Language, meaning and the law

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David Bohm

`During the past few decades, modern technology, with radio, television, air travel and satellites has woven a network of communications which puts each part of the world into almost instant contact with all the other parts. Yet, in spite of this world-wide system of linkages, there is, at every moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale.'[Bohm]The question of how we can communicate better is at the heart of On Dialogue. This is the most comprehensive documentation to date of best-selling author David Bohm's dialogical world view.

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Gérard Genette

Paratexts are those liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher, and reader: titles, forewords, epigraphs, and publishers' jacket copy are part of a book's private and public history. In Paratexts, an English translation of Seuils, Gerard Genette shows how the special pragmatic status of paratextual declarations requires a carefully calibrated analysis of their illocutionary force. With clarity, precision, and an extraordinary range of reference, Paratexts constitutes an encyclopedic survey of the customs and institutions of the Republic of Letters as they are revealed in the borderlands of the text. Genette presents a global view of these liminal mediations and the logic of their relation to the reading public by studying each element as a literary function. Richard Macksey's foreword describes how the poetics of paratexts interacts with more general questions of literature as a cultural institution, and situates Genette's work in contemporary literary theory.

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Shoshana Dreyfus, Susan Hood and Maree Stenglin

"A systemic functional linguistics study analysing how a wide range of modalities, other than language, make and communicate meaning"--Pub. website.

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Rolando Gaete

The rationalization of power has been an enduring feature of Modernity, assigning to human rights the task of subjecting the excesses of power to the scrutiny of critical reason. Gaete examines this task in the wake of the crisis of modernity, when the belief that man can draw principles out of his own ground has lost its authority and when the very possibility of an enlightened, disinterested Reason is being questioned. The aim of the book is not to offer another critique of rights but to investigate how both rights and critiques are transformed by the rhetoric of power. The author traces the discourse of judicial criticism as a series of rhetorical operations, bringing to light the paradoxes, antinomies and 'truth games' that permeate the field of human rights. He interrogates the discourse of modern humanism and investigates how its claims to being the law of the law and the metaphysics of the modern State shape the bond between State and citizen. Gaete carries his argument across the fields of post-Nietzschean philosophy, anglo-american jurisprudence, political science, cultural and legal studies opening new ground for analyses of the rhetoric of rights.