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Strange Concepts and the

Stories they Make Possible:
Cognition, Culture, Narrative
by Lisa Zunshine

Article in SubStance January 2012

DOI: 10.2307/41818945

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180 Reviews

Zunshine, Lisa. Strange Concepts and the Stories they Make Possible: Cogni-
tion, Culture, Narrative. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp. 232.

In Strange Concepts and The Stories they Make Possible: Cognition, Cul-
ture, Narrative, Lisa Zunshine widens her scope from an erstwhile singular
focus on Theory of Mind (inferring interior states from exterior expression
and gesture) in fiction, turning her sights toward a branch of psychology
aimed at the study of the early cognitive development of humans. Here
she explores our distinctive mental capacity to ascribe a function to ob-
jects (a chair is to sit, etc.) and an essence to living creatures (the posited
unchanging, ungraspable spirit or soul, for example). Zunshines aim:
to throw light on how authors and artists confer strange configurations
upon such concepts as function and essence in their making of novels, films,
television shows, and art.
Zunshine builds her theoretical edifice largely on the research
findings of Paul Bloom and Susan A. Gelman concerning the cognitive
development of infants and children, specifically how they process ob-
jects (with a function) differently from living entities (with an essence).
Accordingly, while object-use determines its nature--and so the object can
shift in its identity (chair can become table or ladder, for instance)--living
entities (plant, animal, human, say) are immutable. As Zunshine sums
up: a tiger without legs is still a tiger, not a new species of animal (8).
Zunshine makes much of this insight, asking why it is certain humans
make and engage with cultural phenomena that confuse these otherwise
mentally distinct and fixed categories of function and essence. She explores
how a variety of authors and artists mix and blend these categories to
create strange products that engage their readers and audiences. Here
she chooses to focus on fictions by Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, J.K.
Rowling, and Anton Chekov, on films like I Robot, and on the surrealist
art of Salvador Dal and Man Ray. All the cultural artifacts she examines
deliberately create zones of cognitive uncertainty and possibility (54).
They happily blur our core function and essence categories but while doing
so they also create cognitive confusion and frustration.
There is an implicit continuum of domain violation and strange-
making in Zunshines analyses. At one end of the spectrum, for instance,
theres J.K. Rowlings infusion of an essence (personhood, say) into the
objects (doors, for instance) at Hogwarts. They only open if asked politely.
Only a few essentialism-enabled assumptions about human beings [. . .]
rub off on the flattered doors, but only a few and even those under some
duress (18), Zunshine comments. Novels such as Charles Dickenss Great
Expectations and Mary Shelleys Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus
play more intensely with the quirks of our cognitive architecture (55).

Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2012

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

 Reviews 181

That Dickenss Estella is an object made (130) by Miss Havisham turns

upside down our sense of her as a sentient, human being with complex
interior states of mind. Frustrating our impulse to read her as a person,
we discover her to be a carefully constructed artifact programmed, as it
were, for revenge. The net effect: we are intuitively jolted when these
two domains are momentarily brought together and a human being is
characterized as made in the fashion of an artifact (130). Zunshine con-
siders how Shelleys Frankenstein reverses this expectation. In her novel,
Shelley asks her readers to engage with a man-made object (the monster)
as a person. Frankensteins creature thus functions as a character whose
ontology seems to pull us in two different directionsan artifact with a
definite function and a living being, essentialized, multifunctional, and
largely unpredictable (86). At the other end of this (implied) continuum
of strange cultural artifacts lie Man Rays ironically titled painting The
Gift (it depicts a clothes iron with spikes sticking out of its base), Salvador
Dalis surrealist art, and Marcel Duchamps ready-mades. These objects
pretzel-twist our cognitive predisposition to parse the world in terms
of artifacts and living beings (155). In the here-and-now of our viewing
experience, these cognitively inassimilable entities (155) foreground and
frustrate our essence vs. function cognitive parsing, forcing us ultimately
into a state of cognitive uncertainty (155).
We learn from Zunshine, for instance, how the intermixing of the
functional and the essentialist mechanisms in Dickens, Ray, and Rowling,
among others work out our brain (131). We learn how they use certain
devices to tickle and tease our everyday cognitive world-parsing processes
by prompting us to see what happens if we cross the domains of living
beings and artifacts in this way or that way? (131). We learn that authors
and artists (to varying degrees) can choose to stage this moment of our
categorical confusion in ways that exploit both our eagerness to fix an
essence of a given character and our readiness to admit that we have failed,
once more, to capture that essence (37). Finally, we learn that strange
cultural artifacts that activate and frustrate our core conceptual domains
offer us a particular cognitive value for our confusion (162). They have
the potential to exercise our brains and make them flexible and strong.
Zunshines impulse seems on track. She uses the research results of
Bloom and Gelman to develop a research program that gets at the root
of what makes certain strange narrative fiction and art compelling,
intriguing, frustrating, and satisfying in its particular configurations. She
makes timely use of one critical approach derived from developmental
psychology and gives us compelling readings of fiction and art. Her cen-
tral hypotheses are convincing and seem verified by the relevant facts,
although this does not preclude the necessity for further research. For the
story goes on and much remains to be clarified and verified.

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

182 Reviews

Zunshines scholarship here and elsewhere is boldly exploratory.

She metabolizes research in a certain branch of developmental cognitive
science in an attempt to deepen vitally our understanding of our universal
fiction and art-making and consuming activities. With some implementing
of checks and balances to this research by other work done in the field,
a convergence and finally an emergence may take place: of a foundational
cross-disciplinary research program for understanding better our selves,
the cultural artifacts we make, and the world we live in.
Frederick Luis Aldama
Ohio State University

SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012

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