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9781421415765 Academic Inspection Copy

How Literature Plays with the Brain

The Neuroscience of Reading and Art
  • ISBN-13: 9781421415765
  • Publisher: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
    Imprint: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
  • By Paul B. Armstrong
  • Price: AUD $69.99
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 14/08/2014
  • Format: Paperback 240 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Literary theory [DSA]
Description
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Contents
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'Literature matters,' says Paul B. Armstrong, 'for what it reveals about human experience, and the very different perspective of neuroscience on how the brain works is part of that story.' In How Literature Plays with the Brain, Armstrong examines the parallels between certain features of literary experience and functions of the brain. His central argument is that literature plays with the brain through experiences of harmony and dissonance which set in motion oppositions that are fundamental to the neurobiology of mental functioning. These oppositions negotiate basic tensions in the operation of the brain between the drive for pattern, synthesis, and constancy and the need for flexibility, adaptability, and openness to change.The challenge, Armstrong argues, is to account for the ability of readers to find incommensurable meanings in the same text, for example, or to take pleasure in art that is harmonious or dissonant, symmetrical or distorted, unified or discontinuous and disruptive. How Literature Plays with the Brain is the first book to use the resources of neuroscience and phenomenology to analyze aesthetic experience. For the neuroscientific community, the study suggests that different areas of researchthe neurobiology of vision and reading, the brain-body interactions underlying emotionsmay be connected to a variety of aesthetic and literary phenomena. For critics and students of literature, the study 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?

Preface
1. The Brain and Aesthetic Experience
2. How the Brain Learns to Read and the Play of Harmony and Dissonance
3. The Neuroscience of the Hermeneutic Circle
4. The Temporality of Reading and the Decentered Brain
5. The Social Brain and the Paradox of the Alter Ego
Epilogue
Notes
Index

""At present, when so many universities would gleefully discard the study of the arts in the service of a utilitarian turn in higher education, the evidence that Armstrong provides for their vital cognitive function and the coherence with which he presents that evidence is indeed both welcome and timely.""

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