3.885 Poetics Today (141)
Willard McCarty (MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca)
Mon, 1 Jan 90 18:54:46 EST
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 885. Monday, 1 Jan 1990.
Date: 1 January 1989
From: Willard McCarty <MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca>
Subject: Poetics Today
[The following is from Itamar Even-Zohar, the founding editor. --W.M.]
POETICS TODAY
International Journal for Theory and Analysis
of Literature and Communication
Editors: Itamar Even-Zohar (Tel Aviv) and Benjamin Harshav
(Yale)
Poetics Today is the leading international journal in the theory
and analysis of literature and culture. Beginning with volume
9(1988), it is published by Duke University Press in cooperation
with the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv
University.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Snail Mail address for Porter Institute:
Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv 69978, Israel
Bitnet: PORTER@TAUNIVM.BITNET
Papers on diskette are welcome in Nota Bene or ASCII. If you send
them via BITNET, better UUENCODE them if you use Nota Bene.
Duke University Press can be accessed (for subscription inquiries)
via following BITNET address:
DBOOKS@TUCC.BITNET
-----------------------------------------------------------------
[1]
Poetics Today brings together scholars from around the world,
whose research reflects a diversity of approaches and
disciplines. Theory of literature, literary criticism and
interpretation, literary and cultural history, semiotics of
culture, linguistics, rhetoric and communications, cultural
anthropology, cognitive studies, translation theory: all these
fields, and more, overlap with the interests of Poetics Today.
The common denominator of all this diversity is the ambition to
understand literary and cultural texts both in their own right
and in the context of other cultural systems; to develop advanced
theories of literature, communication, and culture, and advanced
methods of research; and to integrate the study of literature
within the evolving larger field of the human sciences and
ultimately that of the sciences at large.
[2]
"Poetics" means: both the theory and the description and analysis of
literature. Not just the literary text as such, but also
literature in its institutional, semiotic, historical and
cultural context. And not just the literary text, but also
cultural texts of all kinds, and beyond that the repertoires of a
culture from which models of reality are constructed: culture as
text, as system, as system of systems. In this sense, poetics
overlaps with theory of literature, literary criticism and
interpretation, literary and cultural history, semiotics of
culture, linguistics, rhetoric and communications, cultural
anthropology, cognitive studies, translation theory, and much
else.
Today: Today poetics is expanding its frontiers. No longer does
it seem responsible or desirable to study literature, or even
textuality in general, in a vacuum. Now more than ever poetics
aspires to integrate itself within the evolving larger field of
the human sciences and ultimately that of the sciences at large.
Poetics Today: An international multidisciplinary and
interdisciplinary journal, bringing together scholars from around
the world, reflecting a diversity of approaches and fields.
* * *
The 1988 and 1989 volumes of Poetics Today will include four
special guest-edited issues:
Interpretation in Context in Science and Culture
Editors: Peter Bieri and Benjamin Harshav
Contributors include philosophers, intellectual historians,
philosophers and historians of science, among them: Carl Hempel,
Daniel Dennett, Peter Gay.
The Rhetoric of Interpretation and the Interpretation of Rhetoric
Editor: Paul Hernadi
"The volume ... strongly suggests that the principles and
operations of contemporary rhetoric and contemporary
interpretation invite being studied in conjunction with each
other and with the principles and operations characteristic of
contemporary descriptions and critiques of ideology."
Contributors include literary critics and theorists, intellectual
historians, cultural critics, anthropologists, among them: Hayden
White, Jonathan Culler, Terry Eagleton, Houston Baker, Richard
Ohmann, Dominick LaCapra, Susan Handelman, Renato Rosaldo,
Michael Holquist.
Literature and Art
A special double issue.
Editor: Wendy Steiner
"Perhaps the greatest advantage of the interart comparison ... is
the very richness and wit of its juxtapositions. Though it
cannot organize the arts into a structured, coherent system,
nevertheless it delivers a copiousness to aesthetic speculation
that has long been missed in the restrictive matrix of academic
disciplines."
Contributors include literary critics and historians, art
historians, semioticians, among them: W.J.T. Mitchell, Stephen
Nichols, Mary Ann Caws, Charles Altieri, Dick Higgins.
The GRIP Project: Episodes in the History of Criticism and Theory
Editors: David Shumway and Brian McHale
"... literary studies constitutes its own object of investigation
by limiting and construing the features a text is presumed to
have. If this is the case, the history of criticism and theory
becomes vitally important because it can tell us how and why the
object has been constituted in the past and at present."
Papers from the Group for Research into the Institutionalization
and Professionalization of Literary Studies, with a history of
the GRIP Project by David Shumway and a commentary by Jonathan
Culler.
Also: papers by Robert Alter, Douwe Fokkema, Thomas Pavel,
Lubomir Dolezel, Benjamin Harshav; book reviews and review
articles; New Books at a Glance.