Allegories Of Communication

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This is a theoretical study of human metamorphosis in Western literature.

This book discusses the semiotic and ethnographic bases for organizational analysis, including the related fieldwork issues confronting the investigator. It explains the importance of rhetorical-dramaturgic and phenomenological strategies for the study of organizations. The arbitrary and culturally based connections in which organizations abound require an understanding of the particulars of cultural scenes, first observed, later conceptualized through semiotic theory. Organizational Communication includes a series of examples from applied semiotics research in nuclear regulatory policy making, truth telling, regulatory control (by, among others, the police), and risk analysis. These data provide the basis for a critique of the limits of earlier analyses of organizational change, such as those offered by structuralist theories. Dr. Manning concludes with an assessment of the postmodernist ethnographic strategies that have evolved as a response to a larger representational crisis, and of the implications of these strategies for the study of organizational culture.

Religion is a multi-faceted and complex human phenomenon, combining many different mental and social characteristics. Among these, language plays a crucial though often neglected role. This volume brings together groundbreaking work from linguistics, cognitive science and neuroscience, as well as from religious studies, in order to illuminate the origins and centrality of religion in human life.

The book includes a new theoretical synthesis of William Stern’s classic personology published in the 1930s with contemporary cultural psychology of semiotic mediation developed by the author over the last two decades. It looks at the human mind as it operates in its full complexity, starting from the most complex general levels of aesthetic and political participation in society and ending with individual willful actions in everyday life contexts.

Presenting an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to colonial America's best-known literary genre, Andrew Newman analyzes depictions of reading, writing, and recollecting texts in Indian captivity narratives. While histories of literacy and colonialism have emphasized the experiences of Native Americans, as students in missionary schools or as parties to treacherous treaties, captivity narratives reveal what literacy meant to colonists among Indians. Colonial captives treasured the written word in order to distinguish themselves from their Native captors and to affiliate with their distant cultural communities. Their narratives suggest that Indians recognized this value, sometimes with benevolence: repeatedly, they presented colonists with books. In this way and others, Scriptures, saintly lives, and even Shakespeare were introduced into diverse experiences of colonial captivity. What other scholars have understood more simply as textual parallels, Newman argues instead may reflect lived allegories, the identification of one's own unfolding story with the stories of others. In an authoritative, wide-ranging study that encompasses the foundational New England narratives, accounts of martyrdom and cultural conversion in New France and Mohawk country in the 1600s, and narratives set in Cherokee territory and the Great Lakes region during the late eighteenth century, Newman opens up old tales to fresh, thought-provoking interpretations.

In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers—including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber—whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis.