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Lisa Zunshine

University of Kentucky, English, Faculty Member

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Lisa Zunshine is professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Lexington; a former Guggenheim fellow; and author and editor of twelve books, including Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (2005), Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006), Philanthropy and Fiction (2006), Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative (2008), Acting Theory and the English Stage (2009), Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (2010), Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us About Popular Culture (2012), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (2015), and The Secret Life of Literature (MIT Press, 2022). She publishes on a broad variety of topics in history of ideas, comparative literature, film, and media studies.

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Books by Lisa Zunshine

The Secret Life of Literature

MIT Press (full text curently available here through the MIT Open Access program), 2022

An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history t... more

Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us About Popular Culture (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012), part 1

Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us About Popular Culture (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012), part 2

Why Do Robots Go Astray? (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008)

Strange Concepts and The Stories They Make Possible (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) uses r... more Strange Concepts and The Stories They Make Possible (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) uses recent research from cognitive psychology and anthropology to explore plays by Plautus, Dryden and Shakespeare, novels by Dickens, Nabokov, Jonathan Safran Foer, and J. K. Rowling, as well as science fiction, nonsense poetry, and surrealist art.

Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Ohio State UP, 2006; revised 2012), full text pdf

Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010)

Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (Ohio State UP, 2005; revised paperback 2017)

Papers by Lisa Zunshine

Don't be too good at reading other people's minds

Emotion Review, 2024

Mindreading (i.e., attribution and misattribution of mental states) is fundamental to our engagem... more Mindreading (i.e., attribution and misattribution of mental states) is fundamental to our engagement with fiction, such as literature and film. We make sense of characters' behavior by seeing it as caused by their thoughts, emotions, and intentions; in some cases, we are also prompted to think about intentions of authors and directors. Crucially, the social content of works of fiction depends on mental states recursively "embedded" within each other, as, for instance, when a person doesn't want other people to know about her intentions. Given that some characters are shown to be consistently capable of embedding mental states on a higher level than others, this essay reviews historical, generic, and situational factors that may influence authors' intuitive decisions to place some people on top of such mindreading hierarchies, as well as, sometimes, to reverse these hierarchies, in emotionally charged scenes. The argument focuses on the reversal scenes in such films as Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye Lenin (2003) and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (2006) and Never Look Away (2018), and on prosocial emotions evoked by their depiction of a more equitable distribution of a presumably valuable and scarce resource, i.e., access to other people's minds.

Manipulating Metacognition in Witness for the Prosecution

Critical Analysis of Law, 2023

In Billy Wilder’s film Witness for the Prosecution (1957), a man named Leonard Vole, a shiftless ... more In Billy Wilder’s film Witness for the Prosecution (1957), a man named Leonard Vole, a shiftless good-for-nothing, cultivates the affections of an older rich woman. Then, after she changes her will to leave him the bulk of her money, she is found murdered. All the evidence points to Vole; “the facts in this case,” as the prosecutor puts it, “are simple.” Yet the man’s brilliant lawyer, Sir Wilfrid Robarts, the jury members, and we as viewers are somehow made to think that he may be innocent. How is this possible? How can a courtroom drama make us believe something that we, on some level, know cannot be true? To answer this question, this essay draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition, that is, thinking about thinking. Specifically, it argues that the film intuitively exploits an important cognitive phenomenon: we can believe that other people believe something even though we ourselves do not believe it. (For instance, I may think, based on a trial’s outcome, that the court thinks that a defendant is not guilty, while I myself still think that he is guilty.) This leaves us, both as social beings and as consumers of cultural representations, vulnerable to a particular kind of manipulation: we can be maneuvered by a skillful foregrounding of our awareness of other people’s beliefs, into disregarding, at least for a short while, the actual content of those beliefs.

