By Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich , npr.org "If you've ever kept a journal, you've probably worried about someone coming across it and getting an uninvited peek into your personal life. But the daily traces we leave behind in our writings – more and more in today's world of emails,...

By Rob Horning from PopMatters. "On 1 April of this year, the New York Times ran an article by Patricia Cohen about “neuro lit crit”—neurologically informed literary criticism, which some English professors hope will be the savior of their departments. (“Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know...

By Richard E. Cytowic in Seed Magazine "From my perspective as a neurologist who studies minds and as a creative writer who imagines characters’ inner lives, Virginia Woolf’s mind is a marvel to behold. No two books are alike. “Not this, not that,” she seems to be saying as she rejects convention...

review by Michael Bérubé from American Scientist "Let me explain a thing or two about humanists like me. There are legions of us who reach for our guns when we hear the word genome. That’s because we’re all too familiar with the history of eugenics, and we flinch whenever someone attempts an “evolutionary...

The Los Angeles Times recently printed an article about How to Live , by Henry Alford, a comedian who set out to write a book about wisdom. "Nothing distresses one of my friends more than hearing that someone has died short of their 70th birthday and Psalm 90's promise of three score and 10...

By Christopher Cannon In an essay in which he explored the nature of the proverb, Kenneth Burke wondered why it would not be possible to 'extend such analysis … to encompass the whole field of literature'. For Burke, the possibility for such extension stemmed from a similarity in 'strategy'...

This unusual book examines definitions of the fable, apologue, parable, moral tale, etc. It then proposes the use of the term exemplum, used by medieval scribes, to define all types of wisdom narratives. It makes a cross-cultural structural analysis of the exemplum and identifies its tripartite structure...