A stellar cast of fifteen contributors seeks to show the direction in which continental and continentally oriented American literary criticism has evolved in recent years. Nine of the essays are published here for the first time; five of the remaining six were translated, by the editor, from the French; only one has previously appeared in English. The essays make available some of the most important and most representative work that has been done in the wake of structuralism. Among the topics treated are the relationships between semiology and literature, anthropology and literature, and psychoanalysis and literature; modern American poetics; algebraic models as epistemological operators; the modes of production of a poem; Flaubert's view of history; and poetic language. Professor Harari has arranged the essays to move from the general to the particular and from the abstract to the concrete. In an informative and ambitious introduction, he discusses each essay in relation to the whole and explains the interrelationships among the various theories and strategies that are represented in the anthology. A book meant for the specialist as well as the novice, for the teacher of literature and criticism as well as the student, Textual Strategies is a brilliant introduction to post-structuralist critical theories and practices.

Beginning with the general cultural impact of scientific discovery on literature and painting at the turn of the century, Bruss discusses the works of Nabokov, Barthelme and Kosinski, with special attention paid to the ways in which these authors respond to the increasing lack of literature's textual authority.

In Textual Strategies in Ancient War Narrative fourteen specialists study, from literary, linguistic and historical angles the textual strategies that the Greek historian Herodotus and the Roman historian Livy employ in their accounts of two famous battles in ancient history

The Meaning of Video Games takes a textual studies approach to an increasingly important form of expression in today’s culture. It begins by assuming that video games are meaningful–not just as sociological or economic or cultural evidence, but in their own right, as cultural expressions worthy of scholarly attention. In this way, this book makes a contribution to the study of video games, but it also aims to enrich textual studies. Early video game studies scholars were quick to point out that a game should never be reduced to merely its "story" or narrative content and they rightly insist on the importance of studying games as games. But here Steven E. Jones demonstrates that textual studies–which grows historically out of ancient questions of textual recension, multiple versions, production, reproduction, and reception–can fruitfully be applied to the study of video games. Citing specific examples such as Myst and Lost, Katamari Damacy, Halo, Façade, Nintendo’s Wii, and Will Wright’s Spore, the book explores the ways in which textual studies concepts–authorial intention, textual variability and performance, the paratext, publishing history and the social text–can shed light on video games as more than formal systems. It treats video games as cultural forms of expression that are received as they are played, out in the world, where their meanings get made.

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

“This is a sophisticated and fascinating argument written in a very enjoyably entertaining style. It is hard for me to see how readers initially interested in these texts will not be ‘swept off their feet’ by the core assertions of this author, and the devastatingly comprehensive way in which he demonstrates those arguments.” —Brent Steele, University of Kansas In Textual Conspiracies, James R. Martel applies the literary, theological, and philosophical insights of Walter Benjamin to the question of politics and the predicament of the contemporary left. Through the lens of Benjamin’s theories, as influenced by Kafka, of the fetishization of political symbols and signs, Martel looks at the ways in which various political and literary texts “speak” to each other across the gulf of time and space, thereby creating a “textual conspiracy” that destabilizes grand narratives of power and authority and makes the narratives of alternative political communities more apparent. However, in keeping with Benjamin’s insistence that even he is complicit with the fetishism that he battles, Martel decentralizes Benjamin’s position as the key theorist for this conspiracy and contextualizes Benjamin in what he calls a “constellation” of pairs of thinkers and writers throughout history, including Alexis de Tocqueville and Edgar Allen Poe, Hannah Arendt and Federico García Lorca, and Frantz Fanon and Assia Djebar.