Most human action has a technical dimension. This book examines four components of this technical dimension. First, in all actions, various individual, organizational or institutional agents combine actional capabilities with tools, institutions, infrastructure and other elements by means of which they act. Second, the deployment of capabilities and means is permeated by ethical aspirations and hesitancies. Third, all domains of action are affected by these ethical dilemmas. Fourth, the dimensions of the technicity of action are typical of human life in general, and not just a regional or culturally specific phenomenon. In this study, an interdisciplinary approach is adopted to encompass the broad anthropological scope of this study and combine this bigger picture with detailed attention to the socio-historical particularities of action as it plays out in different contexts. Hermeneutics (the philosophical inquiry into the human phenomena of meaning, understanding and interpretation) and social science (as the study of all human affairs) are the two main disciplinary orientations of this book. This study clarifies the technical dimension of the entire spectrum of human action ranging from daily routine to the extreme of violent protest.

This volume is based to a large extent on the understanding of biosemiotic literary criticism as a semiotic-model-making enterprise. For Jurij Lotman and Thomas A. Sebeok, "nature writing is essentially a model of the relationship between humans and nature" (Timo Maran); biosemiotic literary criticism, itself a form of nature writing and thus itself an ecological-niche-making enterprise, will be considered to be a model of modeling, a model of nature naturing. Modes and models of analysis drawn from Thomas A. Sebeok and Marcel Danesi's Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis as well as from Timo Maran's work on "modeling the environment in literature," Edwina Taborsky's writing on Peircean semiosis, and, of course, Jesper Hoffmeyer's formative work in biosemiotics are among the most important organizing elements for this volume.

More than one million people from all walks of life have been uplifted and entertained by Heaven Bound, the folk drama that follows, through song and verse, the struggles between Satan and a band of pilgrims on their way down the path of glory that leads to the golden gates. Staged annually and without interruption for more than seventy years at Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Atlanta, Heaven Bound is perhaps the longest running black theater production. Here, a lifelong member of Big Bethel with many close ties to Heaven Bound recounts its lively history and conveys the enduring power and appeal of an Atlanta tradition that is as much a part of the city as Coca-Cola or Gone with the Wind.

This new collection investigates German literature in its international dimensions. While no single volume can deal comprehensively with such a vast topic, the twelve contributors cover a wide historical range, with a variety of approaches and authors represented. Together, the essays begin to adumbrate the systematic nature of the relations between German national literature and world literature as these have developed through institutions, cultural networks, and individual authors. In the last two decades, discussions of world literature-literature that resonates beyond its original linguistic and cultural contexts-have come increasingly to the forefront of theoretical investigations of literature. One reason for the explosion of world literature theory, pedagogy and methodology is the difficulty of accomplishing either world literature criticism, or world literary history. The capaciousness, as well as the polylingual and multicultural features of world literature present formidable obstacles to its study, and call for a collaborative approach that conjoins a variety of expertise.To that end, this collection contributes to the critical study of world literature in its textual, institutional, and translatorial reality, while at the same time highlighting a question that has hitherto received insufficient scholarly attention: what is the relation between national and world literatures, or, more specifically, in what senses do national literatures systematically participate in (or resist) world literature?

The notion of what it means to "distort" a text is here explored through a rich variety of individual case studies. Distortion is nearly always understood as negative. It can be defined as perversion, impairment, caricature, corruption, misrepresentation, or deviation. Unlike its close neighbour, "disruption", it remains resolutely associatedwith the undesirable, the lost, or the deceptive. Yet it is also part of a larger knowledge system, filling the gap between the authentic event and its experience; it has its own ethics and practice, and it is necessarily incorporated in all meaningful communication. Need it always be a negative phenomenon? How does distortion affect producers, transmitters and receivers of texts? Are we always obliged to acknowledge distortion? What effect does a distortive process have on the intentionality, materiality and functionality, not to say the cultural, intellectual and market value, of all textual objects? The essays in this volume seek to address these questions,They range fromthe medieval through the early modern to contemporary periods and, throughout, deliberately challenge periodisation and the canonical. Topics treated include Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, Reformation documents and poems, Global Shakespeare, the Oxford English Dictionary, Native American spiritual objects, and digital tools for re-envisioning textual relationships. From the written to the spoken, the inhabited object to the remediated, distortion is demonstrated to demand a rich and provocative mode of analysis. Elaine Treharne is Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, Director of the Centre for Spatial and Textual Analysis, and Director of Stanford Technologies at Stanford University; Greg Walker is Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Contributors: Matthew Aiello, Emma Cayley, Aaron Kelly, Daeyeong (Dan) Kim, Sarah Ogilvie, Timothy Powell, Giovanni Scorcioni, Greg Walker, Claude Willan.

