In Experiencing Fiction, James Phelan develops a provocative and engaging affirmative answer to the question, "Can we experience narrative fiction in similar ways?" Phelan grounds that answer in two elements of narrative located at the intersection between authorial design and reader response: judgments and progressions. Phelan contends that focusing on the three main kinds of judgment--interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic--and on the principles underlying a narrative's movement from beginning to end reveals the experience of reading fiction to be potentially sharable. In Part One, Phelan skillfully analyzes progressions and judgments in narratives with a high degree of narrativity: Jane Austen's Persuasion, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Edith Wharton's "Roman Fever," and Ian McEwan's Atonement. In Part Two, Phelan turns his attention to the different relationships between judgments and progressions in hybrid forms--in the lyric narratives of Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," Sandra Cisneros's "Woman Hollering Creek," and Robert Frost's "Home Burial," and in the portrait narratives of Alice Munro's "Prue" and Ann Beattie's "Janus." More generally, Phelan moves back and forth between the exploration of theoretical principles and the detailed work of interpretation. As a result, Experiencing Fiction combines Phelan's fresh and compelling readings of numerous innovative narratives with his fullest articulation of the rhetorical theory of narrative.

Foucault and Fiction develops a unique approach to thinking about the power of literature by drawing upon the often neglected concept of experience in Foucault's work. For Foucault, an 'experience book' is a book which transforms our experience by acting on us in a direct and unsettling way. Timothy O'Leary develops and applies this concept to literary texts. Starting from the premise that works of literature are capable of having a profound effect on their audiences, he suggests a way of understanding how these effects are produced. Offering extended analyses of Irish writers such as Swift, Joyce, Beckett, Friel and Heaney, O'Leary draws on Foucault's concept of experience as well as the work of Dewey, Gadamer, and Deleuze and Guattari. Combining these resources, he proposes a new approach to the ethics of literature. Of interest to readers in both philosophy and literary studies, this book offers new insights into Foucault's mature philosophy and an improved understanding of what it is to read and be affected by a work of fiction.

Presents, in graphic novel format, the story of Alissa Torres, whose husband was killed in the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, and her legal and psychological battles over his death.

Somebody Telling Somebody Else proposes a paradigm shift for narrative theory, contending that a view of narrative as a rhetorical action offers greater explanatory power than the standard view of narrative as a synthesis of story and discourse. James Phelan explores the consequences of this proposal for the interpretation of a wide range of narratives, from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to Ian McEwan's Enduring Love.

In this indispensable guide for anyone who must communicate in speech or writing, Schwartzberg shows that most of us fail to convince because we don't have a point-a concrete contention that we can argue, defend, illustrate, and prove. He lays out, step-by-step, how to develop one. In Joel's Schwartzberg's ten-plus years as a strategic communications trainer, the biggest obstacle he's come across-one that connects directly to nervousness, stammering, rambling, and epic fail-is that most speakers and writers don't have a point. They typically have just a title, a theme, a topic, an idea, an assertion, a catchphrase, or even something much less. A point is something more. It's a contention you can propose, argue, defend, illustrate, and prove. A point offers a position of potential value. Global warming is real is not a point. Scientific evidence shows that global warming is a real, human-generated problem that will have a devastating environmental and financial impact is a point. When we have a point, our influence snaps into place. We communicate belief, conviction, and urgency. This book shows you how to identify your point, leverage it, stick to it, and sell it and how to train others to identify and successfully make their own points.

A side from her Pulitzer Prize-winning talent as a novel writer, Edith Wharton also distinguished herself as a short story writer, publishing more than seventy-two stories in ten volumes during her lifetime. The best of her short fiction is collected here in Roman Fever and Other Stories. From her picture of erotic love and illegitimacy in the title story to her exploration of the aftermath of divorce detailed in "Souls Belated" and "The Last Asset," Wharton shows her usual skill "in dissecting the elements of emotional subtleties, moral ambiguities, and the implications of social restrictions," as Cynthia Griffin Wolff writes in her introduction. Roman Fever and Other Stories is a surprisingly contemporary volume of stories by one of our most enduring writers.