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Tangled Web They Weave
Truth, Falsity, & Advertisers
Ivan L. Preston
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996
Written for the ordinary consumer as well as for advertisers and trade regulators, this book aims to demonstrate how advertising can better serve its audience. Ivan Preston takes us down the slippery slope, from the high ground of honest product information to the unscrupulous bottom-of-the-barrel claims that are wholly false. Along the way he documents the subtle misrepresentations, half and lesser truths, and exploitations of our gullibility that abound in contemporary advertising.
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Testimonio
On The Politics Of Truth
John Beverley
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

A revealing perspective on the controversial literature of witnessing

These four germinal essays by John Beverley sparked the widespread discussion and debate surrounding testimonio—the socially and politically charged Latin American narrative of witnessing—that culminated with David Stoll’s highly publicized attack on Rigoberta Menchú’s celebrated testimonial text. Challenging Hardt and Negri’s Empire, Beverley’s extensive new introduction examines the broader historical, political, and ethical issues that this literature raises, tracing the development of testimonio from its emergence in the Cold War era to the rise of a globalized economy and U.S. political hegemony.

Informed by postcolonial studies and the current debate over multiculturalism and identity politics, Testimonio reaches across disciplinary boundaries to show how this particular literature at once represents and enacts new forms of agency on the part of previously repressed social subjects, as well as its potential as a new form of “alliance politics” between those subjects and artists, scientists, teachers, and intellectuals in a variety of local, national, and international contexts.
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The Three Dynamisms of Faith
Searching for Meaning, Fulfillment, and Truth
Louis Roy
Catholic University of America Press, 2017
Is the faith journey a matter of reflection, of emotion, or of obedience? Is there valid and convincing evidence that does enable human beings to assent to Jesus Christ and his message? What is the influence of cognitive assumptions and of affective tende
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Tortured Subjects
Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France
Lisa Silverman
University of Chicago Press, 2001
At one time in Europe, there was a point to pain: physical suffering could be a path to redemption. This religious notion suggested that truth was lodged in the body and could be achieved through torture. In Tortured Subjects, Lisa Silverman tells the haunting story of how this idea became a fixed part of the French legal system during the early modern period.

Looking closely at the theory and practice of judicial torture in France from 1600 to 1788, the year in which it was formally abolished, Silverman revisits dossiers compiled in criminal cases, including transcripts of interrogations conducted under torture, as well as the writings of physicians and surgeons concerned with the problem of pain, records of religious confraternities, diaries and letters of witnesses to public executions, and the writings of torture's abolitionists and apologists. She contends that torture was at the center of an epistemological crisis that forced French jurists and intellectuals to reconsider the relationship between coercion and sincerity, or between free will and evidence. As the philosophical consensus on which torture rested broke down, and definitions of truth and pain shifted, so too did the foundation of torture, until by the eighteenth century, it became an indefensible practice.
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Toward a Phenomenological Rhetoric
Writing, Profession, and Altruism
Barbara Couture
Southern Illinois University Press, 1998

Current rhetorical and critical theory for the most part separates writing from consciousness and presumes relative truth to be the only possible expressive goal for rhetoric. These presumptions are reflected in our tradition of persuasive rhetoric, which values writing that successfully argues one person’s belief at the expense of another’s. Barbara Couture presents a case for a phenomenological rhetoric, one that values and respects consciousness and selfhood and that restores to rhetoric the possibility of seeking an all-embracing truth through pacific and cooperative interaction.

Couture discusses the premises on which current interpretive theory has supported relative truth as the philosophical grounding for rhetoric, premises, she argues, that have led to constraints on our notion of truth that divorce it from human experience. She then shows how phenomenological philosophy might guide the theory and practice of rhetoric, reanimating its role in the human enterprise of seeking a shared truth. She proposes profession and altruism as two guiding metaphors for the phenomenological activity of "truth-seeking through interaction."

Among the contemporary rhetoricians and philosophers who influence Couture are Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Buber, Charles Altieri, Charles Taylor, Alasdair Maclntyre, and Jürgen Habermas.

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Tradition and Authenticity in the Search for Ecumenic Wisdom
Thomas Langan
University of Missouri Press, 1992

Our emerging world system is bringing the great traditions and cultures it has spawned into ever more intimate and dangerous contact. Langan argues that we must struggle toward a unity of discourse respectful of genuine experiences of varying civilizations if we are to live peacefully on one planet.

