Horst Ruthrof – författare

In this book, first published in 1981, the author argues that narrative is an interaction between "the presented world and the presentational process" and attempts to define narrative from the perspective of reading. The Reader’s Construction of Narrative includes chapters on narrative language, translating narrative and discusses what happens when we read a narrative text. This book will be of particular interest to students of literary theory.

First published in 1992, this book evokes Pandora and Occam as metaphoric corner posts in an argument about language as discourse and in doing so, brings analytic philosophy to bear on issues of Continental philosophy, with attention to linguistic, semiological, and semiotic concerns. Instead of regarding meanings as guaranteed by definitions, the author argues that linguistic expressions are schemata directing us more or less loosely toward the activation of nonlinguistic sign systems. Ruthrof draws up a heuristic hierarchy of discourses, with literary expression at the top, descending through communication-reduced reference and speech acts to formal logic and digital communication at the bottom. The book offers multiple perspectives from which to review traditional theories of meaning, working from a wide variety of theorists, including Peirce, Frege, Husserl, Derrida, Lyotard, Davidson, and Searle. In Ruthrof’s analysis, Pandora and Occam illustrate the opposition between the suppressed rich materiality of culturally saturated discourse and the stark ideality of formal sign systems.

This book will be of interest to those studying linguistics, literature and philosophy.

First published in 1992, this book evokes Pandora and Occam as metaphoric corner posts in an argument about language as discourse and in doing so, brings analytic philosophy to bear on issues of Continental philosophy, with attention to linguistic, semiological, and semiotic concerns. Instead of regarding meanings as guaranteed by definitions, the author argues that linguistic expressions are schemata directing us more or less loosely toward the activation of nonlinguistic sign systems. Ruthrof draws up a heuristic hierarchy of discourses, with literary expression at the top, descending through communication-reduced reference and speech acts to formal logic and digital communication at the bottom. The book offers multiple perspectives from which to review traditional theories of meaning, working from a wide variety of theorists, including Peirce, Frege, Husserl, Derrida, Lyotard, Davidson, and Searle. In Ruthrof’s analysis, Pandora and Occam illustrate the opposition between the suppressed rich materiality of culturally saturated discourse and the stark ideality of formal sign systems.

This book will be of interest to those studying linguistics, literature and philosophy.

In traditional semantics, the human body tends to be ignored in the process of constructing meaning. Horst Ruthrof argues, by contrast, that the body is an integral part of this hermeneutic activity. Strictly language-based theories, and theories which conflate formal and natural languages, run into problems when they describe how we communicate in cultural settings. Semantics and the Body proposes that language is no more than a symbolic grid which does not signify at all unless it is brought to life by non-linguistic signs.

Ruthrof reviews and analyses various ''orthodox'' theories of meaning, from the views of Gottlob Frege at the beginning of the twentieth century to those of theorists in the postmodern period, then offers an alternative approach of his own. His theory features ''corporeal semantics,'' and holds that meaning has ultimately to do with the body and that the meaning of linguistic expressions is indeterminate without the aid of visual, tactile, olfactory, and other bodily signs. This approach also remedies what Ruthrof sees also as a loss of interpretive will in the postmodern era.

Pedagogy in many fields could be enriched by a systemic integration of non-verbal semiosis into the linguistically dominated syllabus. Those involved in discourse analysis, literature, art criticism, film theory, pedagogy, and philosophy will find the implications of Ruthrof''s study considerable.