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The heady system of high‐pressure Continental air that drifted across the Atlantic and collided with the traditional cyclonic patterns of U.S. literary academe in the mid‐1960s precipitated a “Theory Revolution” that has brought a couple of decades of stormy and stimulating weather to the campus. The collision has produced occasionally furious debate and resulted for higher education in the kind of public attention customarily reserved for athletic scandals; it has kept tenuring processes in turmoil and publish‐or‐perish mills working round the clock.

Cognitive literary criticism is introduced as a bridge between cognitive approaches to the study of persuasion, and literary traditions in consumer research. As a successor to reader-response theory, cognitive literary theory focuses on the cognitive processes of interpretation, while keeping an eye on the aesthetic properties of the text. Paradigmatically cautious researchers might shy away from attempts to marry positivist cognitive constructs to interpretivist cultural theory, but this chapter argues that these qualms also conceal missed opportunities for the study of persuasion.

Insights from cognitive literary criticism are demonstrated at the hand of a LEGO ad.

Theory of mind and conceptual blending are crucial cognitive skills involved in the interpretation of persuasive texts.

Most research to date has kept literary and cognitive approaches to persuasion separate, black-boxing the processes of persuasion. This chapter argues for a revitalization of interest in aesthetic detail, informed by insights from cognitive science.

Preservice English teachers are expected to use literary theories and criticism to read and respond to literary texts. Over the past century, two of the most common approaches to literary encounters in secondary schools have been New Criticism – particularly the practice of close reading – and Rosenblatt's transactional theory, both of which have been expanded through critical theorizing along the way. Elucidated by data produced in iterative experiments with Frost's “The Road Not Taken,” the authors reconceptualize the reader, the text, and close reading through the critical posthuman theory of reading with love as a generative way of thinking outside of the habitual practices of European humanisms.

In “thinking with” (Jackson and Mazzei, 2023) desiring-machines, affect, Man and critical posthuman theory, this post qualitative inquiry maps how the “The Road Not Taken” worked when students plugged into it iteratively in processes of reading with love, an affirmative and creative series of experiments with literature.

This study mapped how respect for authority, the battle of good v evil, individualism and meritocracy operated as desiring-machines that channeled most participants’ initial readings of “The Road Not Taken.” In subsequent experiments with the poem, the authors demonstrate that reading with love as a critical posthuman process of reading invites participants to exceed the logics of recognition and representation, add or invent additional ways of being and relating to the world and thereby produce the possibility to transform a world toward greater inclusivity and equity.

The authors reconceptualize the categories of “the reader” and “the text” from Rosenblatt’s transactional theory within practices of reading with love, which they situate within a critical posthuman theory. They eschew separating efferent and aesthetic reading stances while also recuperating practices of “close reading,” historically associated with the New Critics, by demonstrating the generativity of critically valenced “close reading” within a Deleuzian process of reading with love.

This paper adopts a literary theory perspective to depict accounting reports and information as texts rather than as economic commodities and so available for analysis from the vantage point of semiotic linguistic theory. In doing so it takes the literary turn followed by many of the social sciences and humanities in recent decades. It compares and contrasts four dominant genres of literary theory – expressive realism, the new criticism, structuralism, and deconstructionism – to developments in accounting. The paper illustrates these and other ideas in the context of the controversies surrounding the oil and gas accounting crisis and practices circa 1961 to 1990. The paper concludes by outlining a new way of preparing accounting reports based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the heteroglossic novel. This approach calls for making accounting for an enterprise an ongoing conversation rather than a monologic process of closing down on a single meaning.

Although it is commonly assumed that comparative studies are the best way to proceed in constructing theories of organizing, the practical fulfillment of this postulate has always been problematic. For example, anthropologists should have given organization theorists a clue long ago: they made the stories of their exotic localities interesting by using a variety of fictional approaches in their reporting. The purpose of this paper is to call for the development of anthropologies of organization through “distant reading” of novels.

