The terms linguistics and philology refer to different but overlapping areas of the Humanities. An opposition between them does not predate the triumph of structuralism. Structuralist linguistics devoted itself mainly to synchrony and theory, with lexicology and lexicography ending up in no-man’s land. A detailed look at dictionary definitions of linguistics and philology for more than three centuries offers a picture of the goals of both disciplines and of the ways the public understood language studies. Before the twentieth century, the focus of philology was the interpretation of old texts and word origins. The treatment of special terminology (including the terminology of linguistics) in dictionaries shows that despite all the differences a clear line between linguistics and philology cannot and need not be drawn, just as such a line cannot always be drawn between a dictionary and an encyclopedia. In the context of the present study, the use of etymology and phonetic transcription in various dictionaries illuminates the difference between and the unity of philology and linguistics.

As Chapter 7 shows, the strong influence of structuralism in French intellectual history resulted into a different perspective of the “linguistic turn,” shifting the focus on a different dimension of language, besides the semantic and the pragmatic: the syntactic. This marks a sharper departure from the idea of political languages as “models of thinking.” Languages would refer to a second-order dimension of linguistic reality, and, as such, would be semantically indeterminated. They would give rise to many different forms of thought on the level of their ideological contents. Lastly, languages established the terrain for the mutual opposition among the different ideologies present in a given discursive context. As the chapter shows, it entailed a fundamental contribution to intellectual history. However, it rendered indeed more problematic the issue of conceptual change, which paved, in turn, the way to poststructuralism. A key figure here is Rosanvallon and his “conceptual history of the political.” He elaborates of the substratum of undecidability of political concepts, its aporetic nature, which makes of them properly political concepts. It thus entailed a further step in the process of desubstantializing of concepts initiated by the “new intellectual history.”

Chapter 10 elaborates on an epistemic mutation that took place at the end of the nineteenth century and that Foucault missed. It is this that opened that conceptual universe within whose frameworks the theories analyzed in this book could emerge. This, thus, provides fundamental tools to understand the structure of those theories, as well as the problems they found to account for the issue of conceptual change. Finally, it discusses how this new episteme, in turn, starting dissolving, thus raising the issue of the constitutive incompleteness of systems. It will mark the transition from phenomenology to postphenomenology and from structuralism to postructuralism, which entailed, in turn, a new radical redefinition of the concept of the temporality of conceptual formations. Derrida´s criticism played a key role here. Lastly, as this chapter shows, this transformation, as the other epistemic mutations previously studied, traverse the whole thinking of the period, comprehending both the natural sciences and the humanities. It thus allows us to draw meaningful connections among the different areas of knowledge.

This chapter provides a chronological review of critical responses to Old Norse-Icelandic literature. The ‘book-prose vs free-prose’ debate is the starting-point for this overview, which then focuses on modern scholarship on sagas. The approach of the Icelandic school is discussed, followed by consideration of theoretical issues such as orality, structuralism, anthropological methods and the influence of non-Icelandic literary forms. Next come post-structuralism and narratology. The diversity of theoretical approaches which grew up towards the end of the twentieth century is documented, including post-colonialism and polysystem theory. Long-held generic distinctions are reviewed, and the development of gender studies with regard to Old Norse is described. Recent developments in the study of orality in prose and poetry are discussed, as are theoretical topics such as memory studies and the role of the paranormal. The chapter concludes with an account of the diversity of critical approaches to Old Norse-Icelandic literature and explains the need to employ integrated theories bringing in research from a number of disciplines, including archaeology, psychoanalysis and sociology.

This chapter takes stock of the various definitions and valuations the essay has accrued over the course of the history of American literary theory and criticism. Starting with the historical-materialist criticism of the Great Depression era and moving on to the New Criticism of the 1940s and ’50s, then delving into the myriad structuralisms and poststructuralisms of the Cold War and postcommunist eras, before concluding with contemporary critical trends, it tracks the discipline’s trajectory in the American context, all the while zeroing in on the essay’s shifting position therein. The chapter throws into relief the fundamental dialectic between hermetic formalism and committed social criticism that has shaped literary studies in the United States since its rise early in the twentieth century and teases out the way this perennial vacillation has rendered more or less appealing, and more or less useful, the essay as a form and object of analysis.

This chapter begins by looking at Waltz’s other political ordering principle, hierarchy – which, like anarchy, is not in fact an ordering principle. Saying that a system “is hierarchical” merely indicates that it has some unspecified set of relations of stratification and functional differentiation. “Hierarchy,” rather than a structural ordering principle, is a residual category of non-anarchic orders (that, like most residuals, obscures the diversity of the “things” lumped together). And, as the preceding chapters have shown, most international systems, which by definition are anarchic, are also hierarchical. Therefore, even if anarchy and hierarchy are ordering principles, international systems do not have singular ordering principles. The remainder of the chapter looks critically at recent efforts by Ryan Griffiths and by Mathias Albert, Barry Buzan, and Michael Zurn to develop alternative accounts of political ordering principles. I conclude that the problem is not that Waltz has misidentified the ordering principles of international systems but that international systems do not have ordering principles.

