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One of the most popular novels written for children is The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis (2005). However, this novel is controversial amongst critics because it contains religious symbols. This research argues that The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe has its way of presenting religious symbols implicitly therefore children can enjoy reading it. Thus, this research aims to examine the effective presentation of religious symbols in the novel. This research uses the Formalism approach. To support the analysis, the researcher uses library research as the method with the religious symbols found in the novel as the primary data and the books and journals written by experts as the secondary data. The result of this research is The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe presented religious symbols through the characters of children, role models, central subjects and important events of the story of the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article challenges the common belief that observing li (rituals and norms) is the means to attain ren (benevolence) in Confucian philosophy, suggesting that Confucius does not hold this view. Topics include various interpretations of the relationship between ren and li, the contradictions that arise from an instrumentalist approach, and Confucius' emphasis on situational teachings over uniform adherence to li.

Literary studies has repeatedly justified a diciplinary focus on the small scale. Both our most conventional objects—the novel and the lyric poem—and our most conventional methods—close reading, historical analysis, and an attention to surprises and exceptions—lead us away from a focus on large scales of collective life. This essay argues for a different starting point, making a case for a metadisciplinary formalism that can join literary studies and many other fields in the work of responding to global poverty and climate change. Reading Henry Mayhew and Rodrigo Nunes, Levine makes a case for the hinge as a crucial aesthetic and political form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the use of artificial intelligence for writing poetry which can help remove some controversies, but they touch on questions about the limits of empirical data recurring in the discourse about language-model grounding. He mentions that grounding has a precedent in the literary tradition like formalism, though one that has largely existed. The conversation about grounding discusses questions that occurred in the Romantic period.

The article examines the numerous parallels, repetitions, and symmetrical elements in novel "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad. It mentions parallels to another set of forms such as the hierarchized binary oppositions of the colonial discourse that characterize the events of the story and work starts with the standard, hierarchical Victorian social and cultural oppositions of the day. It also mentions unexamined associations as it affirms civilization and savagery, conqueror and colonized.

This essay attempts to trace the ways in which Dana Gioia's use of form relates to, and simultaneously differs from Romanticism, Modernism and postmodernism. His particular brand of formalism takes up the notion of a connection between truth and beauty, without presuming to identify one with the other, and, at the same time, resisting both the Modernist obsession with dissolution and fragmentariness and postmodernism's skepticism towards grand narratives. Form becomes a coalescing agent, uniting different aspects and levels of reality, and narratives are instrumental in shaping both the individual and the social body. The power to name (point to and describe) and to tame (to translate dark or incomprehensible aspects of reality), inherent in language, is the means by which poetry shapes our social and cultural world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent pronouncement of the Supreme Court of Nigeria in Sifax & Ors v. Migfo & Anor reveals the desirability of a pragmatic as against a formalistic approach to Nigerian limitation laws. This article critically examines Sifax and seizes the opportunity to flag up the inadequacies in the extant limitation laws in Nigeria. The article argues that a total overhaul of the limitation laws is long overdue as they are not only old-fashioned and ambiguous but also produce undesirable results. It predicts that it is very unlikely that any legislative intervention may be witnessed in the nearest future. Therefore the article suggests that the courts must continue to fill the gaps by a pragmatic interpretation of the laws within the bounds of the general policy objectives of the limitation laws. It advocates comparative judicialism as a useful methodology to achieve this task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The formalism for Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) was introduced in the 1980s as one of the first constraint-based grammatical formalisms for natural language. It has led to substantial contributions to the linguistic literature and to the construction of large-scale descriptions of particular languages. Investigations of its mathematical properties have shown that, without further restrictions, the recognition, emptiness, and generation problems are undecidable, and that they are intractable in the worst case even with commonly applied restrictions. However, grammars of real languages appear not to invoke the full expressive power of the formalism, as indicated by the fact that algorithms and implementations for recognition and generation have been developed that run—even for broad-coverage grammars—in typically polynomial time. This article formalizes some restrictions on the notation and its interpretation that are compatible with conventions and principles that have been implicit or informally stated in linguistic theory. We show that LFG grammars that respect these restrictions, while still suitable for the description of natural languages, are equivalent to linear context-free rewriting systems and allow for tractable computation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author argues that we should understand Walt Whitman's catalog as a poetic form that is also a logical form--enumerative induction. Whitman's catalogs--his characteristic technique of generating long lists--have long been recognized as central to his poetics. The list, or enumeration, is also the most basic form of inductive reasoning. By recognizing that Whitman reasons logically through his poetic form, not only is the common account of Whitman changed, but the concept of form must be revised in three crucial ways. First, form should not be defined in opposition to poetic content--this is a false definitional binary. Second, form and free verse are another false binary, as poems can be written in free verse and also have form, as Whitman's poetry is and does. Third, form is not just a rubric with which critics interpret poems but the logic by which poems interpret the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers work of Georges Polti, a French writer. Topics discussed include Polti's views which were as popular as they were controversial; highlights work in the "Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations," prefigures later structural studies of narrative; and mentions that the school of American formalism which produced literary works that were structurally similar, advancing a system of common ideas and practices which propagated on the pages of numerous professional publications.

Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle (1931) has been much blamed for characterising modernist literature by an aesthetic refusal to engage with society, and for encouraging the narrow formalism of New Critical pedagogy. The recovery of Wilson's own distinctive teaching practice, however, shows that he used the book to teach modernism's development out of coterie symbolism towards social engagement and cultural criticism. Modern literature classrooms like Wilson's functioned not to define literature's purity, but to explore the connections between then-contemporary modernism and all kinds of writing that describes, references, and names the material world in which it was created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the formalism of author J. M. Coetzee as shown in his works like the short story "He and His Man" and the novel "Slow Man." Topics include literary proprietorship, digital copyright, Coetzee's novels that rival history, and the category of fiction that leans toward historical or mimetic accuracy.

The paradigmatic literary work of Edna O'Brien, The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (1986) narrates the coming of age of two young women from rural backgrounds in the Ireland of the mid-twentieth century and their progressive entry into an adult world, passing through the capital, Dublin, to finally leave their country and arrive in London. Censured in its day, the trilogy is now acknowledged as a feminine Bildungsroman, above all, because of its open allusions to the awakening of female sexuality. However, most criticism has overlooked the political implications of its central theme, as well as the structural and formal innovations that the author employs to represent the impossibility of a feminine Bildung form. Polyphony, fragmentation, and ultimate disintegration are some of the elements that evidence the need to reconsider the place of the trilogy within the panorama of Irish literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russian boasts a highly complex aspectual system which can appear irregular and difficult to learn. It has recently been suggested that motion verbs, which are normally seen as exceptional in their nature, may in fact be at the core of this system, motivating aspectual behavior based on stem directionality. This suggests that analyzing motion verbs may help understand the Russian aspectual system as a whole. The present work demonstrates how Russian motion verbs and their aspectual partners can be implemented and processed successfully with Fluid Constructional Grammar. The study presents an example of language processing in both production and comprehension in operation and highlights the flexibility and power of this formalism, despite the challenges that this complex aspectual system poses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both Indian and Western aesthetic thinking is impregnated with significant views about the language of literature. However, the Indian theory of vakrokti (obliquity) and the Western theory of Russian Formalism deal with the language of literature exhaustively. Kuntaka's theory of vakrokti and Russian formalism consider that a certain obliqueness or indirection or defamiliarization is the most distinguishing characteristic of the language of literature. Both theories point out this very aspect of language of literature. In spite of this common ground, there is no onetoone correspondence between the theories. The present paper aims at exploring a significant area of intersection between the two. The basis of the intersection includes the development of both theories in terms of the levels of the language of literature, the role of author and the reader, the role of emotions and the role of sound and meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bill Martin believes that orthodox Marxism has omitted ethics in capturing social reality. He remedies this deficit by constructing an "Ethical Marxism" that appeals to Derrida's "materialization" of Kant's categorical imperative. He adds that the historical and ethical dimensions involved in this effort would each be an "empty formalism" without the other. Thus his ultimate goal is to save us from formalism by joining "vision" to "viability," transcendence to immanence. But some aspects of Martin's Ethical Marxism suggest that he may be further from Derrida than he thinks. I will explore this possibility and draw its implications for the viability of Martin's Ethical Marxism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented about the concept of the notion of form in literature. Topics discussed include the author's wish for a genuinely formalist critical practice, philosopher Roland Barthes' view on formalism in his book "Mythologies," and a format becoming a form when the material properties of the printed page are intentionally remediated by an artist.

