Gü nter Grass, Edward Dimendberg on Holocaust memorials.

The discipline of rhetoric - adapted through a wide range of reformulations to the specific requirements of Greek, Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance societies - dominated European education and discourse, whether public or private, for more than two thousand years. The end of classical rhetoric's domination was brought about by a combination of social and cultural transformations that occured between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Concurrent with the 'theory boom' of recent decades, rhetoric has appeared as a center of discussion in the humanities and social sciences. Rhetorical...

In this book, the author has three aims: (1) to elaborate an interpretation of Goethe's lyric poetry adequate to the intricacies of its subject matter; (2) to demonstrate the significance of that poetry to the development of European Romanticism; (3) to establish a method of inquiry that weaves together the major strands of theoretical reflection in modern literary studies. Remarkably enough, no study of Goethe's early lyric poetry has been published in English in the last fifty years. But the reading of this poetry the author presents is not intended merely to introduce an English readership...

This study analyses the emergence of aesthetic theory in eighteenth-century Germany in relation to contemporary theories of the nature of language and signs. As well as being extremely relevant to the discussion of literary theory, this perspective casts much light on Enlightenment aesthetics. The central text under consideration shows that the extended comparison of poetry and the plastic arts contained in that major work of aesthetic criticism rests upon a theory of signs and constitutes a complex and global theory of aesthetic signification. His analysis of Laocoon is preceded by chapters...