which are sustained more or less explicitly on what we have called the general problem of causality, the epistemological foundation of a scientific paradigm which has been used for centuries but which, in our opinion, is now outdated. In the first place, we have submitted this old paradigm to critical debate, showing the limits of its scientific validity. Next, we have placed ourselves in a non-referentialist linguistic framework, the Theory of Argumentation in the Language-System, developed by the French linguist Oswald Ducrot, in which we have formulated a new descriptive proposal for discourse connectives, taking into account both the argumentative configuration and the polyphonic configuration of each of the discourse dynamics generated around a given connective. We have described the argumentative configuration in terms of semantic blocks, and the polyphonic configuration in terms of discourse algorithms, original and innovative heuristic instruments with which we attempt to stimulate a new approach to language more in line with the general scientific approaches of the 21st century, and with the new scientific paradigm which is currently valid.

Japan today is haunted by the ghosts its spectacular modernity has generated. Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this provocative conjoining of ethnography, history, and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties—and the attempts to contain them—as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites, and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance. Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early twentieth-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of premodern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theater.

Drawing on range of text genres including novels, poems, health forums, holiday guestbooks, prayers, political songs and news stories, each chapter uses cognitive linguistics to shed light on the meanings and meaning-making processes invoked when we encounter texts belonging to different literary and political genres. The book presents new insights into the workings of textual phenomena such as metaphor, viewpoint and deixis and also sheds light on more elusive, epiphenomenal qualities such as a text's ambience, atmosphere, power, ideology or persuasiveness. It also takes new strides in cognitive text analysis by exploiting experimental and ethnographic methods to empirically investigate readers' reception of, and resistance to, texts.

"Barthes's most popular and unusual performance as a writer is "A Lover's Discourse," a writing out of the discourse of love. This language primarily the complaints and reflections of the lover when alone, not exchanges of a lover with his or her partner is unfashionable. Thought it is spoken by millions of people, diffused in our popular romances and television programs as well as in serious literature, there is no institution that explores, maintains, modifies, judges, repeats, and otherwise assumes responsibility for this discourse . . . Writing out the figures of a neglected discourse, Barthes surprises us in "A Lover's Discourse" by making love, in its most absurd and sentimental forms, an object of interest." Jonathan Culler