The weak equivalence of Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) and Tree-Adjoining Grammar (TAG) is a central result of the literature on mildly context-sensitive grammar formalisms. However, the categorial formalism for which this equivalence has been established differs significantly from the versions of CCG that are in use today. In particular, it allows restriction of combinatory rules on a per grammar basis, whereas modern CCG assumes a universal set of rules, isolating all cross-linguistic variation in the lexicon. In this article we investigate the formal significance of this difference. Our main result is that lexicalized versions of the classical CCG formalism are strictly less powerful than TAG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops a proof-theoretic semantics for belief reports by extending the constructive type-theoretical formalism presented in Więckowski (Stud Log 100:815-853, ) with a specific kind of set-forming operator suited for the representation of belief attitudes. The extended formalism allows us to interpret constructions which involve, e.g., iteration of belief, quantifying into belief contexts, and anaphora in belief reports. Moreover, constructive solutions to canonical instances of the problem of hyperintensionality are suggested. The paper includes a discussion of Ranta's (Type-theoretical grammar, ) constructive account of belief reports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the U.S. Supreme court case Vance v Ball State University regarding employer liability under Title VII of U.S. Topics include rejection of formalism of the text by a court, the role of the law in mitigating discriminatory harassment of employee at workplace, employment actions taken by supervisors against their employees, and regulatory reform of the law for defining employer's liability at workplace.

An interview is presented with the Appalachian poet and former Catholic high school teacher Richard Hague. He discusses the role that working industrial jobs in the summer played in preparing him to become a poet. When asked about the motivation to the publication of his book "During the Recent Extinctions: New and Selected Poems 1984-2012," he comments on his aging. He comments on the use of formalism in his poetry, including in regard to his poem "Mr. Ealy Fishback.”

