... powers of the whole species are fitted to the world and therefore how exquisitely the world is fitted to the mind (in Wordsworth's famous phrase). Fletcher sees us as largely adapted (like all temporarily successful organisms) to the demands of reproductive success, but not adapted to the fact...

... it allowed for such payoffs, ultimately makes novel reading an inner-directed activity. Readers derive pleasure from the various ways the novel makes them aware of their ontological differences from characters. Rhetorical theory, by contrast, sees the nexus of fictionality, audience, and character...

... by modes of rewriting the artwork and in the process questioning accepted meanings, values, and beliefs, not just relating to the particular artwork in question but referencing the ways of seeing and the scopic regimes of the culture at large. Since these changes in writing and reading practices tend...

... . This mode and that book particularly exerted a profound influence on Ludwig Wittgenstein, and in a fairly self-contained sector of his masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations , we see a modernized version of such self-interrogation in action. In his remarks on the experience of reading—a familiar...

... vivid images occur when fictional acts of seeing force readers to shift from action-oriented visualization to object visualization. Some pertinent examples of these close-up, focalized descriptions of perception are discussed, which encourage substituting the automatic default mode with a more conscious...

...Nicholas Paige When literary scholars analyze narrative personhood historically, they typically see periods , explained as an effect of deeper psychosocial mutations. Thus the dominant first person of the eighteenth century is the counterpart to a new bourgeois subject, while the third-person...

...H. Porter Abbott The difficulty of understanding emergent behavior is usually attributed to our need to see in it the operation of some kind of centralized control where there is in fact none (Keller 1985, Resnick 1994). Yet as a species, we seem to have little difficulty with complex narratives...

... of dissident opposition. Beyond binary oppositions of truth vs. falsehood, and dissidents vs. state, on which previous perceptions of samizdat have depended, we might now see the essential quality of samizdat to be its exemplification of epistemic instability, inasmuch as samizdat texts are not automatically...

... into the official press), one may see a message about the importance of Kolyma Tales hidden in plain view. Ultimately, however, it was the samizdat dissemination that, more than anything else, ensured the preservation and the early as well as the future impact of Shalamov's Gulag prose. © 2009 by Porter Institute...

...Dan Shen This essay explores how to infer from a text the image of the implied author. It examines Kate Chopin's “Désirée's Baby” (1893), which has been widely regarded as an indictment of racism but which an “overall consideration” of the implied author's choices will lead us to see as a racist...

... diversity as the “unsurpassable horizon” of the post-1989 period, the article sees in the alliance between new avant-garde and multicultural poetries the promise of a liberatory poetry and poetics that would contribute to the development of multiple cultural literacies. © 2000 by the Porter Institute...

... of the suggestive elements of the original image. This article begins with some methodological considerations regarding the musical equivalent of what literary scholars know as ekphrasis (see Spitzer 1962 [1955]; Hagstrum 1958; Krieger 1967,1992; Lund 1992 [1982]; Clüver 1989, 1997; Scott 1991, 1994; Mitchell 1992...

... such an opposition between theory and history and argues for a lyric theory that sees poetic language as representing historical experience within the very formal elements and self-consciousness of language that are lyric poetry's distinctive features. Paul Celan offers a paradigmatic illustration of such synthesis...

...Richard van Oort In this article, I argue that the problem of representation stands at the center of the debate concerning the legitimacy of cognitivism as a research strategy for the humanities. Yet, curiously, very few commentators in this debate see representation to be a problem at all...

... Viktor Shklovsky almost a hundred years ago, are as relevant today as ever: current studies in cognition confirm his insights about the process of automatization and its opposite. While the Romantics only sought to actualize the beauty of the world, Shklovsky sees art also as a way to make its horrors...

...Galin Tihanov I discuss here Shklovsky's theory of estrangement as formulated in a number of texts written before the October revolution of 1917. The concept of estrangement can only be properly grasped if the early Shklovsky is placed in the context of World War I; we need to begin to see him...

... to the circus in ruins and the ever-present nightmare shadows of death, in the midst of dreamworld pleasure and titillation, which hovers over the circus. This means rethinking the role of representation and nostalgia which Carmeli finds underlying the lion act to see how the act, the artist Howes...

... in order to see if they can be understood by reference to the trauma of the parents. This will be done on the basis of literary testimonies, namely, Eva Hoffman's After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust and Carl Friedman's Nightfather. Second-Generation Testimony...

... of Heiberg's aesthetics are discussed and their echoes in Kierkegaard's writing illustrated. Kierkegaard is also aware that Heiberg's schema of genres breaks down in the face of modernity and such modern art forms as the novel. Here Mikhail Bakhtin (a reader of Kierkegaard) can help us see a carnivalistic...

... it philosophically interesting. Instead of looking to philosophy to provide a theory of biography, we should, I maintain, look to biography to provide a crucially important example and model of what Ludwig Wittgenstein called “the kind of understanding that consists in seeing connections.” This kind of understanding...