The Cognitive Representation of Fantasy Versus Pretense

Do our minds process fantasy, pretense, and reality differently? Participants read fantastical (Snow White eating an apple), pretend (a girl pretending to be Snow White), or realistic (a girl eating an apple) vignettes. Participants’ reaction to a property of each vignette’s realistic context (apple as ‘delicious’) or its unrealistic context (apple as ‘poisonous’) was measured by a computer program. Differences in study 1 reaction time indicate that fantasy may require different mental representation than pretense and reality. Differences in study 2 fail to duplicate results from the fantasy condition in study 1, instead finding differences in mental representation after reading pretend vignettes. Trends in both study 1 and 2 indicate possible influences of fantasy and pretense on realistic thought

Shovels and Swords: How realistic and fantastical themes affect children's word learning

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Research has shown that storybooks and play sessions help preschool children learn vocabulary, thereby benefiting their language and school readiness skills. But the kind of content that leads to optimal vocabulary learning – realistic or fantastical – remains largely unexplored. We investigate this issue as part of a large-scale study of vocabulary learning in low-income classrooms. Preschoolers (N = 154) learned 20 new words over the course of a two-week intervention. These words were taught using either realistic (e.g., farms) or fantastical (e.g., dragons) storybooks and toys. Children learned the new words in both conditions, and their comprehension knowledge did not differ across conditions. However, children who engaged in stories and play with a fantastical theme showed significantly greater gains in their production knowledge. Reasons for and implications of this result are discussed

A Blend of Absurdism and Humanism: Defending Kurt Vonnegut’s Place in the Secondary Setting

This essay argues that Kurt Vonnegut blends a unique humanist stance into his absurdist plots and characters, ultimately urging readers to confront the absurd with a kindness and human decency his protagonists often find rare. As a result of this absurd and humanist synthesis, I defend and promote Vonnegut’s place in the secondary English curriculum, despite his rank on many banned books lists, since his characters’ journeys correlate thematically with the growth and process of postmodern adolescents and encourage moral responsibility without sentimental manipulation. Focusing on Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Slaughterhouse-Five as primary sources, specifically for Vonnegut’s view of their success and their more frequent use in the secondary setting, I explore Vonnegut’s unique postmodern style. Using personal and recorded interviews as well as literary scholarship, I attempt to forge a new outlook on the connection between Vonnegut and adolescent learners. His protagonists struggle with the same philosophical questions that adolescents are beginning to ponder as they develop their ability to think abstractly. I argue that Vonnegut’s moral response to these questions will provide students with a framework from which they may begin to formulate their own answers in a universe they cannot control. Vonnegut’s novels strive to better humanity, and in teaching our youngest generations how he sought to do so may better the society in which we exist together

Amazonian Visions: Animating Ghosts

Amazonian Visions is a practice-based research project that finds associations between the concepts of expanded cinema and animation, and the myriad worlds of the Amazonian psychedelic brew, ayahuasca. I argue that expanded animation is a medium not unlike cultural practices of expanded vision and psychedelic experiences inspired by ayahuasca. By juxtaposing these two concepts, tracing their genealogies, and examining unexpected links between the two, I propose that both are techniques that allow the fantastical to enter the ordinary. This theoretical framework informs my expanded animation work, in particular the shows Tranquilandia and Tres Esquinas, where the histories of the Colombian Amazon are transformed through ayahuasca visions into digital animations and immersive installations

The symbolic epistemological implications of the different mythological set up of the (Egyptian)-Mesopotamian culture compared to the Grecian one

The Mesopotamian peoples were never really dominated by the reason the way we conceptualize it. It's to the revelation as direct emanation of the divine that they ascribed the appearance of knowledge

Feeling and Healing Eco-social Catastrophe: The Horrific Slipstream of Danis Goulet\u27s Wakening

Cree/Métis filmmaker Danis Goulet’s science fiction short Wakening (2013) is set in Canada’s near future, yet the film reveals a slipstream of time where viewers are invited to contemplate the horrors of ecosocial crises—future, past, and present. I argue Wakening, as futuristic ecohorror, produces horrific feelings in the moment of its viewing that are inevitably entangled with the past, inviting its audiences to experience the monstrous contexts of Indigenous lives across time. To articulate this temporal dynamism, I overlay two key conceptual understandings: Walter Benjamin’s critiques of Western progress and historicism, and Indigenous notions of a Native slipstream. When brought together in Wakening, which is inspired by the First Nations movement Idle No More, these concepts not only help expose the horror of Indigenous ecosocial crises wrought by colonial and neocolonial occupations but also draw our attention to the timelessness of Indigenous resistance in the face of such ecohorror. Ultimately, there are two significant implications in understanding Wakening as ecohorror of dynamic temporality. First, such a reading continues the important work of revisioning the theoretical and critical boundaries of Western cinema. Goulet’s play with audiences’ familiar expectations of horror’s invitations to the weird challenge us all to recalibrate our sense of generic cinematic representation and its purpose. Relatedly, such readings highlight film’s politics of emotion: its ability to generate “affective alliances” that can potentially help us all re-imagine our temporal and spatial engagements with the world at large

Do cavies talk? The effect of anthropomorphic picture books on children\u27s knowledge about animals

Many books for young children present animals in fantastical and unrealistic ways, such as wearing clothes, talking and engaging in human-like activities. This research examined whether anthropomorphism in children\u27s books affects children\u27s learning and conceptions of animals, by specifically assessing the impact of depictions (a bird wearing clothes and reading a book) and language (bird described as talking and as having human intentions). In Study 1, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children saw picture books featuring realistic drawings of a novel animal. Half of the children also heard factual, realistic language, while the other half heard anthropomorphized language. In Study 2, we replicated the first study using anthropomorphic illustrations of real animals. The results show that the language used to describe animals in books has an effect on children\u27s tendency to attribute human-like traits to animals, and that anthropomorphic storybooks affect younger children\u27s learning of novel facts about animals. These results indicate that anthropomorphized animals in books may not only lead to less learning but also influence children\u27s conceptual knowledge of animals

The World to Come: Art in the Age of the Anthropocene by Kerry Oliver-Smith

Review of Kerry Oliver-Smith\u27s The World to Come: Art in the Age of the Anthropocen

Beneath Sci-fi Sound: Primer, Science Fiction Sound Design, and American Independent Cinema

Primer is a very low budget science-fiction film that deals with the subject of time travel; however, it looks and sounds quite distinctively different from other films associated with the genre. While Hollywood blockbuster sci-fi relies on “sound spectacle” as a key attraction, in contrast Primer sounds “lo-fi” and screen-centred, mixed to two channel stereo rather than the now industry-standard 5.1 surround sound. Although this is partly a consequence of the economics of its production, the aesthetic approach to the soundtrack is what makes Primer formally distinctive. Including a brief exploration of the role of sound design in science-fiction cinema more broadly, I analyse aspects of Primer’s soundtrack and sound-image relations to demonstrate how the soundplays around with time rather than space, substituting the spatial playfulness of big-budget Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster sound with temporal playfulness, in keeping with its time-travel theme. I argue that Primer’s aesthetic approach to the soundtrack is “anti-spectacle”, working with its mise-en-scène to emphasise the mundane and everyday instead of the fantastical, in an attempt to lend credibility and “realism” to its time-travel conceit. Finally, with reference to scholarship on American independent cinema, I will demonstrate how Primer’s stylistic approach to the soundtrack is configured as a marketable identifier of its “indie”-ness