Black Women’s Stories of Everyday Racism puts literary narrative theory to work on an urgent real-world problem. The book calls attention to African American women’s everyday experiences with ...systemic racism and demonstrates how four types of narrative theory can help generate strategies to explain and dismantle that racism. This volume presents fifteen stories told by eight midwestern African American women about their own experiences with casual and structural racism, followed by four detailed narratological analyses of the stories, each representing a different approach to narrative interpretation. The book makes a case for the need to hear the personal stories of these women and others like them as part of a larger effort to counter the systemic racism that prevails in the United States today. Readers will find that the women’s stories offer powerful evidence that African Americans experience racism as an inescapable part of their day-to-day lives—and sometimes as a force that radically changes their lives. The stories provide experience-based demonstrations of how pervasive systemic racism is and how it perpetuates power differentials that are baked into institutions such as schools, law enforcement, the health care system, and business. Containing countless signs of the stress and trauma that accompany and follow from experiences of racism, the stories reveal evidence of the women’s resilience as well as their unending need for it, as they continue to feel the negative effects of experiences that occurred many years ago. The four interpretive chapters note the complex skill involved in the women’s storytelling. The analyses also point to the overall value of telling these stories: how they are sometimes cathartic for the tellers; how they highlight the importance of listening—and the likelihood of misunderstanding—and how, if they and other stories like them were heard more often, they would be a force to counteract the structural racism they so graphically expose. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
In this compelling interdisciplinary study of what has been called the "century of illegitimacy," Lisa Zunshine seeks to uncover the multiplicity of cultural meanings of illegitimacy in the English ...Enlightenment. Bastards and Foundlings pits the official legal views on illegitimacy against the actual everyday practices that frequently circumvented the law; it reconstructs the history of social institutions called upon to regulate illegitimacy, such as the London Foundling Hospital; and it examines a wide array of novels and plays written in response to the same concerns that informed the emergence and functioning of such institutions. By recreating the context of the national preoccupation with bastardy, with a special emphasis on the gender of the fictional bastard/foundling, Zunshine offers new readings of "canonical" texts, such as Steele's The Conscious Lovers, Defoe's Moll Flanders, Fielding's Tom Jones, Moore's The Foundling, Colman's The English Merchant, Richardson's Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, Burney's Evelina, Smith's Emmeline, Edgewort's Belinda, and Austen's Emma, as well as of less well-known works, such as Haywood's The Fortunate Foundlings, Shebbeare's The Marriage Act, Bennett's The Beggar Girl and Her Benefactors, and Robinson's The Natural Daughter.
Zunshine demonstrates how a cognitive narratological perspective on theory of mind (i.e., our evolved cognitive capacity to see people's observable behavior in terms of their underlying mental ...states, such as thoughts, feelings, desires, and intentions) offers an instructor a new tool for collaborative classroom exploration of representations of fictional consciousness. In particular, Zunshine tells of her experience of asking students to write up “missing” passages from Edith Wharton's short story “Xingu,” following their discussion of the story's construction of social minds, an approach that draws on theoretical perspectives that either directly represent theory of mind (Zunshine's “sociocognitive complexity” and Alan Palmer's “intermental thinking”) or are highly compatible with it (Suzanne Keen's “strategic empathizing”). Having used research on theory of mind to teach a wide range of texts on both graduate and undergraduate levels, Zunshine centers her article on the immediate classroom payoffs of this approach as well as its relationship with other, more established pedagogical strategies.
Attribution of mental states is fundamental to our engagement with fiction. Crucially, its social content depends on mental states recursively “embedded” within each other; for instance, when a ...person doesn’t want other people to know about her intentions. Given that some characters seem to be consistently capable of embedding mental states on a higher level than others, this essay reviews factors that may influence authors’ constructions of such mindreading hierarchies as well as their reversals. The argument focuses on the reversal scenes in films Goodbye Lenin, The Lives of Others, and Never Look Away, and on prosocial emotions evoked by their depiction of a more equitable distribution of a presumably valuable and scarce resource, that is, access to other people's minds.
We live in other people's heads: avidly, reluctantly, consciously, unaware, mistakenly, and inescapably. Our social life is a constant negotiation among what we think we know about each other's ...thoughts and feelings, what we want each other to think we know, and what we would dearly love to know but don't.
Cognitive scientists have a special term for the evolved cognitive adaptation that makes us attribute mental states to other people through observation of their body language; they call it theory of mind.
Getting Inside Your Head uses research in theory of mind to look at movies, musicals, novels, classic Chinese opera, stand-up comedy, mock-documentaries, photography, and reality television. It follows Mr. Darcy as he tries to conceal his anger (Pride and Prejudice), Tyler Durden as he lectures a stranger at gunpoint (Fight Club), and Ingrid Bergman as she fakes interest in horse races (Notorious).
Written in reader-friendly language, this book exemplifies the new interdisciplinary field of cognitive cultural studies, demonstrating that collaboration between cognitive science and cultural studies is
both exciting and productive.
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.
This essay exemplifies a cognitive approach to literary and film studies, with particular emphasis on fictional reimagining of legal institutions. It draws on research of cognitive scientists who ...study metacognition—specifically, the difference between reflective and intuitive beliefs—to suggest that courtroom dramas, such as Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution (1957), can manipulate their viewers into believing something that they, on some level, know cannot be true. In this case, viewers accept the not guilty verdict by the jury even though “the facts in the case” are “simple” and point to the guilt of the defendant. I show how different versions of Witness for the Prosecution—from Agatha Christie’s original short story (1925) and her subsequent play based on that story (1953), to the Hollywood film (1957), and the BBC mini-series (2016)—trigger our reflective beliefs about the defendant’s innocence, so that we find the verdict satisfying (at least for a short while). I conclude by considering literary payoffs of this manipulation, especially in the context of a culture that subscribes to a view of the mind as, in principle, knowable, and thus readable by skillful others.
There is a growing sense among scholars working in cognitive literary studies that their assumptions and methodologies increasingly align them with another paradigmatically interdisciplinary field: ...comparative literature. This introduction to the special issue on cognitive approaches to comparative literature explores points of alignment between the two fields, outlining possible cognitivist interventions into debates that have been animating comparative literature, such as those concerning “universals,” politics of translatability (especially in the context of world literature), and practices of thinking across the boundaries of media. It discusses both fields’ indebtedness to cultural studies, as well as cognitive literary theorists’ commitment to historicizing and their sustained focus on the embodied social mind.
PDF