We tell ourselves stories in order to live, Joan Didion observed in The White Album. Why is this? Michael Austin asks, in Useful Fictions. Why, in particular, are human beings, whose very survival depends on obtaining true information, so drawn to fictional narratives? After all, virtually every human culture reveres some form of storytelling. Might there be an evolutionary reason behind our species need for stories?Drawing on evolutionary biology, anthropology, narrative theory, cognitive psychology, game theory, and evolutionary aesthetics, Austin develops the concept of a...
We tell ourselves stories in order to live, Joan Didion observed in The White Album. Why is this? Michael Austin asks, in Useful Fictions
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, popular works of literature attracted--as they attract today--sequels, prequels, franchises, continuations, and parodies. Sequels of all kinds demonstrate the economic realities of the literary marketplace. This represents something fundamental about the way human beings process narrative information. We crave narrative closure, but we also resist its finality, making such closure both inevitable and inadequate in human narratives. Many cultures incorporate this fundamental ambiguity towards closure in the mythic frameworks that fuel their...
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, popular works of literature attracted--as they attract today--sequels, prequels, franchises, continuation...
Job is perhaps the most difficult to understand of all books in the Bible. While a cursory reading of the text seems to relay a simple story of a righteous man whose love for God was tested through life's most difficult of challenges and rewarded for his faith through those trials, a closer reading of Job presents something far more complex and challenging. The majority of the text is a work of poetry that authors and artists through the centuries have recognized as being one of--if not the--greatest poem of the ancient world. In Re-reading Job: Understanding the Ancient World's Greatest...
Job is perhaps the most difficult to understand of all books in the Bible. While a cursory reading of the text seems to relay a simple story of a righ...
Music Video Games takes a look (and listen) at the popular genre of music games - video games in which music is at the forefront of player interaction and gameplay. With chapters on a wide variety of music games, ranging from well-known console games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band to new, emerging games for smartphones and tablets, scholars from diverse disciplines and backgrounds discuss the history, development, and cultural impact of music games.
Each chapter investigates important themes surrounding the ways in which we play music and play with music in...
Music Video Games takes a look (and listen) at the popular genre of music games - video games in which music is at the forefront of player i...
Music Video Games takes a look (and listen) at the popular genre of music games - video games in which music is at the forefront of player interaction and gameplay. With chapters on a wide variety of music games, ranging from well-known console games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band to new, emerging games for smartphones and tablets, scholars from diverse disciplines and backgrounds discuss the history, development, and cultural impact of music games.
Each chapter investigates important themes surrounding the ways in which we play music and play with music in...
Music Video Games takes a look (and listen) at the popular genre of music games - video games in which music is at the forefront of player i...
Alfreda Bell Bell Michael Austin Ardis E. Parshall
First published in 1855, Boadicea; the Mormon Wife belongs to a sub-genre of crime fiction that flourished in the Eastern United States during the 1850s. Boadicea has become increasingly important to scholars of Mormonism because it gives us a glimpse of the Mormon image in literature immediately after the Church's public acknowledgement of plural marriage. Over the next half century, this image would be sharpened and refined by writers with different rhetorical goals: to end polygamy, to attack Mormon theology, or just to tell a highly entertaining adventure story. In Boadicea, though, we...
First published in 1855, Boadicea; the Mormon Wife belongs to a sub-genre of crime fiction that flourished in the Eastern United States during the 185...