Hospitality as a cultural trait has been associated with the South for well over two centuries, but the origins of this association and the reasons for its perseverance of ten seem unclear. Anthony Szczesiul looks at how and why we have taken something so particular as the social habit of hospitality which is exercised among diverse individuals and is widely varied in its particular practices and so generalized it as to make it a cultural trait of an entire region of the country. Historians have offered a variety of explanations of the origins and cultural practices of hospitality in the antebellum South. Economic historians have at times portrayed southern hospitality as evidence of conspicuous consumption and competition among wealthy planters, while cultural historians have treated it peripherally as a symptomatic expression of the southern code of honor. Although historians have offered different theories, they generally agree that the mythic dimensions of southern hospitality eventually outstripped its actual practices. Szczesiul examines why we have chosen to remember and valorize this particular aspect of the South, and he raises fundamental ethical questions that underlie both the concept of hospitality and the cultural work of American memory, particularly in light of the region's historical legacy of slavery and segregation.

Tragedy is one of the oldest and most revered forms of literature in the western world. Over the centuries, tragedy has shown a tremendous capacity to reinvent itself, often emerging at crucial moments in the evolution of cultural, political and intellectual history. Not only is tragedy marked by its diversity, the critical literature surrounding the genre is equally diverse. This Reader's Guide offers a comprehensive introduction to the key criticism and debates on tragedy, from Aristotle through to the present day. Sarah Dewar-Watson presents the work of canonical theorists and lesser-known but, nonetheless, influential critics, bringing together a strong sense of the critical tradition and an awareness of current scholarly trends. Stimulating and engaging, this essential resource helps students to navigate their way around the subject of tragedy and its rich critical terrain.

Across the eighteenth century in Britain, readers, writers, and theater-goers were fascinated by women who dressed in men's clothing from actresses on stage who showed their shapely legs to advantage in men's breeches to stories of valiant female soldiers and ruthless female pirates. Spanning genres from plays, novels, and poetry to pamphlets and broadsides, the cross-dressing woman came to signal more than female independence or unconventional behaviors; she also came to signal an investment in female same-sex intimacies and sapphic desires. Sapphic Crossings reveals how various British texts from the period associate female cross-dressing with the exciting possibility of intimate, embodied same-sex relationships. Ula Lukszo Klein reconsiders the role of lesbian desires and their structuring through cross-gender embodiments as crucial not only to the history of sexuality but to the rise of modern concepts of gender, sexuality, and desire. She prompts readers to rethink the roots of lesbianism and transgender identities today and introduces new ways of thinking about embodied sexuality in the past.

Narcoepics Unbound foregrounds the controversial yet mostly untheorized phenomenon of contemporary Latin American 'narcoepics.' Dealing with literary works and films whose characteristics are linked to illicit global exchange, informal labor, violence, 'bare life,' drug consumption, and ritualistic patterns of identity, it argues for a new theoretical approach to better understand these 'narratives of intoxication.' Foregrounding the art that has arisen from or seeks to describe drug culture, Herlinghaus' comparative study looks at writers such as Gutierrez, J. J. Rodriguez, Reverte, films such as City of God, and the narratives surrounding cultural villains/heroes such as Pablo Escobar. Narcoepics shows that that in order to grasp the aesthetic and ethical core of these narratives it is pivotal, first, to develop an 'aesthetics of sobriety.' The aim is to establish a criteria for a new kind of literary studies, in which cultural hermeneutics plays as much a part as political philosophy, analysis of religion, and neurophysiological inquiry.