Have you ever had an ache or pain, and wished your body could talk to you and tell you what was wrong? You're not alone! Master storyteller Nancy Mellon, author of Body Eloquence, has guided scores of people through the process of giving their bodies a voice. Drawing from mythology, medicine, biology and energetic healing, she finds the essential stories that characterize each organ of the human body, and trains us how to use these resources to identify the messages that our organs are communicating to us.The heart, for instance, is not just a durable pump, sending oxygenated blood to every cell. It's also a representation of goodwill; a heart-to-heart connection, or an openhearted friend, are universal stories we can all identify. But a hard-hearted person is one we all avoid. These archetypes are found in mythologies from Native American traditions to Scandinavian tribes to Greek history, and are woven together in a fascinating matrix in Body Eloquence, showing how our organs are part of our psyche, our history, and our collective mythology.

As a statement about literacy, this book recommends an approach to teaching writing that stresses the neurological foundations of written English, mastered almost like a foreign language. "Physical eloquence" refers to neurological processes of hand, eye, and ear that every writer must control in order to generate and simultaneously to interpret a written text. "Biology of writing" refers to innate or otherwise untaught abilities that all people have for acquiring prose and which are not enhanced by formal learning. Ochsner promotes a realistic writing curriculum that stresses subconscious processes in the biology of the writing process rather than planned, rehearsed, and formally practiced activities for learning to write. He concludes that successful literacy instruction depends on a teacher's willingness to take into account the supremacy of popular culture and the ascendancy of its spoken idiom.

"An outstanding book, one of the most intelligent, penetrating, and intellectually rigorous studies of pictorial theory in the literature of art history."--Michael Fried, author of Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot "Jacqeline Lichtenstein's groundbreaking contribution to intellectual history reconstructs the history of the age-old debate between philosophy and rhetoric, discourse and images, drawing and color, truth and delight. She shows how, in opposition to the Platonic suspicion of eloquence and colour, 17th-century French aesthetics discovers that painting involves deception more than imitation and delight rather than logic. Impressively erudite, Lichtenstein is also a seductive writer. A book about the pleasure of seeing and the pleasure of reading."--Thomas Pavel, author of The Feud of Language: A History of Structuralist Thought

One of the greatest aesthetic attractions in the ancient world was pantomime dancing, a ballet-style entertainment in which a silent, solo dancer incarnated a series of mythological characters to the accompaniment of music and sung narrative. Looking at a multitude of texts and particularly Lucian's "On the Dance", a dialogue written at the height of pantomime's popularity, this innovative cultural study of the genre offers a radical reassessment of its importance in the symbolic economy of imperial and later antiquity. Rather than being trivial or lowbrow, pantomime was thoroughly enmeshed in wider social discourses on morality and sexuality, gender and desire and a key player in the fierce battles about education and culture that raged in the ancient world. A close reading of primary sources, judiciously interlaced with a wealth of interdisciplinary perspectives, makes this challenging book essential for anyone interested in the performance culture of the Greek and Roman world.

Rhetoric at the Non-Substantialistic Turn: The East-West Coin presents a unique theory of rhetoric that encompasses both Eastern and Western approaches. Based on the Field-Being philosophy founded by Lik Kuen Tong, this theory gives an account of the ontological foundations of both kinds of rhetoric. Beginning with an exposition of the nature of Field-Being rhetoric as Eastern and Western, this book presents chapters on Eastern and Western rhetoric over history as power, ethics, art, creativity, politics, and communication. It acknowledges the thinking of many philosophers and rhetoricians who have contributed to East-West comparative studies in both fields and argues that both understandings of rhetoric are necessary for global communication.

Shortly after her 50th birthday in 2003, Crosby was in a bicycle accident that paralyzed her, and here shares her experience of living her new life.

In the mid-19th century, rhetoric surrounding slavery was permeated by violence. Slavery’s defenders often used brute force to suppress opponents, and even those abolitionists dedicated to pacifism drew upon visions of widespread destruction. Provocative Eloquence recounts how the theater, long an arena for heightened eloquence and physical contest, proved terribly relevant in the lead up to the Civil War. As antislavery speech and open conflict intertwined, the nation became a stage. The book brings together notions of intertextuality and interperformativity to understand how the confluence of oratorical and theatrical practices in the antebellum period reflected the conflict over slavery and deeply influenced the language that barely contained that conflict. The book draws on a wide range of work in performance studies, theater history, black performance theory, oratorical studies, and literature and law to provide a new narrative of the interaction of oratorical, theatrical, and literary histories of the nineteenth-century U.S.