Thomas F. X. Noble

Teaching Company

James A. W. Heffernan

Elizabeth Vandiver

Ronald B. Herzman

Susan Sage Heinzelman

This series presents some of the finest teachers in America, lecturing on some of the greatest literature ever written.

Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition

John E. Lincoln

Writing: A College Workbook, Fourth Edition, is a sure guide to writing effective sentences and managing punctuation, sentence mechanics, and spelling. It parallels and supplements Part 2, 'Writing Sentences, ' and Part 3, 'Punctuation and Mechanics, ' of Writing: A College Handbook, Fourth Edition. The Workbooks positive and supportive approach and its easily understood explanations and examples help build sentence power, while the exercises ensure that power is retained.

Writing, a College Handbook

Fourteen essays examine how the French Revolution has been represented in art, literature, and historical narratives from England, France, Germany, and the Caribbean.

Literature, Historiography, and Art

Representing the French Revolution

In works of Western literature ranging from Homer’s Odyssey to Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the giving and taking of hospitality is sometimes pleasurable, but more often perilous. Heffernan traces this leitmotiv through the history of our greatest writings, including Christ’s Last Supper, Macbeth’s murder of his royal guest, and Camus’s short story on French colonialism in Arab Algeria. By means of such examples and many more, this book considers what literary hosts, hostesses, and guests do to as well as for each other. In doing so, it shows how often treachery rends the fabric of trust that hospitality weaves.

Hospitality and Treachery in Western Literature

Though English has no word for the visual counterpart to literacy, Heffernan argues that the capacity to interpret pictures must be cultivated and deserves a name: picturacy. Using examples such as the pre-historic cave paintings of Lascaux, film versions of Frankenstein, the provocative photographs of Sally Mann, and the abstract canvases of Gerhard Richter, the volume illustrates how learning to decode the language of pictures resembles the process of learning to read. While words typically frame and regulate our experience of art, the study also explains how pictures can contest the authority of the words we use to interpret art.

Visual Art and Verbal Interventions

Cultivating Picturacy

Ekphrasis is the art of describing works of art, the verbal representation of visual representation. Profoundly ambivalent, ekphrastic poetry celebrates the power of the silent image even as it tries to circumscribe that power with the authority of the word. Over the ages its practitioners have created a museum of words about real and imaginary paintings and sculptures. In the first book ever to explore this museum, James Heffernan argues that ekphrasis stages a battle for mastery between the image and the word. Moving from the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante to contemporary American poetry, this book treats the history of struggle between rival systems of representation. Readable and well illustrated, this study of how poets have represented painting and sculpture is a major contribution to our understanding of the relation between the arts.

James A. W. Heffernan

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