Lisa Zunshine

Education:
Ph.D. University of California, Santa Barbara, 2000
Biography:

Lisa Zunshine is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, a former Guggenheim fellow (2007) and the author or editor of thirteen books, including Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (2005), Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006), Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Samuel Richardson (co-edited with Jocelyn Harris, 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 (ed., 2010), Approaches to Teaching the Works of John Dryden (co-edited with Jayne Lewis, 2013), 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 (2022).

Research Interests:
Cognitive Science and Literary Studies
Comparative Literature
Eighteenth Century British Literature
Availability

Fall 2023-Spring 2024: on leave (Berlin, Germany)

Research

New:

August 2023: The Secret Life of Literature has been shortlisted for 2023 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award

 

MLA 2011 joint "Cognitive Cultural Studies" sessions

Session 159 Cognitive Cultural Studies: Cognitive Approaches in Dialogue with Other Approaches

Background materials: Lisa Zunshine, "What is Cognitive Cultural Studies?" pdf

Thursday, 6 January 5:15-6:30 p.m. Plaza I, J. W. Marriott

Presiding: Lisa Zunshine, Univ. of Kentucky

1. Mary Thomas Crane, Boston Coll.

"Is Cognitive Historicism Possible?" abstract, longer version of the paper in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies

Background materials: "Surface, Depth, and the Spatial Imaginary: A Cognitive Reading of The Political Unconscious" in Representations, Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory on Princeton UP website

   
2. Suzanne Parker Keen, Washington and Lee Univ.

"The Place of Narrative Empathy in Cognitive Postcolonial Studies" abstract

Background materials: Empathy and the Novel on Google Books, "A Theory of Narrative Empathy" in Narrative

   
3. Patrick Colm Hogan, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs

"Being Moved: Cognition and Emotion in Literature and Film." New title: "Cognition and Emotion in Literature and Film, or "Is Cultural Study Possible Without Cognitive Neuroscience?" abstract, full paper


4. Blakey Vermeule, Stanford Univ.


"Machiavellian Narratives"

Background materials: Why Do We Care About Literary Characters?


Session 578
Cognitive Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice

Saturday, 8 January 3:30-4:45 p.m. Platinum Salon C, J. W. Marriott

Presiding: Nancy Lincoln Easterlin

1. Alan Palmer, London, England

"Constructing Social Minds in Novels: Perspectives from Cognitive Narratology" abstract

Background materials: Fictional Minds on the University of Nebraska Press website, Social Minds in the Novel on the Ohio State UP website

    
2. Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick


"Against Literary Darwinism" abstract; longer version of the paper in Critical Inquiry

Background materials: Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson

3. Michael Holquist, Yale Univ.


"Super Reading: Philology in the Laboratory"

Background materials: The Yale-Haskins Teagle Collegium


4. Nancy Lincoln Easterlin, Univ. of New Orleans

"Out of the Woods: Finding Our Way toward a Cognitive Ecocriticism" abstract

Background materials: "Voyages in the Verbal Universe: The Role of Speculation in Darwinian Literary Criticism" in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies

Selected Bibliography:
 

