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Zunshine, Lisa. 2008. Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. $65.00 hc. $25.00 sc. 232 pp.

Publication: College Literature
Publication Date: 22-JUN-09 		Format: Online
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Full Article Title: Zunshine, Lisa. 2008. Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. $65.00 hc. $25.00 sc. 232 pp.(Book review)

Article Excerpt
Lisa Zunshine's Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible is a new entry in the field of cognitive poetics, a field that draws on theories from cognitive psychology to assess how literature affects readers. Her book is divided into three sections, each considering in detail a specific interplay of "strange concepts" and stories. The strange concepts are recurring cultural representations whose nature and significance can be linked to specific 'cognitive universals' that have been established in the fields of cognitive psychology and cognitive anthropology. Zunshine taps into these fields in order to study the ways in which "a given cultural representation ... engages our evolved cognitive capacities" (2).

Cognitive psychological studies across various cultures have concluded that humans come into the world with certain built-in concepts of the nature of living beings, or what may more generally be called 'natural kinds' of things (as opposed to manufactured or what may be called 'artifactual kinds' of things). In one set of experiments, as Zunshine explains, a child is presented with a toy animal, say a skunk, that is altered in various ways: limbs...

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