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Truth and Beauty
Aesthetics and Motivations in Science
S. Chandrasekhar
University of Chicago Press, 1987
"What a splendid book! Reading it is a joy, and for me, at least, continuing reading it became compulsive. . . . Chandrasekhar is a distinguished astrophysicist and every one of the lectures bears the hallmark of all his work: precision, thoroughness, lucidity."—Sir Hermann Bondi, Nature

The late S. Chandrasekhar was best known for his discovery of the upper
limit to the mass of a white dwarf star, for which he received the Nobel
Prize in Physics in 1983. He was the author of many books, including
The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes and, most recently,
Newton's Principia for the Common Reader.

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Truth and Existence
Jean-Paul Sartre
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Truth and Existence, written in response to Martin Heidegger's Essence of Truth, is a product of the years when Sartre was reaching full stature as a philosopher, novelist, playwright, essayist, and political activist. This concise and engaging text not only presents Sartre's ontology of truth but also addresses the key moral questions of freedom, action, and bad faith.

Truth and Existence is introduced by an extended biographical, historical, and analytical essay by Ronald Aronson.

"Truth and Existence is another important element in the recently published links between Sartre's existentialist ontology and his later ethical, political, and literary concerns. . . . The excellent introduction by Aronson will help readers not experienced in reading Sartre."—Choice

"Accompanied by an excellent introduction, this dense, lucidly translated treatise reveals Sartre as a characteristically 20th-century figure."—Publishers Weekly

Jean-Paul Sartre (1906-1980) was offered, but declined, the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. His many works of fiction, drama, and philosophy include the monumental study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot, and The Freud Scenario, both published in translation by the University of Chicago Press.
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Truth and Irony
Terence J. Martin
Catholic University of America Press, 2016
Tapping into selected works of Erasmus of Rotterdam, this book offers a series of philosophical meditations designed to retrieve and deploy a distinctively Erasmian manner of thinking - one that is capacious in its perception, agile in its judgments, and unsettling in its irony. In purpose, it takes a philosophical route, addressing perennial questions of self-knowledge - what we can know and how best to communicate what we take to be true, what we ought to do or how we should live, and what we might hope for or what would offer us fulfilment. In method, however, this work taps into the various strategies of irony at play in the works of Erasmus, looking for guidance in handling these age-old questions. What readers will find in Erasmus is a knack for playfully reversing appearances and realities, a penchant for pushing disturbing questions relentlessly to the limit, and a skill for juxtaposing oddly matched opposites. Again and again, Erasmus presses readers to rethink these fundamental questions with dexterity and nuance, ever ready to appreciate the surprising and unsettling upshot of ironic insight.
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Truth and Lies in Literature
Essays and Reviews
Stephen Vizinczey
University of Chicago Press, 1988
"Gathered here is a selection of the essays [of] the distinguished Hungarian born novelist Stephen Vizinczey. . . . Taken together they have a weight and amplitude of a very high order. . . . What is most impressive about these essays (apart from their range and erudition) is the way that literature and life are so subtly intertwined with each other. The passion for the one is the passion for the other. As it ought to be in criticism, but seldom is."—Mark Le Fanu, The Times (London)

"If a critic's job is to puncture pomposity, deflate over-hyped reputations and ferret out true value, then Vizinczey is master of the art."—Publishers Weekly

"Stephen Vizinczey comes on like a pistol-packing stranger here to root out corruption and remind us of our ideals. He carries the role off with inspired gusto. His boldness and pugnacity are bracing and can be very funny."—Ray Sawhill, Newsweek

"Every piece in the book is good, and many are so good that, after dipping into the middle, I stayed up half of the night, reading with growing amazement and admiration."—Bruce Bebb, Los Angeles Reader
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Truth and Objectivity
Crispin Wright
Harvard University Press, 1992
Crispin Wright offers an original perspective on the place of “realism” in philosophical inquiry. He proposes a radically new framework for discussing the claims of the realists and the anti-realists. This framework rejects the classical “deflationary” conception of truth yet allows both disputants to respect the intuition that judgments, whose status they contest, are at least semantically fitted for truth and may often justifiably be regarded as true. In the course of his argument, Wright offers original critical discussions of many central concerns of philosophers interested in realism, including the “deflationary” conception of truth, internal realist truth, scientific realism and the theoreticity of observation, and the role of moral states of affairs in explanations of moral beliefs.
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Truth and Other Enigmas
Michael Dummett
Harvard University Press, 1978