Abbott, Porter. “Narrative and Emergent Behavior.” Poetics Today 29.2 (2008), 227-44
Aldama, Frederick Luis, ed. Toward a Theory of Narrative Acts. University of Texas Press, 2010
Crane, Mary Thomas. Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory. Princeton University Press, 2001
-----. “Surface, Depth, and the Spatial Imaginary: A Cognitive Reading of The Political Unconscious.” Representations (Fall 2009): 76–97
Easterlin, Nancy. "Voyages in the Verbal Universe: The Role of Speculation in Darwinian Literary Criticism."  Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 2.2 (2001): 59-73
Esrock, Ellen J.. The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994
Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Duke University Press, 2005
Hart, F. Elizabeth. “The Epistemology of Cognitive Literary Studies.” Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001): 314-34
Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. University of Nebraska Press, 2002
-----, ed. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Publications of the Center for the Study of the Language and Information (Stanford), 2003
Hogan, Patrick Colm. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge University Press, 2003
-----. Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Neuroscience, and Identity. Ohio State University Press, 2009.
Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford University Press, 2007
Kramnick, Jonathan. "Some Thoughts on Print Culture and the Emotions," The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation 50.1 (2010): 263-267
Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds. University of Nebraska Press, 2004
----. Social Minds in the Novel. Ohio State University Press, 2010
Persson, Per. Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery. Cambridge University Press, 2003
Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge University Press, 2001
-----. The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
Richardson, Alan and Ellen Spolsky, eds. The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity. Ashgate, 2004
Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999
Spolsky, Ellen. Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind. State University of New York Press,1993
-----. Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World. Ashgate, 2001
-----. Word vs Image: Cognitive Hunger in Shakespeare's England. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007
Starr, Gabrielle. “Poetic Subjects and Grecian Urns: Close Reading and the Tools of Cognitive Science.” Modern Philology 105.1 (2007): 48-61
Vermeule, Blakey. The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain. 2001
-----. Why Do We Care About Fictional Characters? Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010
Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. The Ohio State University Press, 2006
----. Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008
----, ed. Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010

Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies (JHUP, 2010)

Introduction on JHUP website
Introduction on amazon.com
Special MLA 2011 discount

Table of Contents (with added background materials)

Introduction: What is Cognitive Cultural Studies? (pdf)
Lisa Zunshine

PART ONE: LITERARY UNIVERSALS

1. Patrick Colm Hogan
Literary Universals

PART TWO: COGNITIVE HISTORICISM

2. Alan Richardson
Facial Expression Theory from Romanticism to the Present


Background materials: The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts


3. Ellen Spolsky
Making "Quite Anew": Brain Modularity and Creativity


Background materials:
Word vs Image: Cognitive Hunger in Shakespearean England on Palgrave Macmillan website, Cognition, Culture and Complexity on Google books

4. Mary Thomas Crane
Analogy, Metaphor, and the New Science: Cognitive Science and Early Modern Epistemology abstract


Background materials: Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory on the Princeton UP website, "Surface, Depth, and the Spatial Imaginary: A Cognitive Reading of The Political Unconscious" in Representations


5. Lisa Zunshine
Lying Bodies of the Enlightenment: Theory of Mind and Cultural Historicism (pdf)



Background Materials: "1700-1775: Theory of Mind, Social Hierarchy, and the Emergence of Narrative Subjectivity." In The Emergence of Mind (ed. D. Herman) (draft)


6. Bruce McConachie
Toward a Cognitive Theory of Cultural Hegemony


Background materials: “Introduction” to Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (word file)
 

PART THREE: COGNITIVE NARRATOLOGY

7. David Herman
Narrative Theory after the Second Cognitive Revolution abstract



Background materials:
forthcoming chapter for the Narratology: Five Questions


8. Alan Palmer
Storyworlds and Groups abstract


9. Lisa Zunshine
Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness (pdf of the original version)


10. Blakey Vermeule
Machiavellian Narratives


Background materials: Why Do We Care About Literary Characters?



PART FOUR: COGNITIVE APPROACHES IN DIALOGUE WITH OTHER THEORETICAL APPROACHES (POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES, ECOCRITICISM, AESTHETICS, POST-STRUCTURALISM)

11. Patrick Colm Hogan
On Being Moved: Cognition and Emotion in Literature and Film


12. Nancy Easterlin
Cognitive Ecocriticism: Human Wayfinding, Sociality, and Literary Interpretation


13. G. Gabrielle Starr
Multisensory Imagery


14. Ellen Spolsky
Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary Theory as a Species of Post-structuralism



Background materials:
"Distributed Cognition (Cog Sci Talk) Copes with the
Unsaturatable Context (Poststructuralist Talk)"

