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Author: Lisa Zunshine
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262046334
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history to examine patterns of “mindreading” in a wide range of literary works. For over four thousand years, writers have been experimenting with what cognitive scientists call “mindreading”: constantly devising new social contexts for making their audiences imagine complex mental states of characters and narrators. In The Secret Life of Literature, Lisa Zunshine uncovers these mindreading patterns, which have, until now, remained invisible to both readers and critics, in works ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Invisible Man. Bringing together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary studies, this engaging book transforms our understanding of literary history. Central to Zunshine’s argument is the exploration of mental states “embedded” within each other, as, for instance, when Ellison’s Invisible Man is aware of how his white Communist Party comrades pretend not to understand what he means, when they want to reassert their position of power. Paying special attention to how race, class, and gender inform literary embedments, Zunshine contrasts this dynamic with real-life patterns studied by cognitive and social psychologists. She also considers community-specific mindreading values and looks at the rise and migration of embedment patterns across genres and national literary traditions, noting particularly the use of deception, eavesdropping, and shame as plot devices. Finally, she investigates mindreading in children’s literature. Stories for children geared toward different stages of development, she shows, provide cultural scaffolding for initiating young readers into a long-term engagement with the secret life of literature.
Author: Lisa Zunshine
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262046334
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Get Book
Book Description
An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history to examine patterns of “mindreading” in a wide range of literary works. For over four thousand years, writers have been experimenting with what cognitive scientists call “mindreading”: constantly devising new social contexts for making their audiences imagine complex mental states of characters and narrators. In The Secret Life of Literature, Lisa Zunshine uncovers these mindreading patterns, which have, until now, remained invisible to both readers and critics, in works ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Invisible Man. Bringing together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary studies, this engaging book transforms our understanding of literary history. Central to Zunshine’s argument is the exploration of mental states “embedded” within each other, as, for instance, when Ellison’s Invisible Man is aware of how his white Communist Party comrades pretend not to understand what he means, when they want to reassert their position of power. Paying special attention to how race, class, and gender inform literary embedments, Zunshine contrasts this dynamic with real-life patterns studied by cognitive and social psychologists. She also considers community-specific mindreading values and looks at the rise and migration of embedment patterns across genres and national literary traditions, noting particularly the use of deception, eavesdropping, and shame as plot devices. Finally, she investigates mindreading in children’s literature. Stories for children geared toward different stages of development, she shows, provide cultural scaffolding for initiating young readers into a long-term engagement with the secret life of literature.
Author: Victoria Nelson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674275497
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
In one of those rare books that allows us to see the world not as we've never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing, Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science. In a backward look at an era now drawing to a close, The Secret Life of Puppets describes a curious reversal in the roles of art and religion: where art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion, covertly, through art and entertainment. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured three hundred years, a Demiurgic consciousness shaped in Late Antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent Expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.
Author: Tom Mole
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781783965298
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
We love books. We take them to bed with us. They weigh down our suitcases on holiday. We display them on our bookshelves, give them as gifts, write our names in them. We take them for granted. And all the time, our books are leading a double life. The Secret Life of Books is about everything that isn't just the words. It's about how books transform us as individuals, the stories they tell us about ourselves. It's about how books - and readers - have evolved over time. And it's about why, even with the arrival of other media, books still have the power to change our lives. In this stylish and thought-provoking meditation, Tom Mole looks at everything from binding innovations to binding errors, to books defaced by lovers, to those imprisoning professors in their offices, to books in art, to burned books, to the books that create nations, to those we'll leave behind. A striking text in a stunning package, it will change how you think about books.
Author: Sue Monk Kidd
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 0143124323
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 333
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Book Description
Now in paperback comes the intoxicating debut novel of "one motherless daughter's discovery of ... the strange and wondrous places we find love" ("The Washington Post"). Sue Monk Kidd's ravishing work is set in South Carolina in 1964.
