Alberto Manguel examines metaphors of readers and reading from literatures across centuries and the globe, from the ancient epic Gilgamesh to the World Wide Web, from the adventures of Ulysses to the tragedy of Emma Bovary, and he considers how these metaphors reflect the cultures that invent them.
Unashamedly a book for the bookish, yet accessible and frequently entertaining, this is the first book devoted to how libraries are depicted in imaginative writing. Covering fiction, poetry, and drama from the late Middle Ages to the present, it runs the gamut of British and American literature, as well as examining a range of fiction in other languages--from Rabelais and Cervantes to modern and contemporary French, Italian, Japanese, and Russian writing. While the tropes of the complex catalogue and the bibliomaniacal reader persist throughout the centuries, libraries also emerge as societal battle-sites where issues of personality, gender, cultural power, and national identity are contested repeatedly and often in surprising ways. As well as examining how libraries were deployed in their work by canonical authors from Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Swift to Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Jorge Luis Borges, the volume also examines in detail the haunted libraries of Margaret Oliphant and M. R. James, and a range of much less familiar historic and contemporary authors. Alert to the depiction of librarians as well as of book-rooms and institutional readers, this book will inform, entertain, and delight. At a time when traditional libraries are under pressure, Libraries in Literature shows the power of their lasting fascination.
Through an innovative approach of critical ethnography and literacy research via case-study methodologies, Enacting Adolescent Literacies across Communities: Latino/a Scribes and Their Rites analyzes Latino/a adolescents’ engagement with the elements of literacy for English language arts learning and understanding. How young people enact literacies in their bicultural lives and understand literary traditions today reveals their own interests in democracy, equity, and opportunity. Moreover, the rites they perform often recover buried histories, mirrors, and stories similar to the pre-Columbian scribes whose intellectual legacy is relevant in the twenty-first century. R. Joseph Rodríguez illustrates how adolescents experience scribal identities and language pluralism that sustains their cultural knowledge as they make meaning and enact literacies with diverse audiences in civic and schooling communities.
How did humans respond to the eighteenth-century discovery of countless new species of animals? This book explores the gamut of human-animal interactions: from love to cultural identifications, moral reflections, philosophical debates, classification systems, mechanical copies, insults and literary creativity.
From the invention of skyscrapers and airplanes to the development of the nuclear bomb, ideas about the modern increasingly revolved around vertiginous images of elevation and decline and new technologies of mobility and terror from above. In The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism, Paul Haacke examines this turn by focusing on discourses of aspiration, catastrophe, and power in major works of European and American literature as well as film, architecture, and intellectual and cultural history. This wide-ranging and pointed study begins with canonical fiction by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and John Dos Passos, as well as poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, and Aimé Césaire, before moving to critical reflections on the rise of New York City by architects and writers from Le Corbusier to Simone de Beauvoir, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and theories of cinematic space and time, and postwar novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among many other examples. In tracing the rise and fall of modernist discourse over the course of the long twentieth century, this book shows how visions of vertical ascension turned from established ideas about nature, the body, and religion to growing anxieties about aesthetic distinction, technological advancement, and American capitalism and empire. It argues that spectacles of height and flight became symbols and icons of ambition as well as direct indexes of power, and thus that the vertical transformation of modernity was both material and imagined, taking place at the same time through the rapidly expanding built environment and shifting ideological constructions of "high" and "low."
Literary Depictions of Dangerous Reading explores how selected American and European literary texts, from the classic to the contemporary, represent reading as a dangerous endeavor. It investigates how the texts being read or the conditions of reading may produce danger and considers the various qualities of the dangers depicted: literal or metaphorical, real or imagined, minor or mortal. Whereas readers can readily imagine being depressed or bored by a book, or even perhaps corrupted in some moral fashion, readers typically assume that the mere words on a page cannot directly affect their health. Nevertheless, literature can and does stage readings in which readers suffer actual harm from the magical or supernatural qualities of a given text. Such impossibly dangerous reading fascinates, the author argues, by exaggerating the dangers that may inhabit certain real experiences of reading.
The history of the novel is also a history of shifting views of the value of novel reading. This study investigates how novels themselves participate in this development by featuring reading as a multidimensional cultural practice. English novels about obsessive reading, written in times of medial transition, serve as test cases for a model that brings together analyses of form and content.
Recent work in argumentation theory has emphasized the nature of arguers and arguments along with various theoretical perspectives. Less attention has been given to the third feature of any argumentative situation - the audience. This book fills that gap by studying audience reception to argumentation and the problems that come to light as a result of this shift in focus. Christopher W. Tindale advances the tacit theories of several earlier thinkers by addressing the central problems connected with audience considerations in argumentation, problems that earlier philosophical theories overlook or inadequately accommodate. The main tools employed in exploring the central issues are drawn from contemporary philosophical research on meaning, testimony, emotion and agency. These are then combined with some of the major insights of recent rhetorical work in argumentation to advance our understanding of audiences and suggest avenues for further research.
In the words of Saint Augustine, the Bible is long, complicated, and difficult to read. Orange Proverbs & Purple Parables is a book about reading the Bible. How does one become a more spiritually discerning and critically appreciative reader of the Holy Scriptures? What does it take to become a better interpreter of biblical texts? This book explores wide-ranging approaches and considerations germane to the enterprise of reading. The catch phrase used throughout the book is that of reading the Holy Scriptures as scripture. What goes into reading the Bible as scripture? What are some of the major elements inherent in this endeavor that should be of concern to the one who aspires to become a deep, thoughtful reader and an effective interpreter? This book weaves through a labyrinth of characters and disciplines as it explores this enterprise of reading the Holy Scriptures. The likes of Chomsky, Augustine, neuroscience, Barth, linguistics, theological interpretation, Origen, metaphor theory, devotional reading, and Jerome, along with many more people and fields of inquiry, are all garnered to encourage the reader in an exploration of the enterprise of reading the Holy Scriptures.
The Rules of Persuasion not only explains exactly how persuasion works in all forms of human communication, but it also presents a clear and effective model you can use to put the elements and chemistry of persuasion to work for you in your personal and professional lives. Using insights and examples from art to history to literature to hip-hop, author Carlos Alvarenga updates and expands ideas first presented in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, adding original observations regarding the role of the audience in persuasion, persuasion in social media, as well as what happens when the rules of persuasion are used to deceive and corrupt audiences—even entire nations. “From Aristotle to Instagram, Carlos Alvarenga weaves together examples from ancient Greek and Roman texts to modern-day art, film, hip-hop, and social media to provide a useful overview of the tools and levers of persuasion in a variety of contexts. Informative and thought-provoking, this book illuminates the exact ways in which words and ideas, persuasively communicated, have shaped people's actions and beliefs from antiquity to the present.” —Jason Steinhauer, bestselling author, History, Disrupted: How Social Media & the Worldwide Web Have Changed the Past “Many of us in the arts struggle to communicate to different audiences in ways that inspire. The insights of Carlos Alvarenga draw on decades of experience helping leaders craft and convey their message. By laying out a clear approach with examples ranging from real-life coaching experiences to ad campaigns to artworks, he transforms the ‘art’ of persuasion into a practical framework that enables readers to sharpen their abilities to influence and motivate others.” —Amy Landau, Ph.D., Director of Education and Interpretation, Fowler Museum at UCLA