The focus of this essay concerns the overlapping, potentially illuminating and educational contexts specific to Hemingway's "The Big Two-Hearted River." These contexts fall broadly into four categories: 1) those related to the intra- and extra-diegetic levels of the narrative and, specifically, the story of the protagonist's fishing expedition; 2) those tied to the narrative's creation, including those specific to Hemingway's life and work; 3) those more elusive and yet no less important theoretical ones, including formalism, poststructuralism, ecocriticism, and, more recently, those that fall under the umbrella of cognitive-ecological understandings of literature; and, finally, 4) those contexts specific to contemporary environmental literature courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at demonstrating the fact that, although the term "fences" in August Wilson's Fences is generally associated with "division" and "separation" by literary critics, "fences" in this play is equally a unifying agent-- an enclosure. The playwright depicts a wife who is very instrumental in uniting family members, thus gathering them behind the fence built by her husband. The fence here therefore fosters family cohesion. Formalism and Feminism will both shed light on the division suggested by the metaphor of the fence and the wife's ability to break these divisions and convert this fence into a unifying enclosure around the family unit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins by tracing the tensions that existed between the proponents of interpretative semantics and those of generative pragmatics within the paradigm of generative linguistics, drawing special attention to the early discomfort with the phenomenon of "vacuous truth". This is followed by a rapid glance at the collusion between syntax and semantics, and the duo pitting itself against pragmatics, practically isolating pragmatics and relegating it to the status of a peripheral concern. Despite the permanence of vestigial traces of the fascination with logic and formalism, a clarion call for a bolder approach is made, one that will liberate pragmatics from the clutches of logic and begin to contemplate it as a perspective on the very phenomenon of language rather than a mere component of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the divide between American formalism and theoreticians of minimalism, Barnett Newman's art received great acclaim from both schools of thought. Attempting to unearth the philosophical preconditions of this strange constellation, this article argues that the closeness between minimalism and formalism is due to their mutual reliance upon phenomenology and ordinary language philosophy. However, their proximity also conveys their distance, since they imply different interpretations and applications of the philosophical schools in question. Such theoretical differences shed light on Newman's paintings: both minimalism and formalism are right in their accounts - yet not exclusively so. What arguably makes up the distinctive fascination of Newman's paintings is their incessant oscillation between empty physicality and powerful meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: his paper examines the distribution and interpretation of manner adverbs in Japanese. We explore the division of labor between the syntactic, semantic and discourse constraints involving the adverbial modification. After having observed manner adverbs potentially produce the ambiguity between the complement and the adjunct interpretation, we offer an explicit account for the apparently elusive paradigm, ascribing such properties to the dual analysis of complements and adjuncts for the correct characterization of manner adverbs in the language. We then show that the proposed analysis can be easily integrated into a Lexical–Functional Grammar (LFG) formalism. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article draws on Richard Murphy's memoirs, The Kick (2002. London: Granta) and his poem 'Wittgenstein and the birds', from his Collected poems 1952-2000 (2001. Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, p. 6) to try to define his particular approach to life writing, which I believe to be significantly different in its constructive premises from that of most other memoir-writers and autobiographers. That is, if most writers of memoirs check the events which they are narrating against their memories, 'notoriously fallible and open to schematization', as Jerome Bruner notes in Narrative and identity (2001. Selfmaking and world-making. eds. Jens Brockmeier and Donal Carbaugh, 25-38. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, p. 28), or against the memories of family members and friends, Murphy draws on his contemporary notebooks, meticulously maintained over many years. Through this memorial and writerly resource he exerts his control over his material, a control always judiciously employed, in keeping with a partiality for what I call 'classical formalism' in his poetry. Memoir writing and poetry, in this respect, share in source material which, considering the initial care Murphy took in writing up his notebooks, impacts on present technical realization in an inherently aesthetic manner. The article concludes by considering the writerly and psychological implications of this control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This address by the President of the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) and the 2010 keynote speaker at the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) takes an overview of the professional state of Victorian Studies in Britain and North America in their institutional contexts. It focuses on new work in literature and science/technology studies, new formalisms, and new collaborative projects in digital humanities that are both interdisciplinary and international; and it extends invitations for further collaboration with scholars of Victorian Britain and cultures in contact outside Europe and North America. It also reports on the commitments of BAVS and NAVSA to their growing constituencies, their statistical growth in their respective first decades, and their support of graduate students and postdocs in times of economic hardship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a formalism to specify interactive storytelling genres in the context of digital entertainment, adopting an information systems approach. We view a genre as a set of plots, where a plot is a partially ordered sequence of events, taken from a fixed repertoire. In general, the specification of a genre should allow to determine whether a plot is a legitimate representative of the genre, and also to generate all plots belonging to the genre. The formalism divides the specification of a genre into static, dynamic and behavioral schemas, that reflect a plan recognition/plan generation paradigm. It leads to executable specifications, supported by LOGTELL, a prototype tool that helps users generate, modify and reuse plots that follow a genre specification. To illustrate the use of the formalism, we specify a simple Swords & Dragons genre and show plots generated by the tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on American poetry criticism. It notes that in "After the New Criticism" (1980) by Frank Lentricchia, the death of formalism was addressed. Aside from formal criticism, there are other types of poetry criticisms including historicist, inter- and contextual and archival. The author believes that Lentricchia's idea conveys that thought formalism is officially dead, it is still relevant. Books of poetry criticism that were assessed include Stephen Burt's "The Forms of Youth: 20th-Century Poetry and Adolescence," Andrew Epstein's "Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry," the essay collection titled "Reading the Middle Generation Anew: Culture, Community, and Form in Twentieth-Century American Poetry.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to study dialectical methodology as a scientific reasoning process in Islam comparatively with mainstream philosophy of science. Design/methodology/approach - Comparative discursive method of inquiry using the language of philosophy of science and abstract mathematization (limited use). Findings - This is a theoretical paper of an intellectual category, which presents the arguments within the framework of the principle of universal and pervasive complementarities as the evidential sign of the epistemology of unity of knowledge studied through functional ontological logical formalism. Research limitations/implications - The theoretical nature of an argumentative paper is at best a foundation one rather than an empirical one. Practical implications - An example of the Islamic dialectical methodology of unity of knowledge is applied to socioeconomic development in Islamic perspective. Originality/value - There is believed to be no other paper on Islam and its dialectical methodology in scientific reasoning compared to the theory of dialectics in mainstream philosophy of science in the contemporary literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a thought experiment that attempts to demonstrate that the turn to language that took place in experimental poetry in the 1970s continues the politics of the 1960s by other means. Decisive movements that occurred during the Free Speech Movement (FSM) on Sproul Plaza, University of California-Berkeley are examined, and the construction of a political genealogy for radically formalist poetics that emerged during the period is explored.