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Loading... Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrativeby Lisa Zunshine
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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. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)809.3Literature By Topic History, description and criticism of more than two literatures FictionLC ClassificationRatingAverage: No ratings.Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
Strange concepts are the foundation of much science fiction (and other kinds of fiction, of course; Zunshine also discusses fairy tales a lot): "Violations of ontological expectations thus seem to be ripe with narrative possibilities. Turn to any realm of ordinary human experience (social, emotional, ethical), and consider it in the light of such a violation-- and there is a story waiting for you" (69). This, if I'm remembering and understanding Zunshine right, makes strange concepts very powerful: by violating our assumptions about how the universe works, they allow us to expose and explore those very assumptions, which is at its base, I think, the appeal of science fiction. (In sf, the counterontologies have an empirical/rational framework, as opposed to fairy tales, where it's all done by magic, which I think convinces us that the counterontologies have some level of real meaning in the case of robots that they don't in the case of orcs.)
It's a well written, clear book, obviously aimed at a literary critic who is not familiar with cognitive literary theory; I could see assigning this book to advanced undergraduates. If I have a complaint, it's that Zunshine betrays little awareness that people have gone before in some of these areas; I found her work pretty congruent with that of Darko Suvin (he claims "cognition" as one of the necessary conditions for sf, after all), for example, yet he goes uncited.