Bücher von Peter Brooks

""'There's nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it.' Thus spake Tyrion in the final episode of Game of Thrones, claiming the throne for Bran the Broken. Many viewers liked neither the choice of king nor its rationale. But the claim that story brings you to world dominance seems by now so banal that it's common wisdom. Narrative seems to have become accepted as the one and only form of knowledge and speech that regulates human affairs." So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks's reckoning with today's flourishing cult of story. Forty years after Brooks published his seminal work Reading for the Plot, his own important contribution to what came to be known as the "narrative turn" in contemporary criticism and philosophy, he returns to question the unquestioning fashion in which story is now embraced as excuse or explanation and the fact that every brand or politician comes equipped with one. In a discussion that ranges from Gone Girl to legal argument, to the power storytellers exercise over their audiences, to what it means for readers and listeners to project themselves imaginatively into fictional characters, Brooks reminds us that among the powers of narrative is the power to deceive. Precisely because story does command our attention so, we must be skeptical of it and cultivate ways of thinking about our world and ourselves that run counter to our penchant for a good story"--

In 1963 George Wilson, the landlord of the Fox and Grapes public house in Sneinton, Nottingham was brutally stabbed to death outside his pub. The pub was known to all of the citizens of Nottingham as ?The Pretty Windows? and this name became synonymous with one of Nottingham?s most vicious and frenzied murders.George Wilson?s attacker was never brought to justice.This book charts a brief history of Sneinton and the part that the pub played, and still plays, in the local community. It uses contemporary newspaper reports to examine the murder, and explores the possible links to other murders committed in the same area in the years immediately prior to and just after 1963.

Is there an ethics of reading, and is this something that the interpretive humanities can and should to contribute to other professional fields, including law, and to public life?

"e;We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going,"e; Peter Brooks writes in Enigmas of Identity. Many of us are also uncomfortably aware that we cannot provide a convincing account of our identity to others or even ourselves. Despite or because of that failure, we keep searching for identity, making it up, trying to authenticate it, and inventing excuses for our unpersuasive stories about it. This wide-ranging book draws on literature, law, and psychoanalysis to examine important aspects of the emergence of identity as a peculiarly modern preoccupation. In particular, the book addresses the social, legal, and personal anxieties provoked by the rise of individualism and selfhood in modern culture. Paying special attention to Rousseau, Freud, and Proust, Brooks also looks at the intersection of individual life stories with the law, and considers the creation of an introspective project that culminates in psychoanalysis. Elegant and provocative, Enigmas of Identity offers new insights into the questions and clues about who we think we are.