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List of contents
Acknowledgements
Preface: Theory’s Redux?
Part I Discourse
1. Discourse in Contemporary Literary Studies (Limit Cases and Spectra)
2. Discourse as Literary Innovation (Charles Bernstein)
3. From Persons to Words: “I am Stanley Cavell”
4. Nothing is Metaphor
5. Yet “It’s Personal”: The Politics of Personhood (Martha Nussbaum, Cora Diamond, Stanley Elkin)
Part II Discourse and Text
6. Can the Text be “Saved” in Discourse? (The Early Walter Michaels)
7. Why Language Can’t Help (Truth and Method)
8. Discourse (The Early Martin Heidegger)
9. Discourse and Text (Davidson and Heidegger)
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Joshua Kates is Professor of English, Adjunct Professor, Germanic Studies and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He has published widely in the fields of philosophy, literary theory, literary criticism, and historiography.
Summary
What would happen if structures, forms, and other stand-alone entities thought to comprise our intellectual toolkit—words, meanings, signs—were jettisoned? How would a work written in a purportedly dead language, like The Iliad, or penned in a foreign tongue be approached if deemed legible without structures such as meaning-bearing signs or grammatical rules?
A New Philosophy of Discourse charts a novel course in response to these questions, coining an original concept of discourse, or talk!, that Joshua Kates presents as more fundamental than language. In Kates’ conception of discourse, writing and speech take shape entirely as events, situated within histories, contexts, and traditions themselves always in the making. Combining literary theory, literary criticism, and philosophy, to reveal a new perspective on discourse, Kates focuses on literary criticism, literary texts by Charles Bernstein and Stanley Elkin, and the philosophical writings of Stanley Cavell, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Donald Davidson and Martin Heidegger.
This ground-breaking study bridges the analytical/continental divide, by working through concrete problems using novel and extended interpretations with wide-ranging implications for the humanities.
Foreword
Proposes a new understanding of language within the humanities, mounting a defence of rigorous humanistic inquiry to arrive at bold new forms of interpretation and understanding.
Additional text
An impressive engagement with fundamental problems of language and meaning. Arguing that the foundational use of language is talk, and that all types of discourse derive from talk in its historicity, Joshua Kates boldly explores a vast range of philosophical and literary interpretive frameworks to produce a surprising synthesis of Heidegger and Davidson.