The theme of the essential activity of the mind provided the exciting intellectual setting that made a compelling case for psychology’s founding, and also gave rise to competing models of psychology. Structural or content psychology, championed by Wundt and Titchener, defined psychology as the experimental study of the data of immediate experience through the method of trained introspection. This natural science model sought to reduce the contents of consciousness to constituent elements of sensory origin. The restricted definition and ambiguous methodology led to challenges. Nevertheless, structural psychology secured recognition of psychology as a science, and Müller, Hering, and Ebbinghaus, attempted to modify structural psychology. Additionally, Mach and Avenarius bolstered the justification for psychology as a natural science. An alternative, described as a human science model, proposed more open definition and methodologies. Brentano’s act psychology stated that the phenomenological processes of psychological events are inseparable from the environment and consciousness. The works of Stumpf, Külpe, Dilthey and Bergson all fall into the human science model, but the lack of systematic theory reduced their successful competition with structural psychology. In many respects, the “founding” of modern psychology was a false beginning, and neither model established a lasting framework for psychology.

Tracing the Courts post-racial constitutionalism beginning with the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy to the present by unpacking the rhetorical structure of the Courts race jurisprudence.

Chapter 1 examines behavioural coherence as a marker of both fictional and actual identity. Concentrating on the recognition scenes in Medea and Thyestes, this chapter contends that Senecan recognition is less about revelation than about validation of an identity achieved through consistent, habitual conduct. It discusses key concepts of decorum and Stoic persona-theory as ways of evaluating Atreus‘ and Medea’s self-construction. It also demonstrates how such behavioural repetition has gone largely unnoticed, as scholars have focused instead on the textual repetition highlighted by dominant methods of intertexual analysis.

The Introduction sets forth the book’s main parameters and situates its study within the current landscape of Senecan scholarship. In addition, it provides a detailed overview of major theoretical approaches to literary character from the late nineteenth century to the present, arguing against the limitations inherent in both the formalist/structuralist method of character criticism, and the humanist/psychological method, and proposing instead a blended theory of character that recognises both structural and person-like qualities. The final section of the Introduction narrows focus to theatrical contexts and considers how stage performance affects the presentation and reception of fictional character.

This chapter situates both the nominalist and neo-Carnapian approaches to mathematics introduced in Chapter 10 with particular reference to Logicism and Structuralism.

This chapter starts by accounting for the early beginnings of social, economic and labour history in different parts of the world at different times. It then analyses the crisis of social history during the 1970s and 1980s. Challenged both by history from below and by political history as well as poststructuralist theories, social, economic and labour history began to decline. However, over recent decades we have also witnessed a renaissance of a ‘new’ social, economic and labour history. The main bulk of the chapter analyses this renewal, discussing sublaltern studies, the cultural turn, the move to global histories of work, the emphasis on practices as well as discourses and the proliferation of new sub-fields. Overall, many of these recent developments have led to a greater self-reflexivity about the writing of history and its links to collective identity formation.

Chapter 8 presents the main positions in economics and in the social sciences regarding the agent/structure problem, and explores some contributions that can be made from artificial economics. First, it presents and discusses the individualist/reductionist, structuralist/holistic, and intermediate positions, regarding the agent/structure problem. Then presents simple artificial economics examples of the generation of endogenous preferences, agents' behavioral changes derived from their economic interaction, and of the demographic effects of the introduction of a market institution into an artificial economy.

A historical investigation into Spinozism teaches us at least as much about the interpreters of Spinoza as it does about Spinoza’s thought itself. More than any other philosophy, Spinoza’s has been held up like a mirror to the great currents of thought, providing a particular perspective on them: one can see reflected and revealed in the mirror of Spinozism the inner and outer conflicts and contradictions of Calvinism, Cartesianism, freethinking and libertinism, the Enlightenment, materialism, the Pantheismusstreit, German Idealism, French spiritualism, Marxism, British Idealism, structuralism, and other movements. This chapter provides a condensed overview of the European reception of Spinoza from the seventeenth century until today, in both minor and major thinkers.

This chapter argues that the postwar nouveau roman is more than an avant-garde experiment in novel form. The movement must also be understood as the product of a particular publishing house (Les Editions de Minuit) and as an aesthetic phenomenon that registers historical trauma, despite its apparent withdrawal from the social. Special attention is paid to convergences and divergences among authors, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Michel Butor, Robert Pinget, Claude Simon, and Samuel Beckett.

This chapter maps a number of the key movements in French theoretical writing on the novel since the 1950s. It begins with an examination of Roland Barthes’s hostility to the novel genre in Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953) and considers the significance of that hostility in relation to Barthes’s later writings and to a number of influential theories of the novel that had appeared earlier in the twentieth century. Subsequently, it describes the place of the novel in works by several leading literary theorists and philosophers, including Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, Gérard Genette, Félix Guattari and Georges Poulet, and positions those works in the context of the intellectual movements, trends and critical approaches with which they have been associated (narratology, phenomenological criticism, structuralism and post-structuralism, for example). The final part of the chapter moves away from theories about the novel and explores both the novel’s theory (theories that belong to or come from the novel) and the work of post-war French authors whose writing can be said to straddle literature and theory.