To great writers, Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labour their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, "The Arcades Project" (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of 13 years - "the theatre," as the author called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas." Focusing on the arcades of 19th century Paris - glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centres of consumerism - Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in 36 categories with descriptive rubrics such as "fashion," "boredom," "dream city," "photography," "catacombs," "advertising," "prostitution," "baudelaire," "theory of progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things -a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age. This book is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of 19th century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

Through a twist of fate that the author of "Labyrinths" himself would have relished, these lost lectures given in English at Harvard in 1967-1968 by Jorge Luis Borges return to us now, a recovered tale of a life-long love affair with literature and the English language. Transcribed from tapes only recently discovered, "This Craft of Verse" captures the cadences, candour, wit and remarkable erudition of one of the most extraordinary and enduring literary voices of the 20th century. In its wide-ranging commentary and exquisite insights, the book stands as a deeply personal yet far-reaching introduction to the pleasures of the word, and as a first-hand testimony of to the life of literature. Though his avowed topic is poetry, Borges explores subjects ranging from prose forms (especially the novel), literary history and translation theory to philosophical aspects of literature in particular and communication in general. Probably the best-read citizen of the globe in his day, he draws on a wealth of examples from literature in modern and mediaeval English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese, speaking with characteristic eloquence on Plato, the Norse "kenningar", Byron, Poe, Chesterton, Joyce and Frost, as well as on translations of Homer, the Bible, and the "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam. Whether discussing metaphor, epic poetry, the origins of verse, poetic meaning, or his own "poetic creed", Borges gives a performance as entertaining as it is intellectually engaging. A lesson in the love of literature and in the making of a unique literary sensibility, this is a sustained encounter with one of the writers by whom the 20th century will be long remembered.

通过这本《象征理论》，我们在掌握西方两千多年以来主要思想家在象征问题上的理论外，也能了解托多罗夫本人对这问题的看法。 象征是美学和文艺理论里的一个重要问题，它同时还涉及到心理学、逻辑学、语言学、符号学等同人类思维有关的许多学科。国内虽时有论及这一问题的文章，但对象征理论从历史方面系统地进行论述的专著却尚未见到。

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 　　 本书提出女性“闺阁政治论述”的观点，通过有关性别、权力和情欲论述的视角，探讨张爱玲笔下的女性人物的复杂关系，分析女性之间的各种冲突与矛盾问题，指出她们所具备的双重特质。 　　此外，本文亦通过“去势模拟”和“杀父书写”视角，剖析了张爱玲文本中的男性家长及其阉割构图，更进一步窥探双重意识的女性叙述。借此论证女性亚文化与父权主导文化如何共同存在于复杂错综的关系中，既与之同谋，同时又是主导文化的颠覆者。反抗与压抑的双重声音，构成张爱玲书写的文本策略。

本书第一部分的前言也能说明发表第二部分的理由。第一部分概括论述了浪漫派的历史，这一部分则分别论述浪漫派的主要人物。在第三和第四部分将着重谈谈施莱格尔传奇故事中其余的英雄好汉，然后也谈谈歌德时代后期出现的悲剧诗人，最后谈谈我自己这个时代的作家们。