Introduction To Cognitive Cultural Studies

Download or read book Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies written by Lisa Zunshine and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the explosion of academic and public interest in cognitive science in the past two decades, this volume features articles that combine literary and cultural analysis with insights from neuroscience, cognitive evolutionary psychology and anthropology, and cognitive linguistics. Lisa Zunshine’s introduction provides a broad overview of the field. The essays that follow are organized into four parts that explore developments in literary universals, cognitive historicism, cognitive narratology, and cognitive approaches in dialogue with other theoretical approaches, such as postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and poststructuralism. Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies provides readers with grounding in several major areas of cognitive science, applies insights from cognitive science to cultural representations, and recognizes the cognitive approach’s commitment to seeking common ground with existing literary-theoretical paradigms. This book is ideal for graduate courses and seminars devoted to cognitive approaches to cultural studies and literary criticism. Contributors: Mary Thomas Crane, Nancy Easterlin, David Herman, Patrick Colm Hogan, Bruce McConachie, Alan Palmer, Alan Richardson, Ellen Spolsky, G. Gabrielle Starr, Blakey Vermeule, Lisa Zunshine

Download or read book Culture and Cognition written by Ronald Schleifer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book challenges the disciplinary boundaries that have traditionally separated scientific inquiry from literary inquiry. It explores scientific knowledge in three subject areas—the natural history of aging, literary narrative, and psychoanalysis. In the authors' view, the different perspectives on cognition afforded by Anglo-American cognitive science, Greimassian semiotics, and Lacanian psychoanalysis help us to redefine our very notion of culture. Part I historically situates the concepts of meaning and truth in twentieth-century semiotic theory and cognitive science. Part II contrasts the modes of Freudian case history to the general instance of Einstein's relativity theory and then sets forth a rhetoric of narrative based on the discourse of the aged. Part III examines in the context of literary studies an interdisciplinary concept of cultural cognition. Culture and Cognition will be essential reading for literary theorists, historians and philosophers of science; semioticians; and scholars and students of cultural studies, the sociology of literature, and science and literature.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies written by Lisa Zunshine and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 681 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies applies developments in cognitive science to a wide range of literary texts that span multiple historical periods and numerous national literary traditions.

Download or read book Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible written by Lisa Zunshine and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2008-07-28 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry written by Antonina Harbus and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2012 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers an entirely new way of interpreting and examining Anglo-Saxon texts, via theories derived from cognitive studies. A major, thoughtful study, applying new and serious interpretative and critical perspectives to a central range of Old English poetry. Professor John Hines, Cardiff University Cognitive approaches to literature offernew and exciting ways of interpreting literature and mentalities, by bringing ideas and methodologies from Cognitive Science into the analysis of literature and culture. While these approaches are of particular value in relation to understanding the texts of remote societies, they have to date made very little impact on Anglo-Saxon Studies. This book therefore acts as a pioneer, mapping out the new field, explaining its relevance to Old English Literary Studies, and demonstrating in practice its application to a range of key vernacular poetic texts, including Beowulf, The Wanderer, and poems from the Exeter Book. Adapting key ideas from three related fields - Cognitive Literary/Cultural Studies, Cognitive Poetics, and Conceptual Metaphor Theory - in conjunction with more familiar models, derived from Literary Analysis, Stylistics, and Historical Linguistics, allows several new ways of thinking about Old English literature to emerge. It permits a systematic means of examining and accounting for the conceptual structures that underpin Anglo-Saxon poetics, as well as fuller explorations, at the level of mental processing, of the workings of literary language in context. The result is a set of approaches to interpreting Anglo-Saxon textuality, through detailed studies of the concepts, mental schemas, and associative logic implied in and triggeredby the evocative language and meaning structures of surviving works. ANTONINA HARBUS is Professor in the Department of English at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

Download or read book The Fictional Minds of Modernism written by Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the notion that modernism is marked by an “inward turn” – a configuration of the individual as distinct from the world – this collection delineates the relationship between the mind and material and social systems, rethinking our understanding of modernism's representation of cognitive and affective processes. Through analysis of a variety of international novels, short stories, and films – all published roughly between 1890 and 1945 – the contributors to this collection demonstrate that the so-called “inward turn” of modernist narratives in fact reflects the necessary interaction between mind, self, and world that constitutes knowledge, and therefore precludes any radical split between these categories. The essays examine the cognitive value of modernist narrative, showing how the perception of objects and of other people is a relational activity that requires an awareness of the constant flux of reality. The Fictional Minds of Modernism explores how modernist narratives offer insights into the real, historical world not as a mere object of contemplation but as an object of knowledge, thus bridging the gap between classical narratology and modernist experimentation.

Download or read book Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games written by Kathrin Fahlenbrach and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In cognitive research, metaphors have been shown to help us imagine complex, abstract, or invisible ideas, concepts, or emotions. Contributors to this book argue that metaphors occur not only in language, but in audio visual media well. This is all the more evident in entertainment media, which strategically "sell" their products by addressing their viewers’ immediate, reflexive understanding through pictures, sounds, and language. This volume applies cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) to film, television, and video games in order to analyze the embodied aesthetics and meanings of those moving images.