Explore the vast range of titles available.

The study offers an interpretation of Borges and Cortázar in the light of romantic irony, in particular Friedriech Schlegel’s concept from the Athenaeum fragment 37 where irony is defined as an art of controlled enthusiasm. This is something that can be found in Borges, at the level of language, in the figure of litotes, in his penchant for brevity and a relative disdain for novels. In Cortázar, the taming of enthusiasm manifests itself more openly, as a contrast of two alternating modes of speech. Thus, Borges and Cortázar embody two answers to the question of enthusiasm.

Litotes, ''a figure of speech in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary\" (OED) has had some tough reviews. For Pope and Swift (\"Scriblerus\" 1727), litotes—stock examples include \"no mean feat\", \"no small problem\", and \"not bad at all\"—is \"the peculiar talent of Ladies, Whisperers, and Backbiters\"; for Orwell (1946), it is a means to affect \"an appearance of profundity\" that we can deport from English \"by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.\" But such ridicule is not without equivocation, given that litotes, or \"logical\" (non-concordial) double negation, may or may not be semantically redundant. When the negation of a logical contrary yields an unexcluded middle, it contributes to expressive power: someone who is not unhappy may not be happy either, and an occurrence may not be infrequent without being frequent. But if something is not possible, what can it be but possible? Why does Crashaw's \"not impossible she\" survive rhetorically while Orwell's \"not unsmall rabbit\" is doomed? How is Robbie being \"not not friends\" with Mary on 7th Heaven distinct from being friends with her, if not not-p reduces to p? The key is recognizing in litotes a corollary of MaxContrary, the tendency for contradictory (wide-scope) sentential negation ¬p to strengthen (at least) pragmatically to a contrary ©p, as when the formal contradictory Fr. \"Il ne faut pas partir\" (lit. 'It is not necessary to leave') is reinterpreted as expressing a contrary ('one must not-leave'). Just as the Law of Excluded Middle can apply where it \"shouldn't\", resulting in pragmatically presupposed disjunctions between semantic contraries, so that \"p v ©p\" amounts to an instance of \"p v ¬p\", the Law of Double Negation can fail to apply where it \"should\". When not not-p conveys ¬©p, the negation of a virtual contrary, the middle between p and not-p is no longer excluded, rendering the Fregean dictum that \"Wrapping up a thought in double negation does not alter its truth value\" not unproblematic.

This paper reports on an analysis of litotes in English research articles from two distant fields, life and social sciences. As a device for understatement, litotes denies the semantic opposite of what is meant to mitigate the literal content of the utterance. This feature makes litotes a useful means of academic communication which should remain cautious in tone and impartial. However, the results of the analysis reveal disciplinary variation in the frequency, structural types and syntactic functions of such constructions in the considered discipline-specific expert writing. The social sciences texts use twice as many litotes as the life sciences texts, and show a greater functional variation of litotes. There are also dissimilarities in the specific patterns by means of which the analysed structural types of litotes are realised.

In English discourse one can find cases of the expression ‘not for nothing’ being used in argumentation. The expression can occur both in the argument and in the standpoint. In this chapter we analyse the argumentative and rhetorical aspects of ‘not for nothing’ by regarding this expression as a presentational device for strategic manoeuvring. We investigate under which conditions the proposition containing the expression ‘not for nothing’ functions as a standpoint, an argument or neither of these elements. It is also examined which type of standpoint (descriptive, evaluative or prescriptive) and which types of argument scheme (symptomatic, causal or comparison) the expression typically co-occurs with. In doing so we aim to develop a better understanding of the role and effects of ‘not for nothing’ when used in argumentation. Finally, we show that the strategic potential of ‘not for nothing’ lies in its suggestion that sufficient support has been provided while this support has in fact been left implicit.

Este artículo analiza el poemario del manchego José Corredor-Matheos, Sin ruido (2013), desde la óptica de la lítote como figura de atenuación y, con mayor alcance, como mecanismo que subsume ciertos rasgos transversales característicos de la poética de madurez del autor. Dichos rasgos redundan en la coherencia de su poética y el compromiso con la poesía de la simplicidad y el despojamiento, en su ubicación en las formas y con las formas, y en la exploración de la negación como mecanismo de profundización semántica y ampliación de matices ante la contundencia de la vejez y la muerte. This paper analyzes Sin ruido (2013), the poetry book by the Spanish poet from Castile-La Mancha, José Corredor-Matheos. Litotes is approached both as a figure for attenuation and, beyond that, as a mechanism that subsumes certain distinctive traits of his poetics across his most mature production. Such traits reinforce the author’s consistency and his commitment to the poetry of simplicity and divestment, its positioning in form and with form, and the exploration of the negative as a device for semantic enhancement and enrichment of nuance when facing old age and death.

Could a Nazi soldier or terrorist be courageous? The Courage Problem asks us to answer this sort of question, and then to explain why people are reluctant to give this answer. The present paper sheds new light on the Courage Problem by examining a controversy sparked by Bill Maher, who claimed that the 9/11 terrorists' acts were 'not cowardly.' It is shown that Maher's controversy is fundamentally related to the Courage Problem. Then, a unified solution to both problems is provided. This solution entails that gutsy people who lack good ends are not courageous.

By \"literary criticism\" we usually mean a self-conscious act involving the technical and aesthetic appraisal, by individuals, of autonomous works of art. Aristotle and Plato come to mind. The word \"social\" does not. Yet, as this book shows, it should--if, that is, we wish to understand where literary criticism as we think of it today came from. Andrew Ford offers a new understanding of the development of criticism, demonstrating that its roots stretch back long before the sophists to public commentary on the performance of songs and poems in the preliterary era of ancient Greece. He pinpoints when and how, later in the Greek tradition than is usually assumed, poetry was studied as a discipline with its own principles and methods. The Origins of Criticism complements the usual, history-of-ideas approach to the topic precisely by treating criticism as a social as well as a theoretical activity. With unprecedented and penetrating detail, Ford considers varying scholarly interpretations of the key texts discussed. Examining Greek discussions of poetry from the late sixth century B.C. through the rise of poetics in the late fourth, he asks when we first can recognize anything like the modern notions of literature as imaginative writing and of literary criticism as a special knowledge of such writing.