William C. Dowling's Books

Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris

Medicine, Theology, and the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

By: William C. Dowling

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Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris

Medicine, Theology, and the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

By: William C. Dowling

An innovative study that links the themes of Holmes's best-known literary works to his medical training in nineteenth-century Paris.

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204

Publisher

UPNE

Published Date

ISBN 10

1584655801

ISBN 13

9781584655800

The Senses of the Text

Intensional Semantics and Literary Theory

By: William C. Dowling

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The Senses of the Text

Intensional Semantics and Literary Theory

By: William C. Dowling

In recent years the notion of determinate meaning?the idea that a word or a line in a literary text means one thing rather than another thing, X rather than Y?has been widely rejected in the name of Derrida and diffärance, reader-response criticism, and "ideological" approaches proclaiming meaning to be no more than a site of political contestation. ø Yet determinate meaning, says William C. Dowling, cannot be rejected in this way. Like the ratio named by p or the primeness of prime numbers in mathematics, it has been there all along, waiting for our theories to catch up. The proof that this is so, he argues, is today most compellingly available in the New Intensionalism of Jerrold J. Katz, which provides a powerful demonstration that the method of "close reading" developed by New Criticism remains the only valid basis for higher-order interpretation. For readers with no technical background in linguistics or logic, The Senses of the Text provides a clear and easily-understood introduction to the "Chomskyan revolution" in linguistic theory and to major issues in the philosophy of language, including the work of Frege, Wittgenstein, Quine, Carnap, Kripke, and Davidson.

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148

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0803217110

ISBN 13

9780803217119

The Boswellian Hero

By: William C. Dowling

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The Boswellian Hero

By: William C. Dowling

Boswell's Life of Johnson, Tour of the Hebrides, and Tour to Corsica are controlled, argues William Dowling, by "a single conception of the heroic character, one that reaches beyond the particular narrative situation to a final vision of man's dilemma in the modern world." Samuel Johnson and Pascal Paoli, the great protagonists of the three major narratives Boswell published during his lifetime, are heroic spirits who manage to survive in an age of spiritual disintegration only by dwelling within imperiled private worlds of coherence and belief. The Boswellian Hero, the first comprehensive thematic study of Boswellian narrative, is also a work with strong theoretical implications for students of biography as a genre. Biography exists as literature, according to Dowling, only in relation to formal or objective interpretations of its meaning--to read the Life of Johnson as a literary work is to dissociate its biographical hero from any "real" or "historical" Samuel Johnson in the same way one dissociates Shakespeare's Richard III from Richard III of England. Although The Boswellian Hero promises to establish its importance in Boswell studies immediately, it will also be of significant interest to readers concerned with the hero in literature, with biography as a narrative form, and with the complex theoretical problem of "factual" or "historical" literature.

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Page Count

226

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820333107

ISBN 13

9780820333106

Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson

Joseph Dennie and The Port Folio, 1801-1812

By: William C. Dowling

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Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson

Joseph Dennie and The Port Folio, 1801-1812

By: William C. Dowling

The Port Folio magazine, America's first major journal of literary and political opinion, was edited by Joseph Dennie between 1801 and 1811. This new study argues that as The Port Folio mounted a last spirited defense of classical republican values against "American jacobinism," the struggle between its Federalist writers and the forces of Jeffersonian ideology gave rise to an important tradition in American writing.

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156

Publisher

Univ of South Carolina Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1570032432

ISBN 13

9781570032431

The Epistolary Moment

The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle

By: William C. Dowling

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The Epistolary Moment

The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle

By: William C. Dowling

The eighteenth-century verse epistle, argues William Dowling, was an attempt to solve in literary terms the dilemma of solipsism as raised by Locke and Hume. The focus of The Epistolary Moment is on internal audience in poetry--the audience "inside" the poem, created by its discourse and belonging to its world--as this divides in epistolary poetry into a double or simultaneous register of address: the audience directly addressed by the letter-writer, and an epistolary audience listening in on the exchange from a point external to the discourse of the speaker but internal to the discourse of the poem. Epistolary audience lies, contends The Epistolary Moment, at the heart of an Augustan theory of poetry as ideological intervention, poems as symbolic acts with enormous consequences in the domain of the real. The emergence of the verse epistle as the dominant form in eighteenth-century poetry thus takes as its ultimate context the origins of eighteenth-century solipsism in a degraded modernity symbolized by Sir Robert Walpole and his Robinocracy, the demonic representatives of a new money or market society arising from the ruins of organic or traditional community. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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229

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400862205

ISBN 13

9781400862207

Jameson, Althusser, Marx (RLE Marxism)

An Introduction to 'The Political Unconscious'

By: William C. Dowling

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Jameson, Althusser, Marx (RLE Marxism)

An Introduction to 'The Political Unconscious'

By: William C. Dowling

Frederic Jameson is widely regarded as one of the most original and influential Marxist critics of the last decades. His most controversial work, The Political Unconscious, had an enormous impact on literary criticism and cultural studies. In Jameson, Althusser, Marx, first published in 1984, Professor Dowling sets out to provide the intellectual background needed for an understanding of Jameson’s argument and its broader implications. He elucidates the unspoken assumptions that are the foundation of Jameson’s thought – assumptions about how the nature of language, of interpretation and of culture – and shows how Jameson attempts to subsume in an expanded Marxism the critical theories of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan and of structuralism and poststructuralism in general. This lively, concise book will be welcomed by anyone interested in current theoretical debates, in Marxist criticism, and in the wide-ranging implications of Marxist cultural theory for the social sciences, the arts and the study of history.

