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What one cannot compute, one must poetize: this essay theorizes the extraordinary regimes of human mental experience by putting the emphasis on poetry. Poetry grants us the ability to move “beyond the limits of thought” and to explore the beyond of cognition. It teaches us to think differently. An elliptic response to Wittgenstein’s point of arrival in the Tractatus, this book is first and foremost an interdisciplinary study of poetry, drawing on literary theory, philosophy, and cognitive science. The work conducted on minds and brains over the last decades in psychology, artificial intelligence, or neuroscience cannot be ignored, if, as “humanists,” we are ever interested in the way we think. Thus, a constant dialogue with the positive examination of cognition serves to better situate the normal regimes of thought—and to underline the other mental possibilities that literature opens up. This essay shows that poetry—a very widespread and possibly universal phenomenon among humans—arises through syntactic structures, cognitive binding, and mental regulations; but that, in going through them, it also exceeds them. The best poems, then, are not only thought experiments but actual thinking experiments for the unthinkable. They expand the usual semantics of natural languages, they singularly deploy the rhetorical armature of speech. They tend to exceed their own algorithms, made of iterations and linguistic re-organizations. They are often reflexive, strange, cognitively dissonant. They provide detachable, movable, and livable significations to our selves. The literary scope of this book is more than “global:” it is uniquely broad and comparative, encompassing dozens of different traditions, oral or written, from all continents, from Ancient times to the contemporary era, with some thirty specific readings of texts, ranging from Sophocles to Gertrude Stein, from Wang Wei to Aimé Césaire, or from cuneiform tablet to rap music.
Poetry. --- Wittgenstein. --- cognitive. --- LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry. --- Poetry.0 --- Poems --- Poetry --- Verses (Poetry) --- Literature --- Philosophy
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The relationship between power and language has been a central theme in critical theory for decades now, yet there is still much to be learned about the sheer force of language in the world in which we live. In Empire of Language, Laurent Dubreuil explores the power-language phenomenon in the context of European and, particularly, French colonialism and its aftermath. Through readings of the colonial experience, he isolates a phraseology based on possession, in terms of both appropriation and haunting, that has persisted throughout the centuries. Not only is this phraseology a legacy of the past, it is still active today, especially in literary renderings of the colonial experience-but also, and more paradoxically, in anticolonial discourse. This phrase shaped the teaching of European languages in the (former) empires, and it tried to configure the usage of those idioms by the "Indigenes." Then, scholarly disciplines have to completely reconsider their discursive strategies about the colonial, if, at least, they attempt to speak up.Dubreuil ranges widely in terms of time and space, from the ancien régime through the twentieth century, from Paris to Haiti to Quebec, from the Renaissance to the riots in the banlieues. He examines diverse texts, from political speeches, legal documents, and colonial treatises to anthropological essays, poems of the Négritude, and contemporary rap, ever attuned to the linguistic strategies that undergird colonial power. Equally conversant in both postcolonial criticism and poststructuralist scholarship on language, but also deeply grounded in the sociohistorical context of the colonies, Dubreuil sets forth the conditions for an authentically postcolonial scholarship, one that acknowledges the difficulty of getting beyond a colonialism-and still maintains the need for an afterward.
Postcolonialism. --- French language --- French literature --- Post-colonialism --- Postcolonial theory --- Political science --- Decolonization --- Political aspects. --- History and criticism. --- French-speaking countries --- Countries, French-speaking --- Francophone countries --- History. --- Postcolonialism --- Littérature française --- Français (Langue) --- Postcolonialisme --- History and criticism --- Histoire et critique --- Aspect politique --- Francophonie --- Histoire
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Dubreuil provocatively proposes an extremist rethinking of the limits of politics - toward a break from politics, the political and policies. He calls for a refusal of politics, suggesting a form of apolitics that would make our lives more liveable.
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