Cognitive Cultural Studies: Selected Bibliography

Abbott, Porter. “Narrative and Emergent Behavior.” Poetics Today 29.2 (2008), 227-44
Aldama, Frederick Luis, ed. Toward a Theory of Narrative Acts. University of Texas Press, 2010
Crane, Mary Thomas. Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory. Princeton University Press, 2001
-----. “Surface, Depth, and the Spatial Imaginary: A Cognitive Reading of The Political Unconscious.” Representations (Fall 2009): 76–97
Easterlin, Nancy. "Voyages in the Verbal Universe: The Role of Speculation in Darwinian Literary Criticism."  Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 2.2 (2001): 59-73
Esrock, Ellen J.. The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994
Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Duke University Press, 2005
Hart, F. Elizabeth. “The Epistemology of Cognitive Literary Studies.” Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001): 314-34
Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. University of Nebraska Press, 2002
-----, ed. Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences. Publications of the Center for the Study of the Language and Information (Stanford), 2003
Hogan, Patrick Colm. The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion. Cambridge University Press, 2003
-----. Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Neuroscience, and Identity. Ohio State University Press, 2009.
Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford University Press, 2007
Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds. University of Nebraska Press, 2004
----. Social Minds in the Novel. Ohio State University Press, 2010
Persson, Per. Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery. Cambridge University Press, 2003
Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge University Press, 2001
-----. The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
Richardson, Alan and Ellen Spolsky, eds. The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity. Ashgate, 2004
Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999
Spolsky, Ellen. Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind. State University of New York Press,1993
-----. Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World. Ashgate, 2001
-----. Word vs Image: Cognitive Hunger in Shakespeare's England. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007
Starr, Gabrielle. “Poetic Subjects and Grecian Urns: Close Reading and the Tools of Cognitive Science.” Modern Philology 105.1 (2007): 48-61
Vermeule, Blakey. The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain. 2001
-----. Why Do We Care About Fictional Characters? Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010
Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. The Ohio State University Press, 2006
----. Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008
----, ed. Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010

Selected Publications:

 

Books

 

Articles

Embodied Social Cognition and Comparative Literature: an Introduction." Poetics Today 41.2 (2020): 171-86 (pdf)

“Who Is He To Speak of My Sorrow?” Poetics Today 41.2 (2020), 223-42 (pdf)

 

"What Mary Poppins Knew: Theory of Mind, Children's Literature, History." Narrative 27.1 (2019): 1-29 (external link to full essay)

"Bakhtin, Theory of Mind, and Pedagogy: Cognitive Construction of Social Class.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 30.1 (2017): 109-26 (external link to full essay)

"The Commotion of Souls," SubStance, # 140, 45. 2 (2016): 118-142 (external link to full essay)

"The Secret Life of Fiction." PMLA 130.3 (May 2015): 724-731 (pdf)

"Theory of Mind as a Pedagogical Tool." Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 16.1 (2014): 89-109 (pdf)

Co-authored with Ralph James Savarese: “The Critic as Neurocosmopolite; Or, What Cognitive Approaches to Literature Can Learn from Disability Studies: Lisa Zunshine in Conversation with Ralph James Savarese.” Narrative 22.1 (January 2014): 17-44 (pdf)

"From the Social to the Literary: Approaching Cao Xueqin's The Story of the Stone (紅樓夢) from a Cognitive Perspective." In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Approaches to Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 176-196. (pdf)

"Introduction to Cognitive Literary Studies." In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 1-9 (pdf)

"Sociocognitive Complexity." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 45.1 (2012): 13-18 (pdf)

“What to Expect When You Pick Up a Graphic Novel.” SubStance: special issue on graphic narratives. Ed. Jared Gardner and David Herman, # 124, 40.1 (2011): 114-134 (pdf)

“Style Brings In Mental States.” Style 45.2 (2011): 349-356 (pdf)

“Cognitive Alternatives to Interiority.” Cambridge History of the English Novel. Ed. Robert L. Caserio and Clement C. Hawes. Cambridge University Press, 2011. 147-162

“Mind Plus: Sociocognitive Pleasures of Jane Austen's Novels.” Studies in Literary Imagination 42.2 (Fall 2009): 89-109 (pdf)

 “1700-1775: Theory of Mind, Social Hierarchy, and the Emergence of Narrative Subjectivity.” The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English. Ed. David Herman. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. 161-186 (pdf)

 “Theory of Mind and Fictions of Embodied Transparency.” Narrative 16.1 (2008): 65-92 (pdf)

