Probes the nature of linguistic or symbolic action as it relates to specific novels, plays, and poems.

Probes the nature of linguistic or symbolic action as it relates to specific novels, plays, and poems.

Excerpt from The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action As for analysis focused upon one work, probably my article on Hitler's Mein Kampf is the most complete example in these pages, with the references to the writings of Coleridge (whom I hope to treat later at greater length in a separate volume) probably coming next. The study of Julius Caesar as a device for the arousing and fulfilling of expectations in an audience, might fall within this class, if the reader is not led by its tone to assign it the quality of a tour de force. And I have included in an appendix some reviews that, while selected because in my opinion they clarified some aspect or other of my position, are by the nature of the case cen tered about some one formal object. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Probes the nature of linguistic or symbolic action as it relates to specific novels, plays, and poems.

From the ForewordThese pieces are selections from work done in the Thirties, a decade so changeable that I at first thought of assembling them under the title, "While Everything Flows." Their primary interest is in speculation on the nature of linguistic, or symbolic, or literary action--and in a search for more precise ways of locating or defining such action. Words are aspects of a much wider communicative context, most of which is not verbal at all. Yet words also have a nature peculiarly their own. And when discussing them as modes of action, we must consider both this nature as words in themselves and the nature they get from the non-verbal scenes that support their acts. I shall be happy if the reader can say of this book that, while always considering words as acts upon a scene, it avoids the excess of environmentalist schools which are usually so eager to trace the relationships between act and scene that they neglect to trace the structure of the act itself.