Books by Paul B. Armstrong

Taking up the age-old question of what our ability to tell stories reveals about language and the mind, this truly interdisciplinary project should be of interest to humanists and cognitive scientists alike.

The Challenge of Bewilderment treats the epistemology of representation in major works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, attempting to explain how the novel turned away from its traditional concern with realistic representation and toward self-consciousness about the relation between knowing and narration. Paul B. Armstrong here addresses the pivotal thematic experience of "e;bewilderment,"e; an experience that challenges the reader's very sense of reality and that shows it to have no more certainty or stability than an interpretative construct. Through readings of The Sacred Fount and The Ambassadors by James, Lord Jim and Nostromo by Conrad, and The Good Soldier and Parade's End by Ford, Armstrong examines how each writer dramatizes his understanding of the act of knowing. Armstrong demonstrates how the novelists' attitudes toward the process of knowing inform experiments with representation, through which they thematize the relation between the understanding of a fictional world and everyday habits of perception. Finally, he considers how these experiments with the strategies of narration produce a heightened awareness of the process of interpretation.

Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation

Examines the parallels between certain features of literary experience and functions of the brain. For critics and students of literature, this book engages fundamental questions within the humanities: What is aesthetic experience? What happens when we read a literary work? How does the interpretation of literature relate to other ways of knowing?

"Classrooms and curricula should be structured to foster the playful interaction that can teach students how to negotiate social and political differences in an emancipatory, noncoercive manner.... Teaching reading as a playful exercise of...