This innovative introduction to literary studies takes 'the life of texts' as its overarching frame. It provides a conceptual and methodological toolbox for analysing novels, poems, and all sorts of other texts as they circulate in oral, print, and digital form. It shows how texts inspire each other, and how stories migrate across media. It explains why literature has been interpreted in different ways across time. Finally, it asks why some texts fascinate people so much that they are reprodu...

"Speech is a way of tearing out a meaning from an undivided whole." Thus does Maurice Merleau-Ponty describe speech in this collection of his important writings on the philosophy of expression, composed during the last decade of his life.

'Naming and Necessity' has had a great and increasing influence. It redirected philosophical attention to neglected questions of natural and metaphysical necessity and to the connections between these and theories of naming, and of identity.