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Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible

Author : Lisa Zunshine

Publisher : JHU Press

Page : 353 pages

File Size : 38,79 MB

Release : 2008-07-28

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 1421406705

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Book Description

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.



Cognitive Approaches to German Historical Film

Author : Jennifer Marston William

Publisher : Springer

Page : 205 pages

File Size : 36,20 MB

Release : 2016-12-07

Category : Performing Arts

ISBN : 3319393189

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Book Description

This book explores how minds at the movies understand minds in the movies and introduces readers to some fundamental principles of Cognitive Studies—namely conceptual blending, Theory of Mind, and empathy/perspective-taking—through their application to film analysis. A cognitive approach to recent popular historical films demonstrates cinema’s potential to stimulate viewers’ critical thinking about crucial events of the past century. Diverging from the focus on narrative processing in traditional cognitivist theory, this book examines film reception and production in the context of the latest developments in cognitive and social psychology. Turning to German cinema as a case study for this interdisciplinary partnership, Jennifer Marston William offers a fresh look at some internationally successful films of the twenty-first century, including Nowhere in Africa, Goodbye, Lenin!, Sophie Scholl, Downfall, The Lives of Others, and The Baader-Meinhof Complex.



Sexual Identities

Author : Patrick Colm Hogan

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 297 pages

File Size : 35,26 MB

Release : 2018

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 019085779X

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Book Description

Patrick Colm Hogan, a leading theorist of cognitive cultural studies, offers the first cognitive cultural study of identity in sex, sexuality, and gender. With precise conceptual distinctions, wide-ranging citation of empirical research, and careful explication of diverse literary works, Hogan defends a systematic skepticism about gender differences and a view of sexuality as evolved but also contingent and variable.



On Soulsring Worlds

Author : Marco Caracciolo

Publisher : Taylor & Francis

Page : 102 pages

File Size : 42,91 MB

Release : 2024-02-26

Category : Games & Activities

ISBN : 1040018165

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Book Description

The first book-length study devoted to FromSoftware games, On Soulsring Worlds explores how the Dark Souls series and Elden Ring are able to reconcile extreme difficulty in both gameplay and narrative with broad appeal. Arguing that the games are strategically positioned in relation to contemporary audiences and designed to tap into the new forms of interpretation afforded by digital media, the author situates the games vis-à-vis a number of current debates, including the posthuman and the ethics of gameplay. The book delivers an object lesson on the value of narrative (and) complexity in digital play and in the interpretive practices it gives rise to. Cross-fertilizing narrative theory, game studies, and nonhuman-oriented philosophy, this book will appeal to students and scholars of game studies, media studies, narratology, and video game ethnography.



Unnatural Narrative

Author : Jan Alber

Publisher : U of Nebraska Press

Page : 329 pages

File Size : 40,87 MB

Release : 2016-03

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 0803286716

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Book Description

A talking body part, a character that is simultaneously alive and dead, a shape-changing setting, or time travel: although impossible in the real world, such narrative elements do appear in the storyworlds of novels, short stories, and plays. Impossibilities of narrator, character, time, and space are not only common in today’s world of postmodernist literature but can also be found throughout the history of literature. Examples include the beast fable, the heroic epic, the romance, the eighteenth-century circulation novel, the Gothic novel, the ghost play, the fantasy narrative, and the science-fiction novel, among others. Unnatural Narrative looks at the startling and persistent presence of the impossible or “the unnatural” throughout British and American literary history. Layering the lenses of cognitive narratology, frame theory, and possible-worlds theory, Unnatural Narrative offers a rigorous and engaging new characterization of the unnatural and what it yields for individual readers as well as literary culture. Jan Alber demonstrates compelling interpretations of the unnatural in literature and shows the ways in which such unnatural phenomena become conventional in readers’ minds, altogether expanding our sense of the imaginable and informing new structures and genres of narrative engagement.



The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief

Author : Alison James

Publisher : Taylor & Francis

Page : 815 pages

File Size : 12,69 MB

Release : 2023-12-22

Category : Fiction

ISBN : 1000993361

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Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief offers a fresh reevaluation of the relationship between fiction and belief, surveying key debates and perspectives from a range of disciplines including narrative and cultural studies, science, religion, and politics. This volume draws on global, cutting edge research and theory to investigate the historically variable understandings of fictionality, and allows readers to grasp the role of fictions in our understanding of the world. This interdisciplinary approach provides a thorough introduction to the fundamental themes of: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives on Fiction Fiction, Fact, and Science Social Effects and Uses of Fiction Fiction and Politics Fiction and Religion Questioning how fictions in fact shape, mediate or distort our beliefs about the real world, essays in this volume outline the state of theoretical debates from the perspectives of literary theory, philosophy, sociology, religious studies, history, and the cognitive sciences. It aims to take stock of the real or supposed effects that fiction has on the world, and to offer a wide-reaching reflection on the implications of belief in fictions in the so-called “post-truth” era.



Approaches to Teaching The Plum in the Golden Vase (The Golden Lotus)

Author : Andrew Schonebaum

Publisher : Modern Language Association

Page : 262 pages

File Size : 10,84 MB

Release : 2022-07-22

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 1603294139

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Book Description

The Plum in the Golden Vase (also known as The Golden Lotus) was published in the early seventeenth century and may be the first long work of Chinese fiction written by a single (though anonymous) author. Featuring both complex structural elements and psychological and emotional realism, the novel centers on the rich merchant Ximen Qing and his household and describes the physical surroundings and material objects of a Ming Dynasty city. In part a social, political, and moral critique, the novel reflects on hierarchical power relations of family and state and the materialism of life at the time. The essays in this volume provide ideas for teaching the novel using a variety of approaches, from questions of genre, intertextuality, and the novel's reception to material culture, family and social dynamics, and power structures in sexual relations. Insights into the novel's representation of Buddhism, Chinese folk religion, legal culture, class, slavery, and obscenity are offered throughout the volume.



Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives

Author : Torsa Ghosal

Publisher : U of Nebraska Press

Page : 314 pages

File Size : 31,58 MB

Release : 2023

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 1496236734

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Book Description

"Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives interrogates the relationship of fictionality and the multimodal use of fact in modern narrative construction"--



Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Classics in International Modernism and the Avant-Garde

Author :

Publisher : BRILL

Page : 332 pages

File Size : 31,10 MB

Release : 2016-12-08

Category : Art

ISBN : 9004335498

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Book Description

Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Classics in International Modernism and the Avant-Garde examines how the writers and artists who lived from roughly the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth sought to build a new world from the ashes of one marked by two world wars, global economic depression, the rise of nationalism, and the collapse of empires. By surveying the modernist appropriation of Ancient Greece and Rome, the fourteen chapters in this volume demonstrate how the Classics, as foundational texts of the old order, were nevertheless adapted to suit the stylistic innovation and formal experimentation that characterized modernist and avant-garde literature and art.



The Seduction of Fiction

Author : Jean-François Vernay

Publisher : Springer

Page : 113 pages

File Size : 11,22 MB

Release : 2016-10-04

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 3319394533

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Book Description

By meshing psychology with literary analysis, this book inspires us to view the reading of fictional works as an emotional and seductive affair between reader and writer. Arguing that current teaching practices have contributed to the current decline in the study of literature, Jean-François Vernay’s plea brings a refreshing perspective by seeking new directions and conceptual tools to highlight the value of literature. Interdisciplinary in focus and relevant to timely discussions of the vitality between emotion and literary studies, particularly within the contexts of psychology, affect studies, and cognitive studies, this book will open up a space in which the formation of our emotions can be openly examined and discussed.