This collection of Michael Dummett’s philosophical essays, spanning more than twenty years, ranges in topic from time to the philosophy of mathematics, but is unified by a steady philosophical outlook. The essays are, in one way or another, informed by Dummett’s concern with metaphysical questions and his belief that the correct approach to them is via the theory of meaning. Reflected here is Dummett’s conviction that the concept of truth is of central importance both for the theory of meaning and for metaphysics. As he sees it, an adequate elucidation of the concept of truth requires nothing less than the construction of a satisfactory theory of meaning. At the same time, resolution of the traditional problems of metaphysics turns critically upon the way in which the concept of truth applies to each of various large ranges of statements, and especially upon whether the statements in each such range satisfy the principle that every statement must be true or false.

The book includes all Dummett’s philosophical essays that were published or given as public lectures before August 1976, with the exception of a few he did not think it worthwhile to reprint and of the two entitled “What Is a Theory of Meaning?” One essay appears here for the first time in English and two have not been previously published. In an extensive preface, Dummett comments on the essays and seeks to relate them to the philosophical background against which they were written.

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Truth and Predication
Donald Davidson
Harvard University Press, 2008

This brief book takes readers to the very heart of what it is that philosophy can do well. Completed shortly before Donald Davidson's death at 85, Truth and Predication brings full circle a journey moving from the insights of Plato and Aristotle to the problems of contemporary philosophy. In particular, Davidson, countering many of his contemporaries, argues that the concept of truth is not ambiguous, and that we need an effective theory of truth in order to live well.

Davidson begins by harking back to an early interest in the classics, and an even earlier engagement with the workings of grammar; in the pleasures of diagramming sentences in grade school, he locates his first glimpse into the mechanics of how we conduct the most important activities in our life--such as declaring love, asking directions, issuing orders, and telling stories. Davidson connects these essential questions with the most basic and yet hard to understand mysteries of language use--how we connect noun to verb. This is a problem that Plato and Aristotle wrestled with, and Davidson draws on their thinking to show how an understanding of linguistic behavior is critical to the formulating of a workable concept of truth.

Anchored in classical philosophy, Truth and Predication nonetheless makes telling use of the work of a great number of modern philosophers from Tarski and Dewey to Quine and Rorty. Representing the very best of Western thought, it reopens the most difficult and pressing of ancient philosophical problems, and reveals them to be very much of our day.

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The Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Mary Ingouville Burton
Ohio University Press, 2017

In 1995, South Africa’s new government set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a lynchpin of the country’s journey forward from apartheid. In contrast to the Nuremberg Trials and other retributive responses to atrocities, the TRC’s emphasis on reconciliation marked a restorative approach to addressing human rights violations and their legacies. The hearings, headed by Bishop Desmond Tutu, began in spring of 1996.

The commission was set up with three purposes: to investigate abuses, to assist victims with rehabilitation, and to consider perpetrators’ requests for amnesty. More than two decades after the first hearings, the TRC’s legacy remains mixed. Many families still do not know what became of their loved ones, and the commission came under legal challenges both from ex-president F. W. de Klerk and the African National Congress. Yet, the TRC fulfilled a vital role in the transition from apartheid to democracy, and has become a model for other countries.

This latest addition to the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series is a trenchant look at the TRC’s entire, stunningly ambitious project. And as a longtime activist for justice in South Africa and a former commissioner of the TRC, Mary Ingouville Burton is uniquely positioned to write this complex story.

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Truth and Tales
Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media
Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson
The Ohio State University Press, 2015
In the medieval period, as in the media culture of the present, learned and popular forms of talk were intermingled everywhere. They were also highly mobile, circulating in speech, writing, and symbol, as performances as well as in material objects. The communication through and between different media we all negotiate in daily life did not develop from a previous separation of orality and writing, but from a communications network not unlike our own, if slower, and similarly shaped by disparities of access. Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media, edited by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, develops a variety of approaches to the labor of imaginatively reconstructing this network from its extant artifacts.
 
