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.
AcknowledgmentsPart 1: ""But what am I, then?"": Chasing Personal Essences across National Literatures1. Ural MountainsRomeLondon2. Essentialism, Functionalism, and Cognitive Psychology3. Possible Evolutionary Origins of Essentialist Thinking4. ""A bullet's a bullet's a bullet!""5. Talk to the Door Politely or Tickle It in Exactly the Right Place6. Resisting Essentialism7. The Ever-Receding ""Essence"" of Sosia8. Identical Twins and Theater9. How Is Mr. Darcy Different from Colin Firth?10. Looking for the Real Mademoiselle11. ""Mahatma Gandhi: war!"" ""But he was a pacifist."" ""Right! War!""Part 2: Why Robots Go Astray, or The Cognitive Foundations of the Frankenstein Complex1. What Is the Frankenstein Complex?2. On Zygoons, Thricklers, and Kerpas3. Theory of Mind4. Theory of Mind and Categorization: Preliminary Implications5. Concepts That Resist Categorization6.... and the Stories They Make Possible7. The Stories That Can Be Told about a Talking Needle8. Asimov's ""The Bicentennial Man""9. Cognitive Construction of ""Undoubted Facts"": ""The Bicentennial Man"" and the Logic of Essentialism10. Made to Rebel11. Why Phyllis Is Still a Robot12.... and Why Rei Toei Is Not13. More Human Than Thou (Piercy's He, She and It)14. Made to Pray15. Made to Serve. Made to Obey. Made to Break HeartsPart 3: Some Species of Nonsense1. How Nonsense Makes Sense in The Hunting of the Snark2. ""Strings of Impossibilia"" and What They Tell Us about the Value of Nonsense3. ""Painters of the Unimaginable,"" or More aboutReally Strange ConceptsConclusion: Almost beyond FictionNotesBibliographyIndex
""Zunshine's scholarship here and elsewhere is boldly exploratory.""
