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This edition includes a newly edited text based on the 1902
edition. Textual History and Editing Principles provides an
overview of the controversies and ambiguities surrounding Heart of
Darkness. Included are background and source materials, and
contemporary responses to the novella along with essays in
criticism, including a new section on film adaptations.
This book explains how the brain interacts with the social
world-and why stories matter. How do our brains enable us to tell
and follow stories? And how do stories affect our minds? In Stories
and the Brain, Paul B. Armstrong analyzes the cognitive processes
involved in constructing and exchanging stories, exploring their
role in the neurobiology of mental functioning. Armstrong argues
that the ways in which stories order events in time, imitate
actions, and relate our experiences to others' lives are correlated
to cortical processes of temporal binding, the circuit between
action and perception, and the mirroring operations underlying
embodied intersubjectivity. He reveals how recent neuroscientific
findings about how the brain works-how it assembles neuronal
syntheses without a central controller-illuminate cognitive
processes involving time, action, and self-other relations that are
central to narrative. An extension of his previous book, How
Literature Plays with the Brain, this new study applies Armstrong's
analysis of the cognitive value of aesthetic harmony and dissonance
to narrative. Armstrong explains how narratives help the brain
negotiate the neverending conflict between its need for pattern,
synthesis, and constancy and its need for flexibility,
adaptability, and openness to change. The neuroscience of these
interactions is part of the reason stories give shape to our lives
even as our lives give rise to stories. Taking up the age-old
question of what our ability to tell stories reveals about language
and the mind, this truly interdisciplinary project should be of
interest to humanists and cognitive scientists alike.
"Literature matters," says Paul B. Armstrong, "for what it reveals
about human experience, and the very different perspective of
neuroscience on how the brain works is part of that story." In How
Literature Plays with the Brain, Armstrong examines the parallels
between certain features of literary experience and functions of
the brain. His central argument is that literature plays with the
brain through experiences of harmony and dissonance which set in
motion oppositions that are fundamental to the neurobiology of
mental functioning. These oppositions negotiate basic tensions in
the operation of the brain between the drive for pattern,
synthesis, and constancy and the need for flexibility,
adaptability, and openness to change. The challenge, Armstrong
argues, is to account for the ability of readers to find
incommensurable meanings in the same text, for example, or to take
pleasure in art that is harmonious or dissonant, symmetrical or
distorted, unified or discontinuous and disruptive. How Literature
Plays with the Brain is the first book to use the resources of
neuroscience and phenomenology to analyze aesthetic experience. For
the neuroscientific community, the study suggests that different
areas of research - the neurobiology of vision and reading, the
brain-body interactions underlying emotions - may be connected to a
variety of aesthetic and literary phenomena. For critics and
students of literature, the study engages fundamental questions
within the humanities: What is aesthetic experience? What happens
when we read a literary work? How does the interpretation of
literature relate to other ways of knowing?
Armstrong suggests that James's perspective is essentially
phenomenological--that his understanding of the process of knowing,
the art of fiction, and experience as a whole coincides in
important ways with the ideas of the leading phenomenologists. He
examines the connections between phenomenology's theory of
consciousness and existentialism's analyses of the lived world in
relation to James's fascination with consciousness and what is
commonly called his
Originally published in 1983.
A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the
latest in digital technology to make available again books from our
distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These
editions are published unaltered from the original, and are
presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both
historical and cultural value.
Armstrong argues that conflicting readings occur because readers
with opposing suppositions about language, literature, and life can
generate irreconcilable hypotheses about a text. Without endorsing
a particular critical methodology, the author offers a theory
designed to help readers better understand the causes and
consequences of interpretive disagreement so that they may make
more informed choices about the various interpretive strategies
available to them.
Originally published in 1990.
A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the
latest in digital technology to make available again books from our
distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These
editions are published unaltered from the original, and are
presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both
historical and cultural value.
This book explains how the brain interacts with the social
world-and why stories matter. How do our brains enable us to tell
and follow stories? And how do stories affect our minds? In Stories
and the Brain, Paul B. Armstrong analyzes the cognitive processes
involved in constructing and exchanging stories, exploring their
role in the neurobiology of mental functioning. Armstrong argues
that the ways in which stories order events in time, imitate
actions, and relate our experiences to others' lives are correlated
to cortical processes of temporal binding, the circuit between
action and perception, and the mirroring operations underlying
embodied intersubjectivity. He reveals how recent neuroscientific
findings about how the brain works-how it assembles neuronal
syntheses without a central controller-illuminate cognitive
processes involving time, action, and self-other relations that are
central to narrative. An extension of his previous book, How
Literature Plays with the Brain, this new study applies Armstrong's
analysis of the cognitive value of aesthetic harmony and dissonance
to narrative. Armstrong explains how narratives help the brain
negotiate the neverending conflict between its need for pattern,
synthesis, and constancy and its need for flexibility,
adaptability, and openness to change. The neuroscience of these
interactions is part of the reason stories give shape to our lives
even as our lives give rise to stories. Taking up the age-old
question of what our ability to tell stories reveals about language
and the mind, this truly interdisciplinary project should be of
interest to humanists and cognitive scientists alike.
The Challenge of Bewilderment treats the epistemology of
representation in major works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and
Ford Madox Ford, attempting to explain how the novel turned away
from its traditional concern with realistic representation and
toward self-consciousness about the relation between knowing and
narration. Paul B. Armstrong here addresses the pivotal thematic
experience of "bewilderment," an experience that challenges the
reader’s very sense of reality and that shows it to have no more
certainty or stability than an interpretative construct. Through
readings of The Sacred Fount and The Ambassadors by James, Lord Jim
and Nostromo by Conrad, and The Good Soldier and Parade’s End by
Ford, Armstrong examines how each writer dramatizes his
understanding of the act of knowing. Armstrong demonstrates how the
novelists’ attitudes toward the process of knowing inform
experiments with representation, through which they thematize the
relation between the understanding of a fictional world and
everyday habits of perception. Finally, he considers how these
experiments with the strategies of narration produce a heightened
awareness of the process of interpretation.
"Classrooms and curricula should be structured to foster the
playful interaction that can teach students how to negotiate social
and political differences in an emancipatory, noncoercive manner. .
. . Teaching reading as a playful exercise of reciprocity with
otherness can help prepare students for a democracy understood as a
community of communities." from the "Pedagogical Postscript"Reading
is socially useful, in Paul B. Armstrong's view, and can model
democratic interaction by a community unconstrained by the need to
build consensus but aware of the dangers of violence,
irrationality, and anarchy. Reading requires mutual recognition but
need not culminate in agreement, Armstrong says; instead, the
social potential of reading arises from the active exchange of
attitudes, ideas, and values between author and reader and among
readers. Play and the Politics of Reading, which has important
implications for education, draws on Wolfgang Iser's notion of free
play to offer a valuable response to social problems.Armstrong
finds that Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Henry James, and James
Joyce provide apt examples of the politics of reading, for reasons
both literary and political. In making the transition from realism
to modernism, these authors experimented with narrative strategies
that seek simultaneously to represent the world and to question the
means of representation itself. The formal ambiguities and
complexities of such texts as Howards End and Ulysses are ways of
staging for the reader the difficulties and opportunities of a
world of differences. Innovative formal structures challenge
readers to reconsider their assumptions and beliefs about social
issues."
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