Truth and Tales includes fourteen essays by medieval literary scholars and historians. Some essays focus on written artifacts that convey high or popular learning in unexpected ways. Others address a social problem of concern to all, demonstrating the genres and media through which it was negotiated. Still others are centered on one or more texts, detailing their investments in popular as well as learned knowledge, in performance as well as writing. This collective archaeology of medieval media provides fresh insight for medieval scholars and media theorists alike.
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Truth and the Heretic
Crises of Knowledge in Medieval French Literature
Karen Sullivan
University of Chicago Press, 2005
In the Middle Ages, the heretic, more than any other social or religious deviant, was experienced as an imaginary construct. Everyone believed heretics existed, but no one believed himself or herself to be a heretic, even if condemned as such by representatives of the Catholic Church. Those accused of heresy, meanwhile, maintained that they were the good Christians and their accusers were the false ones.

Exploring the figure of the heretic in Catholic writings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as well as the heretic's characterological counterpart in troubadour lyrics, Arthurian romance, and comic tales, Truth and the Heretic seeks to understand why French literature of the period celebrated the very characters who were so persecuted in society at large. Karen Sullivan proposes that such literature allowed medieval culture a means by which to express truths about heretics and the epistemological anxieties they aroused. 
The first book-length study of the figure of the heretic in medieval French literature, Truth and the Heretic explores the relation between orthodoxy and deviance, authority and innovation, and will fascinate historians of ideas and literature as well as scholars of religion, critical theory, and philosophy.
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Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought
Mood, Modality, and Propositional Attitudes
Anastasia Giannakidou and Alda Mari
University of Chicago Press, 2021

Can language directly access what is true, or is the truth judgment affected by the subjective, perhaps even solipsistic, constructs of reality built by the speakers of that language? The construction of such subjective representations is known as veridicality, and in this book Anastasia Giannakidou and Alda Mari deftly address the interaction between truth and veridicality in the grammatical phenomena of mood choice: the indicative and subjunctive choice in the complements of modal expressions and propositional attitude verbs.

Combining several strands of analysis—formal linguistic semantics, syntactic theory, modal logic, and philosophy of language—Giannakidou and Mari’s theory not only enriches the analysis of linguistic modality, but also offers a unified perspective of modals and propositional attitudes. Their synthesis covers mood, modality, and attitude verbs in Greek and Romance languages, while also offering broader applications for languages lacking systematic mood distinction, such as English. Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought promises to shape longstanding conversations in formal semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, among other areas of linguistics.

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Truth Decay
An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life
Michael D. Kavanagh
RAND Corporation, 2018
Political and civil discourse in the United States is characterized by “Truth Decay,” defined as increasing disagreement about facts, a blurring of the line between opinion and fact, an increase in the relative volume of opinion compared with fact, and lowered trust in formerly respected sources of factual information. This report explores the causes and wide-ranging consequences of Truth Decay and proposes strategies for further action.
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Truth in History
Oscar Handlin
Harvard University Press, 1979

One of the most eminent historians of our time offers here a perceptive guide to the study of history. Truth in History teaches how to read, how to analyze, how to discriminate. It is as helpful to the reader whose history is created daily in the news as it is to the professional historian whose field is in a crisis of disarray.

A Pulitzer Prize winner and mentor for more than a generation of American historians, Oscar Handlin instructs his readers in the fundamentals of his field. He tells us how to deal with evidence, how to discern patterns amid flux, how to situate ourselves in history, and how to recognize where fact shades subtly into opinion. He combines a historian’s knowledge with a historiographer’s breadth and a philosopher’s temperament. He is concerned with a historian’s limitations and with the ways one can operate honestly within those limitations. He brings a full appreciation of the past to his evaluation of what is modern. And while carefully examining recent developments in his discipline, he culls genuine achievements from the trends that confuse originality with true worth.

Handlin everywhere enlivens his discussion with brilliant details. As he pursues broad definitions of history and its uses, he also attends to specific subjects, showing how they bear directly on each other and on his concerns. He deals with Populism, capitalism, laissez-faire, the two-party system, the New History, ethnicity, and roots, treating all with the flair of an accomplished man of letters. Only a scholar of Handlin’s experience and expertise could have brought such a wealth of particular facts to an issue of such general importance: truth in history.

