Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible

Lisa Zunshine is a professor of English at the University of Kentucky and author of Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel.

• AcknowledgmentsPart 1: "But what am I, then?": Chasing Personal Essences across National Literatures1. Ural Mountains–Rome–London2. 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

The book is stylistically well-written and features interesting readings of various texts. -- Marcus Hartner Zeitschrift fuer Anglistik und Amerikanistik 2009 The author gives herself a refreshingly modest assignment: to demonstrate that a certain cognitive predisposition has contributed to the development of, and continued interest in, specific literary motifs that occur across a wide variety of cultures. This is all that she tries to do, and she does it very well. Philosophy and Literature 2009 Zunshine renders the book accessible to the general reader. -- Aristie Trendel Cercles