An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history to examine patterns of “mindreading” in a wide range of literary works.\nFor over four thousand years, writers have been experimenting with what cognitive scientists call “mindreading”: constantly devising new social contexts for making their audiences imagine complex mental states of characters and narrators. In The Secret Life of Literature, Lisa Zunshine uncovers these mindreading patterns, which have, until now, remained invisible to both readers and critics, in works ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Invisible Man. Bringing together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary studies, this engaging book transforms our understanding of literary history.\nCentral to Zunshine’s argument is the exploration of mental states “embedded” within each other, as, for instance, when Ellison’s Invisible Man is aware of how his white Communist Party comrades pretend not to understand what he means, when they want to reassert their position of power. Paying special attention to how race, class, and gender inform literary embedments, Zunshine contrasts this dynamic with real-life patterns studied by cognitive and social psychologists. She also considers community-specific mindreading values and looks at the rise and migration of embedment patterns across genres and national literary traditions, noting particularly the use of deception, eavesdropping, and shame as plot devices. Finally, she investigates mindreading in children’s literature. Stories for children geared toward different stages of development, she shows, provide cultural scaffolding for initiating young readers into a long-term engagement with the secret life of literature.

The Secret Life of Literature

Literature & Fiction

ZUNSHINE, LISA

History & Criticism

The MIT Press

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.

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

Reference

Johns Hopkins University Press

BASTARDS AND FOUNDLINGS: ILLEGITIMACY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

A study of 18th century rhetoric, history, and literature concerning bastard and orphaned children.

British & Irish

Ohio State University Press

Why We Read Fiction offers a lucid overview of the most exciting area of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as "Theory of Mind" and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson’s Clarissa, Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Zunshine’s surprising new interpretations of well-known literary texts and popular cultural representations constantly prod her readers to rethink their own interest in fictional narrative. Written for a general audience, this study provides a jargon-free introduction to the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field known as cognitive approaches to literature and culture.

WHY WE READ FICTION: THEORY OF MIND AND THE NOVEL (THEORY INTERPRETATION NARRATIV)

Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Theory and Interpretation of Narrative)

In this compelling interdisciplinary study of what has been called the "century of illegitimacy,"&#157; Lisa Zunshine seeks to uncover the multiplicity of cultural meanings of illegitimacy in the English Enlightenment. Bastards and Foundlings pits the official legal views on illegitimacy against the actual everyday practices that frequently circumvented the law; it reconstructs the history of social institutions called upon to regulate illegitimacy, such as the London Foundling Hospital; and it examines a wide array of novels and plays written in response to the same concerns that informed the emergence and functioning of such institutions. By recreating the context of the national preoccupation with bastardy, with a special emphasis on the gender of the fictional bastard/foundling, Zunshine offers new readings of "canonical" texts, such as Steele's The Conscious Lovers, Defoe's Moll Flanders, Fielding's Tom Jones, Moore's The Foundling, Colman's The English Merchant, Richardson's Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, Burney's Evelina, Smith's Emmeline, Edgewort's Belinda, and Austen's Emma, as well as of less well-known works, such as Haywood's The Fortunate Foundlings, Shebbeare's The Marriage Act, Bennett's The Beggar Girl and Her Benefactors, and Robinson's The Natural Daughter.

BASTARDS FOUNDLINGS: ILLEGITIMACY IN 18TH CENTURY ENGLAND

History

Europe

Nabokov at the Limits (Border Crossings)

The eleven contributors to this volume investigate the connections between Nabokov's output and the fields of painting, music, and ballet.

Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing Critical Boundaries (Border Crossings)

Arts & Photography

Music

Routledge

Black Women’s Stories of Everyday Racism

Black Women's Stories of Everyday Racism puts literary narrative theory to work on an urgent real-world problem. The book calls attention to African American women's everyday experiences with systemic racism and demonstrates how four types of narrative theory can help generate strategies to explain and dismantle that racism. This volume presents fifteen stories told by eight midwestern African American women about their own experiences with casual and structural racism, followed by four detailed narratological analyses of the stories, each representing a different approach to narrative interpretation. The book makes a case for the need to hear the personal stories of these women and others like them as part of a larger effort to counter the systemic racism that prevails in the United States today.Readers will find that the women's stories offer powerful evidence that African Americans experience racism as an inescapable part of their day-to-day lives--and sometimes as a force that radically changes their lives. The stories provide experience-based demonstrations of how pervasive systemic racism is and how it perpetuates power differentials that are baked into institutions such as schools, law enforcement, the health care system, and business. Containing countless signs of the stress and trauma that accompany and follow from experiences of racism, the stories reveal evidence of the women's resilience as well as their unending need for it, as they continue to feel the negative effects of experiences that occurred many years ago. The four interpretive chapters note the complex skill involved in the women's storytelling. The analyses also point to the overall value of telling these stories: how they are sometimes cathartic for the tellers; how they highlight the importance of listening--and the likelihood of misunderstanding--and how, if they and other stories like them were heard more often, they would be a force to counteract the structural racism they so graphically expose.The Open Access version of this book, available at http: //www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

PHELAN, JAMES

Warhol, Robyn

Drake, Simone

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Books by ZUNSHINE, LISA

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by ZUNSHINE, LISA. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Secret Life of Literature

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

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

BASTARDS AND FOUNDLINGS: ILLEGITIMACY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

WHY WE READ FICTION: THEORY OF MIND AND THE NOVEL (THEORY INTERPRETATION NARRATIV)

Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Theory and Interpretation of Narrative)

BASTARDS AND FOUNDLINGS: ILLEGITIMACY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

BASTARDS FOUNDLINGS: ILLEGITIMACY IN 18TH CENTURY ENGLAND

Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing Critical Boundaries (Border Crossings)

Black Women’s Stories of Everyday Racism