Introduccio A L Etnopoetica

The Politics of Poetic Form

Aproximació a l'altre / An approach to the other

The different contributions included in this volume deal with aspects of biographical writing and other similar genres (semblances, portraits, etc.). These articles analyze theoretical and generic questions as well as some of the most relevant examples of the genre – with a focus on those written in Catalan. In addition, some of the articles focus on the relationship between biography and national images (nation-building) from a sociocultural standpoint. The Research Group on Contemporary Literature from the Universitat d’Alacant has gathered contributions from several specialists in numerous fields and has selected a group of relevant works for analysis. In addition to studies on authors such as André Maurois and Lytton Strachey, contributions deal with figures such as Josep Pla, Domènec Guansé, Josep Maria Espinàs and Agustí Pons. Finally, some contributions pay attention to the biographical genre in the audiovisual arts. The volume contains contributions in Spanish, English, and Catalan.

Natural Histories of Discourse

Is culture simply a more or less set text we can learn to read? Since the early 1970s, the notion of culture-as-text has animated anthropologists and other analysts of culture. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban present this stunning collection of cutting-edge ethnographies arguing that the divide between fleeting discursive practice and formed text is a constructed one, and that the constructional process reveals "culture" to those who can interpret it. Eleven original essays of "natural history" range in focus from nuptial poetry of insult among Wolof griots to case-based teaching methods in first-year law-school classrooms. Stage by stage, they give an idea of the cultural processes of "entextualization" and "contextualization" of discourse that they so richly illustrate. The contributors' varied backgrounds include anthropology, psychiatry, education, literary criticism, and law, making this collection invaluable not only to anthropologists and linguists, but to all analysts of culture.