The paper uses insights from literary theory, notably Iser and Moretti, to discuss the benefits of “distant readings” of novels for scholars and students within the discipline of organization studies.

Distant readings can make it possible for those studying organizations to consider novels as sources in historical anthropology; can enable an exploration of the theories embedded in the novel; can contribute to advancement in approaches to reading fieldwork material, and can help organization theorists better delineate the boundaries of their own literary genre.

The paper broadens the understanding of the relationship between the novel and organization through explaining how reading novels through the glasses of an organization theoretician might produce “novel readings” but also novel insights into the practices of organizing – across times and places.

The purpose of this article is to propose Lexicon Rhetoricae, the narrative theory of Kenneth Burke from the discipline of literary criticism, as a comprehensive model which helps to explain how symbolism and nonconscious processes influence the consumption experience, and which helps to reconcile the psychology of the consumption experience with the more observable stimuli of the marketing environment.

Lexicon Rhetoricae distinguishes two categories of literary form – symbolic and formal appeal – which describe inputs to the literary experience. A third term, eloquence, categorizes the interaction of symbolic and formal appeals, and describes how robust that experience is.

Lexicon Rhetoricae provides: a mechanism for describing how unobservable internal psychological processes (conscious or nonconscious) might work; a method for coding observable marketer‐controlled inputs to the consumption experience; and a means for demonstrating how the unobservable processes and the observable inputs interact in the consumption experience.

Lexicon Rhetoricae provides a theoretical framework for categorically combining the “black box” experiences of the consumer and the perceptible marketer‐controlled variables in the marketplace.

The subject description of novels in library catalogues is traditionally limited to the classification number with no description of the story. On the other hand, enthusiastic readers describe novels by tags or reviews in Web services. The purpose of this paper is to analyse readers' descriptions of novels and suggest an enhancement of the catalogue record which would be useful to the readers.

The original research involved a content analysis of tags and reviews written by users in the online bookstore Amazon.com, the online reader advisory service LibraryThing, and the reading promotion project Primorci beremo. The results were compared to previously published results.

The characteristics that most frequently elicit comments by readers are: the names of the creators and literary characters, geographic names and the titles of works, the time frame in which the story takes place, and the literary genre. Their evaluation of a novel was expressed with an opinion, an analysis, or a professional review. Awards were mentioned, and readers often also expressed their personal experience with the novel. They connected the novel with a sequel or series, with otherwise related novels, movies, etc. Often, pictures of the cover and other factual data were included.

Research was limited to readers' experiences and descriptions of literary works written in prose.

It is suggested that the time frame, genre and awards received should be included in the functional requirements models.

Original research was conducted over a longer period of time. The results were re‐evaluated and compared to previously published results from studies by different researchers.

This paper suggests a standard format for creating hypermedia software. Teachers and students of literature have taken up the use of hypermedia technology enthusiastically and so we are rapidly arriving at a situation where a mushrooming of software for language and literature teaching will be faced. We will arrive much sooner at a situation where searching for an appropriate software would be as difficult as finding an appropriate article today. Technology is expected to optimise information to maximise knowledge: the confusion created by Gutenburg's invention is because duplication cannot be avoided. The suggested format is based on the major pillars of literary criticism — author centred, text centred and reader centred—and develops from the word to the work level. The findings have been demonstrated in the form of Technocriticism, a hypermedia program created on HyperCard.

Although criticized as illegitimate, literary elements are necessary features of legal argument. In a modern liberal state, law motivates compliance by justifying controversial prescriptions as products of an appropriate process for representing the will of society. Yet because law constructs the will of individual and collective actors in representing them, its representations are necessarily figurative rather than mimetic. In evaluating law's representation of society, citizens of the liberal state are also shaping their own ends. Such self-expressive choices, subjective but non-instrumental, entail aesthetic judgment. Thus the literary elements of rhetorical figuration and aesthetic appeal are fundamental, rather than merely ornamental, to legal justification.