Arts of Address: Being Alive to Language and the World

Modes of address are forms of signification that we direct at living beings, things, and places, and they at us and at each other. Seeing is a form of address. So are speaking, singing, and painting. Initiating or responding to such calls, we participate in encounters with the world. Widely used yet less often examined in its own right, the notion of address cries out for analysis.

Monique Roelofs offers a pathbreaking systematic model of the field of address and puts it to work in the arts,...