How do we know when critical terms lose their power? Could it be that some of the fundamental notions of literary and cultural studies have been adopted so broadly in so many contexts and disciplines that they explain too much, and thus not enough? This is true for terms such as textuality, discourse, narrative, and representation, some of our colleagues have claimed. If critical terms originat...

Metaphor is, in essence, mapping from the target domain to the source domain; from the familiar and concrete to the unfamiliar and abstract. When this happens, the entailments of metaphors as well as the contextual information will be integrated into texts and hence form coherent texts. Thus, it is accessible for us to explore discourse cohesion and coherence from the point view of conceptual m...

This paper unearths the contribution of lexical cohesion to the textuality and overall meaning of Malcolm X’s speech 'The Ballot or the Bullet'. Drawing on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) and Hoey’s (1991) theory of cohesion, specifically lexical   cohesion, whose main thrust is the role of lexical items in not only contributing to meaning but also serving as cohesive ties, the paper discusses how ...