Ring Lardner and the Other is actually two books, mutually embedded. The first is about Ring Lardner: a long reading of a single Lardner short story, "Who Dealt?," a briefer look at his life and work, and an exploration of his reception. The second is about the "Other," in an expanded Lacanian sense: the speaking of various unconscious voices (mother and father and child, culture and anarchy, majority and minority) through literary characters and their authors and readers. The Lardner book explores the contradictions of Lardner's patriarchal masculinity--how such a dour, sexist...

J.L. Austin famously distinguished between constative utterances that convey information and performative utterances that perform actions. In this work, Douglas Robinson argues that Austin's distinction can be used to understand linguistic methodologies. Robinson uses Austin's model to introduce a new distinction between constative and performative linguistics. Constative linguistics, Robinson suggests, includes methodologies aimed at freezing language as an abstract sign system cut off from the use of language in actual speech situations. Performative linguistics, on the other hand, covers...

This user-friendly introduction to a new performative methodology in linguistic pragmatics breaks away from the traditional approach which understands language as a machine. Drawing on a wide spectrum of research and theory from the past thirty years in particular, Douglas Robinson presents a combination of action-oriented approaches from sources such as J.L. Austin, H. Paul Grice, Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman.

Paying particular attention to language as drama, the group regulation of language use, individual resistance to these regulatory pressures and nonverbal...

This user-friendly introduction to a new performative methodology in linguistic pragmatics breaks away from the traditional approach which understands language as a machine. Drawing on a wide spectrum of research and theory from the past thirty years in particular, Douglas Robinson presents a combination of action-oriented approaches from sources such as J.L. Austin, H. Paul Grice, Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman.

Paying particular attention to language as drama, the group regulation of language use, individual resistance to these regulatory pressures and nonverbal...

In What is Translation? Douglas Robinson investigates the present state of translation studies and looks ahead to the exciting new directions in which he sees the field moving. Reviewing the work of such theorists as Frederick Rener, Rita Copeland, Eric Cheyfitz, Andre Lefevere, Anthony Pym, Suzanne Jill Levine, Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz, Antoine Berman, Lawrence Venuti, and Philip E. Lewis, he both celebrates and critiques the last decade's work.

Since the mid-eighties, long-held ideas in translation scholarship have undergone dramatic revision, and Douglas Robinson has been a...

From the time of the first written sacred texts in the West, taboo has proscribed the act and art of translation. So argues the author of this book, exploring the age-old prohibition of translation of sacred texts. He shows how similar taboos influence interculture exchange. Probing concepts about language, culture, and geopolitical boundaries - both archaic and contemporary - he investigates the origins of translation and traces the implications for the transference of ideas.

Robert B. Parker's detective Spenser. John Rambo, created by David Morrell and played on the silver screen by Sylvester Stallone. Bruce Springsteen. All three, Douglas Robinson claims, are central figures in a new form of popular men's art: art that explores what it means to be a man in a feminist age. Robinson develops a three-stage transformation myth out of Joseph Campbell's studies of hero mythology: the road of trials, on which repressive normality is tested and found lacking (Spenser); a symbolic death in which defensive rational ego-structures are surrendered (the Rambo of First...

Robert B. Parker's detective Spenser. John Rambo, created by David Morrell and played on the silver screen by Sylvester Stallone. Bruce Springsteen. All three, Douglas Robinson claims, are central figures in a new form of popular men's art: art that explores what it means to be a man in a feminist age. Robinson develops a three-stage transformation myth out of Joseph Campbell's studies of hero mythology: the road of trials, on which repressive -normality- is tested and found lacking (Spenser); a symbolic death in which defensive rational ego-structures are surrendered (the Rambo of First...