The Senses of the Text: Intensional Semantics and Literary Theory

Dowling, William C.

ISBN 10: 0803217110 / ISBN 13: 9780803217119

Published by University of Nebraska Press, 1999

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Senses of the Text: Intensional Semantics and Literary Theory
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0803217110
• ISBN 13: 9780803217119
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

In recent years the notion of determinate meaning—the idea that a word or a line in a literary text means one thing rather than another thing, X rather than Y—has been widely rejected in the name of Derrida and différance, reader-response criticism, and "ideological" approaches proclaiming meaning to be no more than a site of political contestation.

Yet determinate meaning, says William C. Dowling, cannot be rejected in this way. Like the ratio named by p or the primeness of prime numbers in mathematics, it has been there all along, waiting for our theories to catch up. The proof that this is so, he argues, is today most compellingly available in the New Intensionalism of Jerrold J. Katz, which provides a powerful demonstration that the method of "close reading" developed by New Criticism remains the only valid basis for higher-order interpretation. For readers with no technical background in linguistics or logic, The Senses of the Text provides a clear and easily-understood introduction to the "Chomskyan revolution" in linguistic theory and to major issues in the philosophy of language, including the work of Frege, Wittgenstein, Quine, Carnap, Kripke, and Davidson.

About the Author

William C. Dowling is a professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of, most recently, Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson.