The idea for this study came to me in the course of my reading of innova tive US-American! fiction of the last three decades. I observed that much of it is cast in the comic mode - or, more precisely, that there seems to be in contemporary fiction an affinity between 'innovation' and 'the comic' and that this affinity, furthermore, appears to be characteristic of postmo dernism. It is obvious, at the same time, that comic has become an elusive and, more often than not, a disputable category. Frederick Karl, in his sur vey of American Fictions 1940-1980, maintains, for instance, that much comic writing consists in ridicule that lacks deeper intellectual and cul tural roots. "Wit and mockery," he notes, "by themselves have little lasting value. Even in the best of such fiction, Gravity's Rainbow, one is made aware of attenuated skits stiched onto previous segments, rather than baked in by a defined point of view. " (Karl: 27) Such assessments of course challenge my view that the comic is in significant ways connected with what is innovative in postmodernist US-American fiction. Yet the term comic -or related terms like humour, parody, irony and so fort- is regularly and heavily employed in discussions or reviews of con temporary fiction.

If common sense is so common, why don't I have it? Come explore the invisible world of common sense and its often hilarious connection to real life! Comic Sense shows what's common - and what's comic - about sense. Nancy Mucklow, creator of the sensory team approach to sensory processing, uses comics to reveal the hidden patterns behind social reasoning. Instead of listing rules and blunders, Mucklow takes you behind the scenes to discover what everyone else seems to know. The result is a new way of looking at the social world.You'll learn: How to be aware - What people assume - What people expect - How to predict - How to prioritize - How to take action. With over 300 illustrations, Comic Sense is a unique and engaging book-anessential social skills tool for anyone who thinks in pictures.

"Polhemus sketches several distinctions between nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists and concludes that what most characterizes the nineteenth century, from the perspective of the twentieth, is the tendency in its comic fiction to criticize and to undermine the dogma and institutions of religion and to put faith instead of the existence of the comic perspective. Comic Faith is a virtuoso performance of impressive stature; I suspect the book will be influential for many years to come."—John Halperin, Modern Fiction Studies

The human mind has proven uniquely capable of unraveling untold mysteries, and yet, the mind is fundamentally challenged when it turns back on itself to ask what it itself is. How do we conceive of mind in this postmodern world; how can we use philosophical anthropology to understand mind and its functions? While philosophers and social scientists have made important contributions to our understanding of mind, existing theories are insufficient for penetrating the complexities of mind in the twenty-first century. Mind Unmasked: A Political Phenomenology of Consciousness draws on twentieth-century philosophies of consciousness to explain the phenomenon of mind in the broadest sense of the word. Michael A. Weinstein and Timothy M. Yetman develop a thought provoking discourse that moves beyond the nature of the human experience of mind at both the individual and interpersonal levels and present a meditation on life in the contemporary world of global mass-mediated human culture.

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.

Contemporary philosophy has adopted an increasingly tragic point of view. Tragedy, though, is only a partial truth of the human condition. Comedy is another partial truth. The nature of human existence is neither wholly the one nor the other, but tragi-comic. Philosophy must be attuned to both despair and laughter if it is to understand its own world. In Making Philosophy Laugh, the philosopher Dustin Peone makes an apology for the comic side of existence and its use in philosophy. He demonstrates the social and moral uses of humor and analyzes its significance for speculative thinking. Folly and irony are shown to be vital facets of dialectical philosophy. The reader is introduced to the comical side of Socrates and Homer, Descartes and Vico, Kant and Hegel, and many others. Finally, a doctrine of the tragi-comic sense of life is presented that does justice to all aspects of human existence and liberates the spirit from the grimness of serious thought.

Our knowledge of Greek history rests largely on literary texts - not merely historians (especially Herodotus, Thucylides and Xenephon), but also tragedies, comedies, speeches, biographies and philosophical works. These texts are themselves among the most skilled and highly wrought productions of a brilliant rhetorical culture. How is the historian to use them? This book addresses this problem by taking a series of extended test-cases, and discussing how we should and should not try to exploit the texts. In some instances we can investigate 'what really happened', and the ways in which the texts manipulate, remould, or colour it according to their own rhetorical strategies; in others the most illuminating aspect may be those strategies themselves, and what they tell us about the culture - how it figured questions of sex and gender, politics, citizenship and the city, the law and the courts and how wars happen. Literary Texts and the Greek Historian concentrates on Athens in the second half of the fifth-century, when many of the principal genres came together, but includes some examples from earlier (Aeschylus ^Oresteia) and later (including Aristotles poetics). Literary Texts and the Greek Historian examines the range of responses to these texts and suggests new ways in which literary criticism can illuminate the society from which these texts sprang.