Paul B. Armstrong is Professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form, also from Cornell University Press, and of How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art, The Phenomenology of Henry James, and Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation.

In short, Armstrong's close, careful readings of James, Conrad, and Ford incorporate philosophical aesthetics into a unique interpretive vocabulary. As a result, The Challenge of Bewilderment finally advocates what it examines: the idea that readers may learn through a reflective response to bewilderment to suspend their investment in the social codes that construct their world, while attaining a capacity to reflect critically on the self-sustaining artifice of signs and meaning.- Richard Swartz (The Henry James Review)

Paul B. Armstrong is Professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form, also from Cornell University Press, and of How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art, The Phenomenology of Henry James, and Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation.

In short, Armstrong's close, careful readings of James, Conrad, and Ford incorporate philosophical aesthetics into a unique interpretive vocabulary. As a result, The Challenge of Bewilderment finally advocates what it examines: the idea that readers may learn through a reflective response to bewilderment to suspend their investment in the social codes that construct their world, while attaining a capacity to reflect critically on the self-sustaining artifice of signs and meaning.- Richard Swartz (The Henry James Review)

Paul B. Armstrong is Professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form, also from Cornell University Press, and of How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art, The Phenomenology of Henry James, and Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation.

In short, Armstrong's close, careful readings of James, Conrad, and Ford incorporate philosophical aesthetics into a unique interpretive vocabulary. As a result, The Challenge of Bewilderment finally advocates what it examines: the idea that readers may learn through a reflective response to bewilderment to suspend their investment in the social codes that construct their world, while attaining a capacity to reflect critically on the self-sustaining artifice of signs and meaning.- Richard Swartz (The Henry James Review)