Belief Is a Mess. That Makes It Good for Fiction

Routledge

Misinterpreting the Body Language of African-American Women Storytellers

In 2021, eight African-American women were invited to tell two stories each about everyday racism... more In 2021, eight African-American women were invited to tell two stories each about everyday racism: one “focused on a situation in which she felt discriminated against but was able to overcome, and another, focused on a discriminatory situation that she felt she was not able to overcome.” The stories were recorded and uploaded on YouTube. Then, four professors of English, who had been earlier asked to suggest some prompts for the speakers (for instance, “Telling this story now makes me think . . . ”), were asked to comment on these recordings, using theoretical approaches from their respective fields of research. These approaches included critical race and gender studies, narrative theory, feminist theory, and cognitive literary studies. This essay represents a cognitive-literary perspective. It highlights the role of metacognitive monitoring in oral storytelling, while also showing that this monitoring may be fundamentally liable to misinterpretation. The author suggest that literary scholars would benefit from articulating at least some of the factors (including but not limited to cognitive biases) which inform such misinterpretations.

How Memories Become Literature

SubStance, 2022

Cognitive science can help literary scholars 1ormulate speci4c questions to be answered by archiv... more Cognitive science can help literary scholars 1ormulate speci4c questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes, as its starting point, embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then 1ollows the trans1ormation o1 embedded mental states throughout several manuscripts o1 Christa Wol1's autobiographical novel, Patterns o1 Childhood (Kindheitsmuster, 1976), available at the Berlin Academy o1 Arts. The author shows that later versions o1 Patterns o1 Childhood have more complex embedments in the chapter describing the adolescent protagonist's relationship with her schoolteacher. This textual development is integral to the process whereby the presumably authentic memories o1 the past are constructed to 4t the present needs o1 the person who is doing the remembering. Accompanying the three case studies o1 the manuscript revision is a discussion o1 theoretical and practical implications of this "cognitive-archival" approach to literature.

Babylon Berlin: Bargaining with Shadows

Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 2022

Abstract: Working within cognitive television and media studies, this essay explores social cogni... more Abstract: Working within cognitive television and media studies, this essay explores social cognition and emotion regulation involved in watching the popular German television series Babylon Berlin.

Keywords: Babylon Berlin, social cognition, cognitive literary theory, cognitive television and media studies, serial television, emotion regulation, theory of mind, cognitive narratology, behavioral economics

Life Writing and Cognition (Introduction)

SubStance, 2022

Why Reasonable Children Don’t Think that Nutcracker is Alive or that the Mouse King is Real

Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited edited by Richard C. Sha and Joel Faflak (Edinburgh University Press), 2022

E. T. A. Ho mann's tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816) contains several wonderful, one ... more E. T. A. Ho mann's tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816) contains several wonderful, one may even say magical, events. First, it celebrates the birthday of a man who died in his early thirties, then came back from the dead for a couple of days, and then disappeared from view completely, while still managing to stay alive, somewhere (possibly, behind the clouds), for almost 2,000 years. To commemorate him, the grownup characters of Ho mann's story buy toys for their children and tell them that these gifts come from that man, who brings goodies to hundreds of thousands of well-behaved youngsters of Europe, and who, incidentally, has now become an infant again. 1 So, what we have here is a gift-bearing, omnipresent, 2,000-year-old infant. Another wonderful event involves a nutcracker, perhaps delivered by that energetic infant. Shaped like a little man with a large mouth, the nutcracker comes alive at night and commandeers a regiment of toy soldiers to fight an army of mice led by their king: a large seven-headed mouse. The battle is witnessed by a seven-year-old girl, who then reports what she has seen to her parents and to her younger brother, Fritz. One would expect that this event should not strike the parents as very strange because they may already be familiar with its broad outlines, again, through stories involving the two-thousand-year-old infant. When that infant was still a man, he was reported to have successfully fought basilisks, dragons, and many-headed serpents. 2 Somewhere in his 800s, however, he lost interest, so by the eleventh century, the job of dragon-trampling was assumed by St George. St George's exploits were commemorated by many famous artists. One of these artists was Albrecht Dürer (see Figure 10.1), a particular favorite of Ho mann's, 3 who used to live in the same city of Nuremberg as do several characters in The Nutcracker. This is to say that an appearance of a seven-headed monster, right around the birthday of the infant, and its subsequent defeat by the very Nutcracker whom the infant may have

"Who is he to speak of my sorrow?"

Poetics Today, 2020

This article suggests that comparative literature scholars may benefit from the awareness that di... more This article suggests that comparative literature scholars may benefit from the awareness that different communities around the world subscribe to different models of mind and that works of fiction can thus be fruitfully analyzed in relation to those local ideologies of mind. Taking as her starting point the “opacity of mind” doctrine, found in the South Pacific and Melanesia, the author compares cultural practices originating in communities in which people think but do not talk publicly about others’ internal states, to those originating in communities in which people both think and talk about them, indeed, in which public speculation about other people’s intentions is (mostly) rewarded. While the immediate analysis centers on a very specific and limited set of case studies from English, Chinese, and Russian novels and Bosavi performance genres, the author’s larger goal is to begin to articulate opportunities and challenges of using research in theory of mind for the comparative study of literature.

Mindreading and Social Status

forthcoming in _Further Reading_, eds. Matthew Rubery and Leah Price. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 257-270

Keywords: theory of mind, social status, Mansfield Park, Dream of the Red Chamber, Measure for Me... more

"Embodied Social Cognition and Comparative Literature: an Introduction"

Poetics Today, 2020

There is a growing sense among scholars working in cognitive literary studies that their assumpti... more 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.

What Mary Poppins Knew

_Narrative_ (January 2019)

This essay investigates the phenomenon of "embedded" mental states in fiction (i.e., a mental sta... more This essay investigates the phenomenon of "embedded" mental states in fiction (i.e., a mental state within a mental state within yet another mental state, as in, "Mrs. Banks wished that Mary Poppins wouldn't know so very much more about the best people than she knew herself "), asking if patterns of embedment manifest themselves differently in children's literature than they do in literature for "grownups. " Looking at books for three age groups (nine to twelve, three to seven, and one to two), Zunshine finds significant differences in their respective patterns of embedment, while also arguing that a critical inquiry into complex mental states is not just a cognitive but also a historicist project. Drawing on research in developmental psychology, rhetorical narratology, and cultural history, as well as on digital data mining, this essay seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary and interpretive range of cognitive literary studies. REMEMBER the time when Ben Rogers left off what looked like a really cool gamepretending to be a Missouri steam ship-to take over Tom Sawyer's chore of whitewashing the fence?

"Bakhtin and Theory of mind," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 30.1 2017

_Eighteenth-Century Fiction_, 2017

This essay brings together cognitive literary theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic im... more 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

MIT Press (full text curently available here through the MIT Open Access program), 2022

An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history t... more

Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us About Popular Culture (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012), part 1

Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us About Popular Culture (Johns Hopkins UP, 2012), part 2

Why Do Robots Go Astray? (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008)

Strange Concepts and The Stories They Make Possible (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) uses r... more Strange Concepts and The Stories They Make Possible (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) uses recent research from cognitive psychology and anthropology to explore plays by Plautus, Dryden and Shakespeare, novels by Dickens, Nabokov, Jonathan Safran Foer, and J. K. Rowling, as well as science fiction, nonsense poetry, and surrealist art.

Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Ohio State UP, 2006; revised 2012), full text pdf

Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010)

Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (Ohio State UP, 2005; revised paperback 2017)

Don't be too good at reading other people's minds

Emotion Review, 2024

Mindreading (i.e., attribution and misattribution of mental states) is fundamental to our engagem... more Mindreading (i.e., attribution and misattribution of mental states) is fundamental to our engagement with fiction, such as literature and film. We make sense of characters' behavior by seeing it as caused by their thoughts, emotions, and intentions; in some cases, we are also prompted to think about intentions of authors and directors. Crucially, the social content of works of fiction depends on mental states recursively "embedded" within each other, as, for instance, when a person doesn't want other people to know about her intentions. Given that some characters are shown to be consistently capable of embedding mental states on a higher level than others, this essay reviews historical, generic, and situational factors that may influence authors' intuitive decisions to place some people on top of such mindreading hierarchies, as well as, sometimes, to reverse these hierarchies, in emotionally charged scenes. The argument focuses on the reversal scenes in such films as Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye Lenin (2003) and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (2006) and Never Look Away (2018), and on prosocial emotions evoked by their depiction of a more equitable distribution of a presumably valuable and scarce resource, i.e., access to other people's minds.

Manipulating Metacognition in Witness for the Prosecution

Critical Analysis of Law, 2023

In Billy Wilder’s film Witness for the Prosecution (1957), a man named Leonard Vole, a shiftless ... more In Billy Wilder’s film Witness for the Prosecution (1957), a man named Leonard Vole, a shiftless good-for-nothing, cultivates the affections of an older rich woman. Then, after she changes her will to leave him the bulk of her money, she is found murdered. All the evidence points to Vole; “the facts in this case,” as the prosecutor puts it, “are simple.” Yet the man’s brilliant lawyer, Sir Wilfrid Robarts, the jury members, and we as viewers are somehow made to think that he may be innocent. How is this possible? How can a courtroom drama make us believe something that we, on some level, know cannot be true? To answer this question, this essay draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition, that is, thinking about thinking. Specifically, it argues that the film intuitively exploits an important cognitive phenomenon: we can believe that other people believe something even though we ourselves do not believe it. (For instance, I may think, based on a trial’s outcome, that the court thinks that a defendant is not guilty, while I myself still think that he is guilty.) This leaves us, both as social beings and as consumers of cultural representations, vulnerable to a particular kind of manipulation: we can be maneuvered by a skillful foregrounding of our awareness of other people’s beliefs, into disregarding, at least for a short while, the actual content of those beliefs.

Belief Is a Mess. That Makes It Good for Fiction

Routledge

Misinterpreting the Body Language of African-American Women Storytellers

In 2021, eight African-American women were invited to tell two stories each about everyday racism... more In 2021, eight African-American women were invited to tell two stories each about everyday racism: one “focused on a situation in which she felt discriminated against but was able to overcome, and another, focused on a discriminatory situation that she felt she was not able to overcome.” The stories were recorded and uploaded on YouTube. Then, four professors of English, who had been earlier asked to suggest some prompts for the speakers (for instance, “Telling this story now makes me think . . . ”), were asked to comment on these recordings, using theoretical approaches from their respective fields of research. These approaches included critical race and gender studies, narrative theory, feminist theory, and cognitive literary studies. This essay represents a cognitive-literary perspective. It highlights the role of metacognitive monitoring in oral storytelling, while also showing that this monitoring may be fundamentally liable to misinterpretation. The author suggest that literary scholars would benefit from articulating at least some of the factors (including but not limited to cognitive biases) which inform such misinterpretations.

How Memories Become Literature

SubStance, 2022

Cognitive science can help literary scholars 1ormulate speci4c questions to be answered by archiv... more Cognitive science can help literary scholars 1ormulate speci4c questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes, as its starting point, embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then 1ollows the trans1ormation o1 embedded mental states throughout several manuscripts o1 Christa Wol1's autobiographical novel, Patterns o1 Childhood (Kindheitsmuster, 1976), available at the Berlin Academy o1 Arts. The author shows that later versions o1 Patterns o1 Childhood have more complex embedments in the chapter describing the adolescent protagonist's relationship with her schoolteacher. This textual development is integral to the process whereby the presumably authentic memories o1 the past are constructed to 4t the present needs o1 the person who is doing the remembering. Accompanying the three case studies o1 the manuscript revision is a discussion o1 theoretical and practical implications of this "cognitive-archival" approach to literature.

Babylon Berlin: Bargaining with Shadows

Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 2022

Abstract: Working within cognitive television and media studies, this essay explores social cogni... more Abstract: Working within cognitive television and media studies, this essay explores social cognition and emotion regulation involved in watching the popular German television series Babylon Berlin.

Keywords: Babylon Berlin, social cognition, cognitive literary theory, cognitive television and media studies, serial television, emotion regulation, theory of mind, cognitive narratology, behavioral economics

Life Writing and Cognition (Introduction)

SubStance, 2022

Why Reasonable Children Don’t Think that Nutcracker is Alive or that the Mouse King is Real

Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited edited by Richard C. Sha and Joel Faflak (Edinburgh University Press), 2022

E. T. A. Ho mann's tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816) contains several wonderful, one ... more E. T. A. Ho mann's tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816) contains several wonderful, one may even say magical, events. First, it celebrates the birthday of a man who died in his early thirties, then came back from the dead for a couple of days, and then disappeared from view completely, while still managing to stay alive, somewhere (possibly, behind the clouds), for almost 2,000 years. To commemorate him, the grownup characters of Ho mann's story buy toys for their children and tell them that these gifts come from that man, who brings goodies to hundreds of thousands of well-behaved youngsters of Europe, and who, incidentally, has now become an infant again. 1 So, what we have here is a gift-bearing, omnipresent, 2,000-year-old infant. Another wonderful event involves a nutcracker, perhaps delivered by that energetic infant. Shaped like a little man with a large mouth, the nutcracker comes alive at night and commandeers a regiment of toy soldiers to fight an army of mice led by their king: a large seven-headed mouse. The battle is witnessed by a seven-year-old girl, who then reports what she has seen to her parents and to her younger brother, Fritz. One would expect that this event should not strike the parents as very strange because they may already be familiar with its broad outlines, again, through stories involving the two-thousand-year-old infant. When that infant was still a man, he was reported to have successfully fought basilisks, dragons, and many-headed serpents. 2 Somewhere in his 800s, however, he lost interest, so by the eleventh century, the job of dragon-trampling was assumed by St George. St George's exploits were commemorated by many famous artists. One of these artists was Albrecht Dürer (see Figure 10.1), a particular favorite of Ho mann's, 3 who used to live in the same city of Nuremberg as do several characters in The Nutcracker. This is to say that an appearance of a seven-headed monster, right around the birthday of the infant, and its subsequent defeat by the very Nutcracker whom the infant may have

"Who is he to speak of my sorrow?"

Poetics Today, 2020

This article suggests that comparative literature scholars may benefit from the awareness that di... more This article suggests that comparative literature scholars may benefit from the awareness that different communities around the world subscribe to different models of mind and that works of fiction can thus be fruitfully analyzed in relation to those local ideologies of mind. Taking as her starting point the “opacity of mind” doctrine, found in the South Pacific and Melanesia, the author compares cultural practices originating in communities in which people think but do not talk publicly about others’ internal states, to those originating in communities in which people both think and talk about them, indeed, in which public speculation about other people’s intentions is (mostly) rewarded. While the immediate analysis centers on a very specific and limited set of case studies from English, Chinese, and Russian novels and Bosavi performance genres, the author’s larger goal is to begin to articulate opportunities and challenges of using research in theory of mind for the comparative study of literature.

Mindreading and Social Status

forthcoming in _Further Reading_, eds. Matthew Rubery and Leah Price. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 257-270

Keywords: theory of mind, social status, Mansfield Park, Dream of the Red Chamber, Measure for Me... more

"Embodied Social Cognition and Comparative Literature: an Introduction"

Poetics Today, 2020

There is a growing sense among scholars working in cognitive literary studies that their assumpti... more 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.

What Mary Poppins Knew

_Narrative_ (January 2019)

This essay investigates the phenomenon of "embedded" mental states in fiction (i.e., a mental sta... more This essay investigates the phenomenon of "embedded" mental states in fiction (i.e., a mental state within a mental state within yet another mental state, as in, "Mrs. Banks wished that Mary Poppins wouldn't know so very much more about the best people than she knew herself "), asking if patterns of embedment manifest themselves differently in children's literature than they do in literature for "grownups. " Looking at books for three age groups (nine to twelve, three to seven, and one to two), Zunshine finds significant differences in their respective patterns of embedment, while also arguing that a critical inquiry into complex mental states is not just a cognitive but also a historicist project. Drawing on research in developmental psychology, rhetorical narratology, and cultural history, as well as on digital data mining, this essay seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary and interpretive range of cognitive literary studies. REMEMBER the time when Ben Rogers left off what looked like a really cool gamepretending to be a Missouri steam ship-to take over Tom Sawyer's chore of whitewashing the fence?

"Bakhtin and Theory of mind," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 30.1 2017

_Eighteenth-Century Fiction_, 2017

This essay brings together cognitive literary theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic im... more 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.

Groucho, Harpo, and Narrative Theory

This short piece on _Duck Soup_ (1933) and narrative theory is a response to Jim Phelan's target ... more

I Lie Therefore I Am

Validating judgments of perspective embedding

Scientific Study of Literature, 2016

Authors: D. H. Whalen, Lisa Zunshine, Evelyne Ender, Eugenia Kelbert, Jason Tougaw, Robert F. Bar... more

"The Commotion of Souls," SubStance #140, 45.2 2016

"Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness" (The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter, Bedford/St. Martin's, 2016)

This is a revised reprint of an essay first published in Narrative in 2003. It appears in the "Re... more

"The Secret Life of Fiction," PMLA 130.3 2015

虚构作品的秘密生活

Bibliography for Cognitive Literary and Cultural Studies (in progress, updated regularly)

MLA Division for Cognitive Approaches to Literature

The MLA official discussion group on cognitive approaches to literature was approved by the MLA E... more The MLA official discussion group on cognitive approaches to literature was approved by the MLA Executive Council in 1999 and has since grown from 250 to 2118 registered members. In December 2012, the discussion group was promoted to a division within the MLA. The full text of the original petition for the establishment of the discussion group can be found here: https://www2.bc.edu/~richarad/lcb/fea/pet.html or in the attached file.

The Chinese Association of Cognitive Poetics and Cognitive Literary Studies

[information courtesy of Jiang Yongjun] The Chinese Association of Cognitive Poetics was organi... more [information courtesy of Jiang Yongjun]

The Chinese Association of Cognitive Poetics was organized and founded at the First International Cognitive Poetics Conference and the Third National Cognitive Poetics Conference in Chongqing in 2013. So far, the list of national or international conference on cognitive poetics reads as follows:

• Dec. 2008 The First National Cognitive Poetics Conference, in Guangxi Teachers Education University, Nanning;
• Nov. 2010 The First National Cognitive Poetics High-Level Forum, in China University of Petroleum, Beijing ;
• Aug. 2011 The Second National Cognitive Poetics Conference, in Ningxia University, Yinchuan;
• Nov. 2012 The Second National Cognitive Poetics High-Level Forum, in Dali University, Yunnan;
• Oct. 2013 The First International Cognitive Poetics Conference and the Third National Cognitive Poetics Conference in Sichuan International Studies University, Chongqing;
• Nov. 2014 The Third National Cognitive Poetics High-Level Forum in Guangxi Normal University, Guilin;
• Oct. 2015 The Second International Cognitive Poetics Conference and the Fourth National Cognitive Poetics Conference in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou;
• Dec. 2016 The Fourth National Cognitive Poetics High-Level Forum in Hainan Normal University, Haikou;
• Oct. 2017 The Third International Cognitive Poetics Conference and the Fifth National Cognitive Poetics Conference in China University of Petroleum, Beijing.

The Association has a semiannual publication named Cognitive Poetics, issued in every July and December. Submission-mail: [email protected]

The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI)

The Society for Cogni0ve Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI) is an interdisciplinary organiza0on ... more The Society for Cogni0ve Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI) is an interdisciplinary organiza0on made up of scholars interested in cogni0ve, philosophical, aesthe0c, neurophysiological, and evolu0onary--psychological approaches to the analysis of film and other moving--image media. The society is on the forefront of studying how moving--image media shape and are shaped by human psychological ac0vity.