Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible

Fantastic tales of rebellious robots and animated artifacts are a permanent fixture in popular culture. What kind of behavior do we expect from such conceptual hybrids in science fiction, nonsense poetry, and surrealist art

Bakhtin, Theory of Mind, and Pedagogy: Cognitive Construction of Social Class

This essay brings together cognitive literary theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic imagination to illuminate the construction of social class in the eighteenth-century novel. It offers a close reading of selected passages from Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), made possible by combining Bakhtinian and cognitive poetics. It also discusses the theoretical ramifications of this approach and demonstrates its use in an undergraduate classroom

The Secret Life of Literature

An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history to examine patterns of “mindreading” in a wide range of literary works. For 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. Central 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 Fiction"

“The Secret Life of Fiction” uses cognitive literary theory to critique the failure of “The Common Core Standards Initiative” to recognize fiction as a catalyst of complex thinking in students

"Introduction to Cognitive Literary Studies"

This is a short introductory essay for _The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies_, published in 2015. The areas covered by _The Handbook_ include cognitive historicism, cognitive narratology, cognitive queer theory, neuroaesthetics, cognitive postcolonial studies, studies in emotions and empathy, decision theory, cognitive disability studies, empirical and qualitative studies, and the new unconscious. The introduction traces the trajectory of the field over the last fifteen years and explains why the goals, methods, and philosophy of scholars working with cognitive approaches to literature are diametrically opposed to those of "literary Darwinists.