Widely praised for his innovative scientific thinking and elegant writing, Antonio Damasio achieves a new understanding of consciousness by asking-and answering-profound questions: How is it that we know what we know? How is it that our conscious and private minds have a sense of self? A gifted medical clinician with decades of caring for patients with brain damage, a great scientific thinker, and an extraordinary writer, Damasio offers a new understanding of the biological roots of consciousness and its role in survival. Damasio's work on feeling and emotion forever joins our minds and bodies, offering an arrestingly original way of understanding what it is to be human. After reading Damasio's landmark, Descartes' Error, Jonas Salk wrote, "You will never again look at yourself or another without wondering what goes on behind the eyes that so meet." As to The Feeling of What Happens, the New York Times wrote, "Unlike any other book here, it will change your experience of yourself."
What is the precise relationship between the writer of a text and the reader? Contributions to reader-response theory have suggested that the reader is relatively passive. In this 1987 text, Professor Foster argues that the relationship is more complex than that: readers enter into complicity with writers and create the illusion of the writer's mastery over meaning in order to imagine themselves as masters and become writers in their own place. This dynamic model of the reading process is revealed most tellingly in 'confessional' narratives and so Professor Foster explores the complex patterns of the reader/writer symbiosis in texts by Augustine, Kierkegaard, Henry James, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and Beckett. What emerges is a fresh theory of reading literature: the engagement between writer and reader as a struggle for power in which the reader is actively complicit and self-conscious in his or her interpretations.
Do we think in natural language? Or is language only for communication? Much recent work in philosophy and cognitive science assumes the latter. In contrast, Peter Carruthers argues that much of human conscious thinking is conducted in the medium of natural language sentences. However, this does not commit him to any sort of Whorfian linguistic relativism, and the view is developed within a framework that is broadly nativist and modularist. His study will be essential reading for all those interested in the nature and significance of natural language, whether they come from philosophy, psychology or linguistics.
The first-century emperor Claudius did not leave the fledgling Roman Empire as he had found it: his contribution was to turn its developing institutions into an imperial tradition. But the ancient sources represent him as an odd personality - active but manipulated by his inferiors, at once distracted and awkward and cruel. Suetonius' biography is a rich offering of both solid fact and the prejudicial anecdotes that his contemporaries and the generation that followed thought worth repeating, raw material for exploring the man and his reign. This commentary provides context for the text's abundant information, but form is not neglected, and attention is given to Suetonius' intelligent and conscious marshalling of his material, and guidance offered to students reading the biographer's often densely compressed style. This is the first English commentary on the Claudius Life to deal with both historical and stylistic issues.
This book presents Jane Austen as a radical innovator. It explores the nature of her confrontation with the popular novelists of her time, and demonstrates how her challenge to them transformed fiction. It is evident from letters and other sources, as well as the novels themselves, that the Austen family developed a strong scepticism about contemporary notions of the proper content and purpose of fiction. Austen's own writing can be seen as a conscious demonstration of these disagreements. In thus identifying her literary motivation, this book (moving away from the questions of ideology which have so dominated Austen studies in this century) offers a unifying critique of the novels and helps to explain their unequalled durability with the reading public.
Conscious of ancient modes of reading poetry 'for the life', Roman poets encoded versions of their lives into their texts. The result is a body of literature that cries out to be read in terms of lives in reception. Afterlives of the Roman Poets shows how the fictional biographies (or 'biofictions') of its authors have shaped the reception of Latin poetry. From medieval biographies of Ovid inscribed in the margins of his texts to republican readings of Lucan's death in periods of revolution to the 'death of the author' in Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil, the book tells a cultural history of the reception of ancient literature as imagined through the lens of poets' lives. Putting modern life-writing studies and ancient poetry into dialogue, it brings biofictional reception to debates in classics, and puts antiquity and its reception onto the map of modern studies in life-writing.
How did Nietzsche the philosopher come into being? The Nietzsche known today did not develop 'naturally', through the gradual maturation of some inborn character. Instead, from an early age he engaged in a self-conscious campaign to follow his own guidance, thereby cultivating the critical capacities and personal vision which figure in his books. As a result, his published works are steeped in values that he discovered long before he mobilised their results. Indeed, one could argue that the first work which he authored was not a book at all, but his own persona. Based on scholarship previously available only in German, this book examines Nietzsche's unstable childhood, his determination to advance through self-formation, and the ways in which his environment, notably the Prussian education system, alternately influenced and impeded his efforts to find his own way. It will be essential reading for all who are interested in Nietzsche.
