Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative

by Lisa Zunshine

In this fresh and often playful interdisciplinary study, Lisa Zunshine presents a fluid discussion of how key concepts from cognitive science complicate our cultural interpretations of "strange" literary phenomena.

From Short Circuit to I, Robot, from The Parent Trap to Big Business, fantastic tales of rebellious robots, animated artifacts, and twins mistaken for each other are a permanent fixture in popular culture and have been since antiquity. Why do these strange concepts captivate the human imagination so thoroughly? Zunshine explores how cognitive science, specifically its ideas of essentialism and functionalism, combined with historical and cultural analysis, can help us understand why we find such literary phenomena so fascinating.

Drawing from research by such cognitive evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists as Scott Atran, Paul Bloom, Pascal Boyer, and Susan A. Gelman, Zunshine examines the cognitive origins of the distinction between essence and function and how unexpected tensions between these two concepts are brought into play in fictional narratives. Discussing motifs of confused identity and of twins in drama, science fiction’s use of robots, cyborgs, and androids, and nonsense poetry and surrealist art, she reveals the range and power of key concepts from science in literary interpretation and provides insight into how cognitive-evolutionary research on essentialism can be used to study fiction as well as everyday strange concepts.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

228 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 13, 2008

About the author

Lisa Zunshine is Bush-Holbrook Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, where she teaches courses in Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature and culture. She is a former Guggenheim fellow (2007) and the author or editor of eleven books, including Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (2005), Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006), Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Samuel Richardson (co-edited with Jocelyn Harris, 2006), Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative (2008), Acting Theory and the English Stage (2009), Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (ed., 2010), Approaches to Teaching the Works of John Dryden (co-edited with Jayne Lewis, 2013), Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture (2012) and The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (2015).

Reviews

[Craig McConnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much tighter than Why We Read Fiction, Zunshine explores a number of canonical works in terms of their essentialist and functionalist use of language. There's still a tension here between her complaints about literary analyses that are not falsifiable and her own framework, which she claims is universally applicable (making me wonder at times if it's not every bit as unfalsifiable as the earlier works she mocks), but the prose is lively and her enthusiasm infectious.

[Roy Kenagy]

Another find from Half-Price Books. Should help me defend the thesis that a SpongeBob cake pan is a perfectly acceptable public library resource. Zunshine has a recent contribution to narrative theory - Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel - that I haven't gotten around to yet.