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Truth in Motion
The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination
Martin Holbraad
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Embarking on an ethnographic journey to the inner barrios of Havana among practitioners of Ifá, a prestigious Afro-Cuban tradition of divination, Truth in Motion reevaluates Western ideas about truth in light of the practices and ideas of a wildly different, and highly respected, model. Acutely focusing on Ifá, Martin Holbraad takes the reader inside consultations, initiations, and lively public debates to show how Ifá practitioners see truth as something to be not so much represented, as transformed. Bringing his findings to bear on the discipline of anthropology itself, he recasts the very idea of truth as a matter not only of epistemological divergence but also of ontological difference—the question of truth, he argues, is not simply about how things may appear differently to people, but also about the different ways of imagining what those things are. By delving so deeply into Ifá practices, Truth in Motion offers cogent new ways of thinking about otherness and how anthropology can navigate it.  
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Truth in Nonfiction
Essays
David Lazar
University of Iowa Press, 2008
Even before the controversy that surrounded the publication of A Million Little Pieces, the question of truth has been at the heart of memoir. From Elie Wiesel to Benjamin Wilkomirski to David Sedaris, the veracity of writers’ claims has been suspect. In this fascinating and timely collection of essays, leading writers meditate on the subject of truth in literary nonfiction. As David Lazar writes in his introduction, “How do we verify? Do we care to? (Do we dare to eat the apple of knowledge and say it’s true? Or is it a peach?) Do we choose to? Is it a subcategory of faith? How do you respond when someone says, ‘This is really true’? Why do they choose to say it then?”

The past and the truth are slippery things, and the art of nonfiction writing requires the writer to shape as well as explore. In personal essays, meditations on the nature of memory, considerations of the genres of memoir, prose poetry, essay, fiction, and film, the contributors to this provocative collection attempt to find answers to the question of what truth in nonfiction means.

Contributors: John D’Agata, Mark Doty, Su Friedrich, Joanna Frueh, Ray González, Vivian Gornick, Barbara Hammer, Kathryn Harrison, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Leonard Kriegel, David Lazar, Alphonso Lingis, Paul Lisicky, Nancy Mairs, Nancy K. Miller, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Phyllis Rose, Oliver Sacks, David Shields, and Leo Spitzer
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The Truth in Painting
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 1987
"The four essays in this volume constitute Derrida's most explicit and sustained reflection on the art work as pictorial artifact, a reflection partly by way of philosophical aesthetics (Kant, Heidegger), partly by way of a commentary on art works and art scholarship (Van Gogh, Adami, Titus-Carmel). The illustrations are excellent, and the translators, who clearly see their work as both a rendering and a transformation, add yet another dimension to this richly layered composition. Indispensable to collections emphasizing art criticism and aesthetics."—Alexander Gelley, Library Journal
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The Truth in Painting
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 1987
"The four essays in this volume constitute Derrida's most explicit and sustained reflection on the art work as pictorial artifact, a reflection partly by way of philosophical aesthetics (Kant, Heidegger), partly by way of a commentary on art works and art scholarship (Van Gogh, Adami, Titus-Carmel). The illustrations are excellent, and the translators, who clearly see their work as both a rendering and a transformation, add yet another dimension to this richly layered composition. Indispensable to collections emphasizing art criticism and aesthetics."—Alexander Gelley, Library Journal
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Truth in Philosophy
Barry Allen
Harvard University Press, 1993
The goal of philosophers is truth, but for a century or more they have been bothered by Nietzsche’s question, “What is the good of truth?” Barry Allen shows what truth has come to mean in the philosophical tradition, what is wrong with many of the ways of conceiving truth, and why philosophers refuse to confront squarely the question of the value of truth—why it is always taken to be an unquestioned concept. What is distinctive about Allen’s book is his historical approach. Surveying Western thought from the pre-Socratics to the present day, Allen identifies and criticizes two core assumptions: that truth implies a realist metaphysics, and that truth is a good thing.
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Truth in Public Life
Vernon White, Stephen Lamport, and Claire Foster-Gilbert
Haus Publishing, 2020
In Truth in Public Life, three public servants—a theologian, an economist, and an ethicist—contend for both the existence and moral imperatives of absolute truth. Each argues that society, built on ethical leadership and communal accountability, cannot be sustained without a widespread commitment to objectivity. This commitment begins at the top: policymakers must resist political expediency, judges must believe victims, journalists must embrace complexity, and the public must hold its leaders accountable to consistent, ethical standards. This short book offers a potent reminder that in a world of fake news, state lies, and echo chambers, the truth matters more than ever. For our public institutions to survive, we must define and protect the truth against all comers
 