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Page Count

159

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1000156060

ISBN 13

9781000156065

Confessions of a Spoilsport

My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University

By: William C. Dowling

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Confessions of a Spoilsport

My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University

By: William C. Dowling

The author recounts his failed efforts, along with other professors, students and alumni, to get Rutgers University out of the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I-A during the mid-1990s, maintaining the colleges today sacrifice academics in order to build nationally competitive athletic programs.

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Page Count

218

Publisher

Penn State Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0271032936

ISBN 13

9780271032931

Language and Logos in Boswell's Life of Johnson

By: William C. Dowling

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Language and Logos in Boswell's Life of Johnson

By: William C. Dowling

In this deconstructionist interpretation of a major eighteenth-century work, William Dowling analyzes Boswell's Life of Johnson as a paradigm of antithetical structure in narrative, and develops a grammar of discontinuity" for interpreting other texts as well. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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207

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400853826

ISBN 13

9781400853823

Ricoeur on Time and Narrative

An Introduction to Temps et récit

By: William C. Dowling

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Ricoeur on Time and Narrative

An Introduction to Temps et récit

By: William C. Dowling

“The object of this book,” writes William C. Dowling in his preface, “is to make the key concepts of Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative available to readers who might have felt bewildered by the twists and turns of its argument.” The sources of puzzlement are, he notes, many. For some, it is Ricoeur’s famously indirect style of presentation, in which the polarities of argument and exegesis seem so often and so suddenly to have reversed themselves. For others, it is the extraordinary intellectual range of Ricoeur’s argument, drawing on traditions as distant from each other as Heideggerian existentialism, French structuralism, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Yet beneath the labyrinthian surface of Ricoeur’s Temps et récit, Dowling reveals a single extended argument that, though developed unsystematically, is meant to be understood in systematic terms. Ricoeur on Time and Narrative presents that argument in clear and concise terms, in a way that will be enlightening both to readers new to Ricoeur and those who may have felt themselves adrift in the complexities of Temps et récit, Ricoeur’s last major philosophical work. Dowling divides his discussion into six chapters, all closely involved with specific arguments in Temps et récit: on mimesis, time, narrativity, semantics of action, poetics of history, and poetics of fiction. Additionally, Dowling provides a preface that lays out the French intellectual context of Ricoeur's philosophical method. An appendix presents his English translation of a personal interview in which Ricoeur, having completed Time and Narrative, looks back over his long career as an internationally renowned philosopher. Ricoeur on Time and Narrative communicates to readers the intellectual excitement of following Ricoeur’s dismantling of established theories and arguments—Aristotle and Augustine and Husserl on time, Frye and Greimas on narrative structure, Arthur Danto and Louis O. Mink on the nature of historical explanation—while coming to see how, under the pressure of Ricoeur’s analysis, these ideas are reconstituted and revealed in a new set of relations to one another.

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Page Count

136

Publisher

University of Notre Dame Pess

Published Date

ISBN 10

0268077975

ISBN 13

9780268077976

Professor's Song: A Life in Teaching

By: William C. Dowling

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Professor's Song: A Life in Teaching

By: William C. Dowling

William C. Dowling is University Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature emeritus at Rutgers University. His previous publications include The Epistolary Moment: A Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle, Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson, Jameson/Althusser/Marx, The Senses of the Text: Intensional Semantics and Literary History, Ricoeur on Time and Narrative, and Confessions of a Spoilsport, an account of the struggle against commercialized college athletics at Rutgers and other Div IA schools. ln 20l2 he received the Drake Group's Robert Maynard Hutchins Award for his advocacy of a return to participatory athletics in American higher education. A Reader's Companion to Infinite Jest, co-authored with Robert H. Bell of Williams College, was published by Xlibris in 2005.

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Page Count

340

Publisher

Xlibris Us

Published Date

ISBN 10

1664161791

ISBN 13

9781664161795

Book's by William C. Dowling

Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris

Oliver Wendell Holmes in Paris

The Senses of the Text

The Senses of the Text

The Boswellian Hero

The Boswellian Hero

Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson

Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson

The Epistolary Moment

The Epistolary Moment

Jameson, Althusser, Marx (RLE Marxism)

Jameson, Althusser, Marx (RLE Marxism)

Confessions of a Spoilsport

Confessions of a Spoilsport

Language and Logos in Boswell's Life of Johnson

Language and Logos in Boswell's Life of Johnson

Ricoeur on Time and Narrative

Ricoeur on Time and Narrative

Professor's Song: A Life in Teaching

Professor's Song: A Life in Teaching

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