When a young Algerian named Meursault kills a man, his subsequent imprisonment and trial are puzzling and absurd. The apparently amoral Meursault--who puts little stock in ideas like love and God--seems to be on trial less for his murderous actions, and more for what the authorities believe is his deficient character.

Theory of Mind is what enables us to "put ourselves in another's shoes." It is mindreading, empathy, creative imagination of another's perspective: in short, it is simultaneously a highly sophisticated ability and a very basic necessity for human communication. Theory of Mind is central to such commercial endeavors as market research and product development, but it is also just as important in maintaining human relations over a cup of coffee. Not...

In this outstanding book, Susan Strehle argues that a new fiction has developed from the influence of modern physics. She calls this new fiction actualism, and within that framework she offers a critical analysis of major novels by Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis, John Barth, Margaret Atwood, and Donald Barthelme. According to Strehle, the actualists balance attention to questions of art with an engaged meditation on the external,...

As a city that seems to float between Europe and Asia, removed by a lagoon from the tempos of terra firma, Venice has long seduced the Western imagination. Since the 1797 fall of the Venetian Republic, fantasies about the sinking city have engendered an elaborate series of romantic clichés, provoking modern artists and intellectuals to construct conflicting responses: some embrace the resistance to modernity manifest in Venice's labyrinthine premodern...

Focusing primarily on the work of Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, and J. M. Coetzee, Ato Quayson launches a thoroughly cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study of the representation of physical disability. Quayson suggests that the subliminal unease and moral panic invoked by the disabled is refracted within the structures of literature and literary discourse itself, a crisis he terms "aesthetic nervousness." The disabled reminds the able-bodied...

"Winner of the 2016 Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture, Media Ecology Association" "Winner of the 2015 James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association" "One of Flavorwire's 10 Best Books by Academic Publishers in 2015" Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University. She is the author of The Serious Pleasures of Suspense and Provoking Democracy. A radically...

En este libro Irene Artigas Albarelli, anteponiendo a la visión de los primeros analistas del relato que buscaban encontrar la "estructura de todos los relatos", la noción de lo escribible, la cual "está emparentada con, lo literario, lo que sólo podemos atisbar", nos lleva por un recorrido ecfrástico (de ecfrasis: ek [afuera] y phrasein [decir, declarar, pronunciar]) en el que demuestra de una manera práctica la profunda relación entre la...

In the romantic tradition, music is consistently associated with madness, either as cause or cure. Writers as diverse as Kleist, Hoffmann, and Nietzsche articulated this theme, which in fact reaches back to classical antiquity and continues to resonate in the modern imagination. What John Hamilton investigates in this study is the way literary, philosophical, and psychological treatments of music and madness challenge the limits of representation...

Is there life after postmodernism? Many claim that it sounded the death knell for history, art, ideology, science, possibly all of Western philosophy, and certainly for the concept of reality itself. Responding to essential questions regarding whether the humanities can remain politically and academically relevant amid this twenty-first-century uncertainty, Why the Humanities Matter offers a guided tour of the modern condition, calling upon thinkers...

In Critical Children, Richard Locke follows child characters in classic novels for adults and their use in exploring or evading social, psychological, and moral problems. Moving from Dickens's Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Pip in Great Expectations to Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn; from Henry James's Miles and Flora in The Turn of the Screw to J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan and his modern American descendent, J. D. Salinger's Holden...