Related
Related Books
Reviews
Reviews
The book is stylistically well-written and features interesting readings of various texts.
The author gives herself a refreshingly modest assignment: to demonstrate that a certain cognitive predisposition has contributed to the development of, and continued interest in, specific literary motifs that occur across a wide variety of cultures. This is all that she tries to do, and she does it very well.
Zunshine renders the book accessible to the general reader.
Zunshine’s scholarship here and elsewhere is boldly exploratory.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x 9
Pages
232
ISBN
9780801887079
Illustration Description
10 halftones, 1 line drawing
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Part 1: "But what am I, then?": Chasing Personal Essences across National Literatures
1. Ural Mountains–Rome–London
2. Essentialism, Functionalism, and Cognitive Psychology
3. Possible
Acknowledgments
Part 1: "But what am I, then?": Chasing Personal Essences across National Literatures
1. Ural Mountains–Rome–London
2. Essentialism, Functionalism, and Cognitive Psychology
3. Possible Evolutionary Origins of Essentialist Thinking
4. "A bullet's a bullet's a bullet!"
5. Talk to the Door Politely or Tickle It in Exactly the Right Place
6. Resisting Essentialism
7. The Ever-Receding "Essence" of Sosia
8. Identical Twins and Theater
9. How Is Mr. Darcy Different from Colin Firth?
10. Looking for the Real Mademoiselle
11. "Mahatma Gandhi: war!" "But he was a pacifist." "Right! War!"
Part 2: Why Robots Go Astray, or The Cognitive Foundations of the Frankenstein Complex
1. What Is the Frankenstein Complex?
2. On Zygoons, Thricklers, and Kerpas
3. Theory of Mind
4. Theory of Mind and Categorization: Preliminary Implications
5. Concepts That Resist Categorization
6.... and the Stories They Make Possible
7. The Stories That Can Be Told about a Talking Needle
8. Asimov's "The Bicentennial Man"
9. Cognitive Construction of "Undoubted Facts": "The Bicentennial Man" and the Logic of Essentialism
10. Made to Rebel
11. Why Phyllis Is Still a Robot
12.... and Why Rei Toei Is Not
13. More Human Than Thou (Piercy's He, She and It)
14. Made to Pray
15. Made to Serve. Made to Obey. Made to Break Hearts
Part 3: Some Species of Nonsense
1. How Nonsense Makes Sense in The Hunting of the Snark
2. "Strings of Impossibilia" and What They Tell Us about the Value of Nonsense
3. "Painters of the Unimaginable," or More aboutReally Strange Concepts
Conclusion: Almost beyond Fiction
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Featured Contributor
Lisa Zunshine
Lisa Zunshine is Bush-Holbrook Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. She is the author and editor of ten books, including Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative and Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, both also published by Johns Hopkins. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher...Resources
