Narrative comprehension and film

Sample

Karl Kroeber

"Describing in detail precise differences between the psychological experience of reading a novel and watching a movie, Make Believe in Film and Fiction shows how movies' unique magnification of movements produces stories especially potent in exposing hypocrisy, the spread of criminality in contemporary society, and the relation of private experience to the natural environment. By contrasting novels with visual storytelling the book also displays how fiction facilitates sharing of subjective fantasies, frees the mind from limiting spatial and temporal preconceptions, and dramatizes the ethical significance of even trivial and commonplace behavior, while intensifying readers' awareness of how they think and feel."--Jacket.

Sample

Marc Perlman

Describes and analyzes seven classic movies, from "Metropolis" to "Annie Hall," and places them in the context of cinema history.

Sample

Hayley Mitchell Haugen

Who is Lemony Snicket? Is he an author, an alter ego, or a character in the popular children's books, A Series of Unfortunate Events Learn all about this mysterious guy in KidHaven's Lemony Snicket. This text sheds light on Snicket's childhood, his success as an author, the zany antics that have followed, and what he is up to today.

Sample

Joseph Litvak

Theoretically sophisticated: How often has this term been used to distinguish a work of contemporary criticism, and what, exactly, does it mean? In Strange Gourmets, Joseph Litvak reclaims sophistication from its negative connotations and turns the spotlight on those who, even as they demonize sophistication, surreptitiously and extensively use it. Though commonly thought of as a kind of wordliness as its best and an elitist snobbery at its worst, sophistication, Litvak reminds us, remains tied to its earlier, if forgotten, meaning of "perversion" - a perversion whose avatars are the homosexual and the intellectual. Proceeding with his investigations from a specifically gay academic perspective, Litvak presents thoroughly inventive readings of novels by Austen, Thackeray, and Proust, and of theoretical works by Adorno and Barthes, each text epitomizing sophistication in one of its more familiar modes. Among the issues he explores are the ways in which these texts teach sophistication, the embarrassment that sophistication causes the sophisticated, and how the class politics of sophistication are inseparable from its sexual politics.