During the Spring-Autumn period (722–420 BCE) and the time of the Warring States (480–222 CE), China was in great turmoil. Intellectuals and social reformers sifted through their wisdom and knowledge of China’s experiences up to then, attempting to find a solution to their situation.The Tao Te Ching, one of the foremost products of the era, is a metaphysical book, a source of the highest …
The relationships, both historical and philosophical, among the Zhuangzi’s Inner, Outer, and Miscellaneous chapters are the subject of ancient and enduring controversy. Liu marshals linguistic, intertextual, intratextual, and historical evidence to establish an objectively demonstrable chronology and determine the philosophical affiliations among the various chapters. This major advance in Zh…
Is it possible to get outside your assumptions and know the world for what it is? As the 20th century came to a close, the verdict seemed to be a resounding “no,” but in recent years a renaissance in speculative thought has sparked new lines of inquiry into de-centering the human. Other Grounds enters this conversation with a decidedly lively voice and an ambitious project to match. Not onl…
[Given, If, Then] attempts to conceive a possibility of reading, through a set of readings: reading being understood as the relation to an Other that occurs prior to any semantic or formal identification, and, therefore, prior to any attempt at assimilating, or appropriating, what is being read to the one who reads. As such, it is an encounter with an indeterminable Other, an Other who is other…
Using Vladimir Nabokov as its case study, this volume approaches translation as a crucial avenue into literary history and theory, philosophy and interpretation. It attempts to bring together issues in translation and the shift in Nabokov studies from its earlier emphasis on the metaliterary to the more recent metaphysical approach. Addressing specific texts (both literary and cinematic), the b…
The legacy of the Second World War remains unsettled; no consensus has been achieved about its meaning and its lasting impact. This is pre-eminently the case in France, where the experience of defeat and occupation created the grounds for a deeply ambiguous mixture of resistance and collaboration, pride and humiliation, heroism and abjection, which writers and politicians have been trying to di…
Up until the late 1960s the story of Australian literary magazines was one of continuing struggle against the odds, and of the efforts of individuals, such as Clem Christesen, Stephen Murray-Smith, and Max Harris. During that time, the magazines played the role of 'enfant terrible', creating a space where unpopular opinions and writers were allowed a voice. The magazines have very often been ah…
De Vries’ (2006 et seq.) addition of ‘par-Merge’ to the extant Merger operations utilized by the narrow syntax provides a means by which to model parataxis and yet maintain that paratactic constituents (i.e. parentheticals) are concatenated with their host in the narrow syntax in the structural position in which they are observed. A principal ingredient of the par-Merge approach to parata…
The paper is organised as follows. In order to establish which kinds of parentheses should be considered ‘anchored’, I present a global overview in §2. This is followed by a discussion of the core properties of anchored parentheses, focusing on the relation between anchor and parenthesis, and their ‘specificational’ interpretation. §3discusses anchored parenthesis in the domain of par…
The idea of toleration as the appropriate response to difference has been central to liberal thought since Locke. Although the subject has been widely and variously explored, there has been reluctance to acknowledge the new meaning that current debates on toleration have when compared with those at its origins in the early modern period and with subsequent discussions about pluralism and freedo…