•  53
    In Strange Concepts and The Stories they Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, 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 objects (a chair is to sit, etc.) and an essence to living creatu…Read more
  •  2
    Through a series of provocative conversations, Frederick Luis Aldama and Herbert Lindenberger, who have written widely on literature, film, music, and art, locate a place for the discomforting and the often painfully unpleasant within aesthetics. The conversational format allows them to travel informally across many centuries and many art forms. They have much to tell one another about the arts since the advent of modernism soon after 1900—the nontonal music, for example, of the Second Vienna Sc…Read more
  •  1
    To Read or Not Read Mental States
    Symploke 22 (1-2): 315. 2014.
  • "In this exciting new book, Frederick Luis Aldama has done an outstanding job of remapping 'magical realism.'" —Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of Afro-American Studies, Harvard University Magical realism has become almost synonymous with Latin American fiction, but this way of representing the layered and often contradictory reality of the topsy-turvy, late-capitalist, globalizing world finds equally vivid expression in U.S. multiethnic a…Read more
  •  4
    Conversations on Cognitive Cultural Studies: Literature, Language, and Aesthetics
    with Patrick Colm Hogan
    Ohio State University Press. 2014.
    In recent years, few areas of research have advanced as rapidly as cognitive science, the study of the human mind and brain. A fundamentally interdisciplinary field, cognitive science has both inspired and been advanced by work in the arts and humanities. In _Conversations on Cognitive Cultural Studies: Literature, Language, and Aesthetics,_ Frederick Luis Aldama and Patrick Colm Hogan, two of the most prominent experts on the intersection of mind, brain, and culture, engage each other in a live…Read more
  •  38
    Why the humanities matter: a commonsense approach
    University of Texas Press. 2008.
    Introduction: a new humanism -- Self, identity, and ideas -- Revisiting Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault -- Derrida gets medieval -- Imaginary empires, real nations -- Edward said spaced out -- Modernity, what? -- Teachers, scholars, and the humanities today -- Translation matters -- Can music resist? -- The "cultural studies turn" in Brown studies -- Pulling up stakes in Latin/o American theoretical claims -- Fugitive thoughts on justice and happiness -- Why literature matters -- Interpretation, in…Read more