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The Truth of Science
Physical Theories and Reality
Roger G. Newton
Harvard University Press, 1997

It's not a scientific truth that has come into question lately but the truth--the very notion of scientific truth. Bringing a reasonable voice to the culture wars that have sprung up around this notion, this book offers a clear and constructive response to those who contend, in parodies, polemics and op-ed pieces, that there really is no such thing as verifiable objective truth--without which there could be no such thing as scientific authority.

A distinguished physicist with a rare gift for making the most complicated scientific ideas comprehensible, Roger Newton gives us a guided tour of the intellectual structure of physical science. From there he conducts us through the understanding of reality engendered by modern physics, the most theoretically advanced of the sciences. With its firsthand look at models, facts, and theories, intuition and imagination, the use of analogies and metaphors, the importance of mathematics (and now, computers), and the "virtual" reality of the physics of micro-particles, The Truth of Science truly is a practicing scientist's account of the foundations, processes, and value of science.

To claims that science is a social construction, Newton answers with the working scientist's credo: "A body of assertions is true if it forms a coherent whole and works both in the external world and in our minds." The truth of science, for Newton, is nothing more or less than a relentless questioning of authority combined with a relentless striving for objectivity in the full awareness that the process never ends. With its lucid exposition of the ideals, methods, and goals of science, his book performs a great feat in service of this truth.

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The Truth of Uncertainty
Beyond Ideology in Science and Literature
Edward L. Galligan
University of Missouri Press, 1998

In the last chapter of Walden, Henry David Thoreau proclaims a simple yet profound conviction: "Any truth is better than make- believe." Edward Galligan shares this conviction. In The Truth of Uncertainty: Beyond Ideology in Science and Literature, he argues that contemporary American critics should embrace literary truths with all of their ardent uncertainties rather than cling to the make-believe certainties of ideologies.

 Postmodern critics fail to ask the truth-seeker's essential question, What does the evidence prove? and instead trust the generalizations and slogans of ideologies to guide their interpretations. Attempting to be up-to-date and profound, these critics lose sight of the literature they are supposed to explore.

The Truth of Uncertainty celebrates values commonly associated with modern, not postmodern criticism, applying them to contemporary works in a series of fresh and unusual inquiries. Galligan finds important implications for criticism in work from the physical sciences that are rarely touched on by American intellectuals, such as Gerald M. Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind and Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. Likewise, he finds illumination in the works of novelists that American critics have largely ignored—Josef Skvorecky, George V. Higgins, Mary Lee Settle, Robertson Davies.

As a consequence of dealing with these "unusual" texts, Galligan presents a refreshing interpretation of a number of important concepts: language is grounded in talk; all literary criticism is subjective and tentative because reading is a highly subjective enterprise; and, most important, the world is real and any truth is indeed better than make-believe. He moves from a rejection of criticism in the service of ideology to an affirmation of criticism in the service of truthfulness.

The ideas celebrated in The Truth of Uncertainty are timeless and valuable. Galligan returns to the text and provides a penetrating critique of the state of contemporary criticism, which has abandoned truth for ideology. The result is an eloquent salute to literature itself.

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Truth or Dare
Art and Documentary
Edited by Gail Pearce and Cahal McLaughlin
Intellect Books, 2007
The new wave of documentaries that prominently feature their filmmakers, such as the works of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, have attracted fresh, new audiences to the form—but they have also drawn criticism that documentaries now promote entertainment at the expense of truth. Truth or Dare examines the clash between the authenticity claimed by documentaries and their association with imagination and experimental contemporary art. An experienced group of practitioners, artists, and theorists here question this binary, and the idea of documentary itself, in a cross-disciplinary volume that will force us to reconsider how competing interests shape filmmaking. 
 
 
 
 
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Truth
Studies of a Robust Presence
Kurt Pritzl
Catholic University of America Press, 2010
Truth: Studies of a Robust Presence brings together groundbreaking studies of objective truth as a robust, philosophically consequential reality and a compelling presence in all areas and dimensions of human life.
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