Author: Lisa Zunshine
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262367645
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history to examine patterns of “mindreading” in a wide range of literary works. For over four thousand years, writers have been experimenting with what cognitive scientists call “mindreading”: constantly devising new social contexts for making their audiences imagine complex mental states of characters and narrators. In The Secret Life of Literature, Lisa Zunshine uncovers these mindreading patterns, which have, until now, remained invisible to both readers and critics, in works ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Invisible Man. Bringing together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary studies, this engaging book transforms our understanding of literary history. Central to Zunshine’s argument is the exploration of mental states “embedded” within each other, as, for instance, when Ellison’s Invisible Man is aware of how his white Communist Party comrades pretend not to understand what he means, when they want to reassert their position of power. Paying special attention to how race, class, and gender inform literary embedments, Zunshine contrasts this dynamic with real-life patterns studied by cognitive and social psychologists. She also considers community-specific mindreading values and looks at the rise and migration of embedment patterns across genres and national literary traditions, noting particularly the use of deception, eavesdropping, and shame as plot devices. Finally, she investigates mindreading in children’s literature. Stories for children geared toward different stages of development, she shows, provide cultural scaffolding for initiating young readers into a long-term engagement with the secret life of literature.
Author: Mark Blackwell
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838756669
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 378
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Book Description
This collection enriches and complicates the history of prose fiction between Richardson and Fielding at mid-century and Austen at the turn of the century by focusing on it-narratives, a once popular form largely forgotten by readers and critics alike. The volume also advances important work on eighteenth-century consumer culture and the theory of things. The essays that comprise The Secret Life of Things thus bring new texts, and new ways of thinking about familiar ones, to our notice. Those essays range from the role of it-narratives in period debates about copyright to their complex relationship with object-riddled sentimental fictions, from anti-semitism in Chrysal to jingoistic imperialism in The Adventures of a Rupee, from the it-narrative as a variety of whore's biography to a consideration of its contributions to an emergent middle-class ideology.
Author: Jerome Charyn
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039307725X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
"In this brilliant and hilarious jailbreak of a novel, Charyn channels the genius poet and her great leaps of the imagination." —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review) Jerome Charyn, "one of the most important writers in American literature" (Michael Chabon), continues his exploration of American history through fiction with The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, hailed by prize-winning literary historian Brenda Wineapple as a "breathtaking high-wire act of ventriloquism." Channeling the devilish rhythms and ghosts of a seemingly buried literary past, Charyn removes the mysterious veils that have long enshrouded Dickinson, revealing her passions, inner turmoil, and powerful sexuality. The novel, daringly written in first person, begins in the snow. It's 1848, and Emily is a student at Mount Holyoke, with its mournful headmistress and strict, strict rules. Inspired by her letters and poetry, Charyn goes on to capture the occasionally comic, always fevered, ultimately tragic story of her life-from defiant Holyoke seminarian to dying recluse.
Author: Ann Cameron
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250044197
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Living in a rural community in Wisconsin during the 1950s, eleven-year-old Amanda gradually and painfully learns a lot about herself, her parents, and her older sister.
Author: Jude Morgan
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250025044
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 467
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Book Description
Named One of Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Books of 2014 There are so few established facts about how the son of a glove maker from Warwickshire became one of the greatest writers of all time that some people doubt he could really have written so many astonishing plays. We know that he married Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant and six years older than he, at the age of eighteen, and that one of their children died of the plague. We know that he left Stratford to seek his fortune in London, and eventually succeeded. He was clearly an unwilling craftsman, ambitious actor, resentful son, almost good-enough husband. But when and how did he also become a genius? The Secret Life of William Shakespeare pulls back the curtain to imagine what it might have really been like to be Shakespeare before a seemingly ordinary man became a legend. In the hands of acclaimed historical novelist Jude Morgan, this is a brilliantly convincing story of unforgettable richness, warmth, and immediacy.
Author: Diane Miller
Publisher: Disney Electronic Content
ISBN: 1401325947
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
"Brusque Lady . . . Please meet the Jackal at the bar in the Metro Court at 10:00 PM sharp. Although it is somewhat past my his bedtime, he must speak with you on a grave matter concerning many of your clientele. Do not fail me him. Regards, The Jackal" So begins an evening unlike any other in Port Charles. When high-powered attorney Diane Miller agrees to meet with computer hacker extraordinaire Damian Spinelli, otherwise known as The Jackal, she knows she's in for an interesting night. But the stories he has to tell about some of Port Charles's most famous, and infamous, inhabitants are beyond her wildest imagination. Could these tales possibly be true? Or is Spinelli using her for some other purpose? From the deck of the Smilin' Lila to the halls of General Hospital, from the Case of the Vamping Valkyrie to the Case of the Contrived Contralto, here are Spinelli's tales of intrigue, kidnapping, murder, and more. The office of Spinelli/McCall, P.I., has never been busier. Spinelli may be a gumshoe like no other, but he will save, defend, and protect the citizens of Port Charles until the bitter end!