 “Theory of Mind and Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality: Notes Toward Cognitive Historicism.” Toward a Theory of Narrative Acts. Ed. Frederick Aldama. University of Texas Press, 2010. 179-203 (pdf)

“Lying Bodies of the Enlightenment: Theory of Mind and Cultural Historicism.” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 115-133 (pdf)

“What is Cognitive Cultural Studies?”Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010 1-33 (pdf)

 “Why Jane Austen Was Different, And Why We May Need Cognitive Science to See It.” Style 41.3 (2007): 273-297 (pdf)
           Reprinted inREAL—Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature24 (2008):141-61

 “Caught Unawares by a Benefactor: Embodying the Deserving Object of Charity in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.” The Eighteenth-Century Novel 5 (2006): 37-65 (pdf)

 “Essentialism and Comedy: A Cognitive Reading of the Motif of Mislaid Identity in Dryden’s Amphitryon (1690),” Performance and Cognition: Theatre in the Age of New Cognitive Studies. Ed. Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart. Routledge, 2006. 97-121

“Introduction.” Philanthropy and Fiction, 1698-1818. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006. vii-xxi (pdf)

“Can We Teach the ‘Deep Intersubjectivity’ of Richardson’s Clarissa?” New Windows on a Woman's World: A Festschrift for Jocelyn Harris. Otago Studies in English, 9. Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago, 2005. 88-99 (pdf)

“The Spectral Hospital: Philanthropy and the Eighteenth-Century Novel.” Eighteenth-Century Life, 29.1 (2005), 1-22 (pdf)

 “Teaching Sir Charles Grandison to Undergraduates instead of Pamela,” Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Samuel Richardson. Ed. Zunshine and Harris. New York: Modern Language Association, 2005. 184-190 (pdf)

“Introduction” and “Materials,” Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Samuel Richardson. Ed. Zunshine and Harris. New York: Modern Language Association, 2005. xi-xiii, 3-23 (pdf)

 “Bastard Daughters and Foundling Heroines: Rewriting Illegitimacy for the Eighteenth-Century Stage,” Modern Philology 102.4 (2005): 501-533 (pdf)

 “Richardson’s Clarissa and a Theory of Mind,” The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity. Ed. Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky. Ashgate Press, 2004. 127-146

“Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Consciousness,” Narrative 11.3 (2003): 270-291 (pdf)
           Reprinted in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006
           Translated into Russian and reprinted in Dialogue so Vremenem: Almanac of Intellectual History. Moscow: KomKniga. 15 (2005): 263-292

“Vladimir Nabokov and the Scriblerians,” Nabokov at Cornell. Ed. Gavriel Shapiro. Cornell University Press, 2003. 161-71(pdf)

 “The Gender Dynamics of the Infanticide Prevention Campaign in Eighteenth-Century England and Richardson’s History of Sir Charles Grandison,” Writing English Infanticide: Child-Murder, Gender, and Print, 1722-1859. Ed.Jennifer Thorn. Newark: The University of Delaware Press, 2003. 145-171 (pdf)

 “Eighteenth-Century Print Culture and the ‘Truth’ of Fictional Narrative,” Philosophy and Literature, 25.2 (2001): 215-232 (pdf)

“Rhetoric, Cognition, and Ideology in Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s 1781 Hymns in Prose for Children,” Poetics Today, 23.1 (2001): 231- 259 (pdf)

“The Politics of Eschatological Prophesy and Dryden’s 1700 The Secular Masque.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, vol. 41.3 (2000): 119-137 (pdf)

 “Nabokov’s ‘On Discovering a Butterfly’ and Pushkin’s ‘Exegi monumentum,’” The Nabokovian (2000): 38-42

“Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and VladimirNabokov’s Pale Fire”, Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing Critical Boundaries. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999. 161-82 (pdf)

 

 

External Links:

Academic

Suzanne Keen's advice on applying to graduate schools

Alan Richardson's notes on proposing and giving conference papers

John Richetti reads Pope and Swift on PennSound

Molly Worthen's rules of academic etiquette