Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Roy Harris
A seminal figure in the development of distinctively American concert music, Roy Harris created a large body of compositions in virtually all media in a career spanning more than fifty years, from the 1920s to the 1970s. His fortunes fluctuated widely with the public and critical community. Eclipsed during the 1960s, when his conservative idiom with its strong nationalistic stance was out of vogue, he and his work have gained increased scholarly, performance, and recording interest in recent decades, which have brought to the fore an entire generation of neglected American composers. Documenting and organizing Harris's complex oeuvre is the essential concern of the present book, and the cata...
Signs, Language, and Communication
Harris proposes a new theory of communication, beginning with the premise that the mental life of an individual should be conceived of as a continuous attempt to integrate the present with the past and future.
Signs of Writing
By treating writing as an independent mode of communication, based on the use of spatial relations to connect events separated in time, the author shows how other forms of writing obey the same principles.In Signs of Writing Roy Harris re-examines basic questions about writing that have long been obscured by the traditional assumption that writing is merely a visual substitute for speech.By treating writing as an independent mode of communication, based on the use of spatial relations to connect events separated in time, the author shows how musical, mathematical and other forms of writing obey the same principles as verbal writing. These principles, he argues, apply to texts of all kinds: a sonnet, a symphonic score, a signature on a cheque and a supermarket label. Moreover, they apply throughout the history of writing, from hieroglyphics to hypertext.This is the first book to provide a new general theory of writing in over forty years. Signs of Writing will be essential reading for anyone interested in language and communication.
Rethinking Writing
The traditional Western view of writing, from Aristotle down to the present day, has treated the written word as a visual substitute for the spoken word. The eminent Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was the first to provide this traditional assumption with a reasoned basis by incorporating it into a more general theory of signs. In the wake of Saussure's work, modern linguistics has ignored or marginalized writing in favour of the study of speech. In all literate societies, however, speech in turn is interpreted by reference to the culturally dominant writing system. This puts in place a system of educational values which ensures that the more literate members of society main...
Rationality and the Literate Mind
This book re-examines the old debate about the relationship between rationality and literacy. Does writing "restructure consciousness?" Do preliterate societies have a different "mind-set" from literate societies? Is reason "built in" to the way we think? How is literacy related to numeracy? Is the "logical form" that Western philosophers recognize anything more than an extrapolation from the structure of the written sentence? Is logic, as developed formally in Western education, intrinsically beyond the reach of the preliterate mind? What light, if any, do the findings of contemporary neuroscience throw on such issues? Roy Harris challenges the received mainstream opinion that reason is an intrinsic property of the human mind, and argues that the whole Western conception of rational thought, from Classical Greece down to modern symbolic logic, is a by-product of the way literacy developed in European cultures.
The Sound of a Superpower
After two decades of remarkable success, the quest to create a uniquely American classical music faltered in the 1950s. Many blamed the Cold War for its demise, but the conflict also brought Americanist composers unprecedented opportunities. This book examines this complex picture and its long-term effects.
The Great Debate about Art
In this lucid and insightful essay, renowned linguist Roy Harris reflects on the early nineteenth-century doctrine of "art for art's sake." This was attacked by Proudhon and Nietzsche, but defended by Théophile Gautier and E. M. Forster. It influenced movements as diverse as futurism and Dada. Over the past two centuries, three main positions have emerged. The "institutional" view declares art to be a status conferred upon certain works by the approval of influential institutions. The "idiocentric" view gives absolute priority to the judgment of the individual. The third is the "conceptual" view of art, which insists that what counts is the idea that inspired a work, not the physical execution. But as Harris shows, the tacit assumptions which once supported this Debate and these positions have now collapsed. "Art" as a coherent category has imploded, leaving behind a historical residue of empty questions that contemporary society can no longer answer. The Great Debate about Art provides much needed signposts for understanding this sorry state of affairs.
Conversations in the Wings
Roy Harris interviews 13 actors in this entertaining and informative book on the technique of acting.
The Emergence of the English Native Speaker
The native speaker is one of the central but at the same time most controversial concepts of modern linguistics. With regard to English, it became especially controversial with the rise of the so-called "New Englishes," where reality is much more complex than the neat distinction into native and non-native speakers would make us believe. This volume reconstructs the coming-into-being of the English native speaker in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to probe into the origins of the problems surrounding the concept today. A corpus of texts which includes not only the classics of the nineteenth-century linguistic literature but also numerous lesser-known articles from periodical journals of the time is investigated by means of historical discourse analysis in order to retrace the production and reproduction of this particularly important linguistic ideology.
