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Drawing on Homer, Plato, Proust, and others the author defines beauty as a founding principle and reveals its relationship to ethics (view table of contents)

Product Description: The scientific research literature on memory is enormous. Yet until now no single book has focused on the complex interrelationships of memory and belief. This book brings together eminent scholars from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, literature, and medicine to discuss such provocative issues as "false memories," in which people can develop vivid recollections of events that never happened; retrospective biases, in which memories of past experiences are influenced by one's current beliefs; and implicit memory, or the way in which nonconscious influences of past experience shape current beliefs...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Discusses five principal practices writers use to instruct readers in the art of mental composition (view table of contents)

Product Description: "These essays are about previous ends of centuries, but are also themselves fin-de-siècle instruments and achievements. They will become part of any future study of our own time."--Peter Sacks, The Johns Hopkins University.In Les Fins de Siècle Elaine Scarry brings together an eminent group of contributors to examine a subject that increasingly occupies our thoughts as this century--and this millennium--approaches an end...read more

Product Description: This collection of essays displays the author's developing concern with the problematics of representation as exemplified in literary texts that deal with such concepts as work, pain, time, and the cosmos. Through her readings of texts by Thomas Hardy, Samuel Beckett, Boethius, William Thackeray and others, Scarry demonstrates the difficulties and the complexities of the ways in which language and imagery attempt, and fail, to make present some aspects of the "real...read more

Product Description: Polemically set against the weightlessness of much recent discourse, this book explores the body as the ultimate testing ground for debates over language's ability to refer to the world.

Discusses the inexpressibility of physical pain and analyzes the philosophical and cultural aspects of pain, torture, and war