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Lisa Zunshine deposited How Memories Become Literature in the group
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 2 weeks, 3 days ago
Cognitive science can help literary scholars formulate specific questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes as its starting point embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then follows the transformation of embedded mental states throughout several…[Read more]
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Lisa Zunshine deposited Manipulating Metacognition in Witness for the Prosecution in the group
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 3 weeks, 1 day ago
This essay exemplifies a cognitive approach to literary and film studies, with particular emphasis on fictional reimagining of legal institutions. It draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition—specifically, the difference between reflective and intuitive beliefs—to suggest that courtroom dramas, such as Billy Wilder’s Witne…[Read more]
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Bradley J. Fest deposited Isn’t It a Beautiful Day? An Interview with J. Hillis Miller in the group
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 4 months ago
This interview with esteemed literary critic J. Hillis Miller was conducted via Skype on July 17, 2013. Miller speaks about a number of issues important to his life and work. Providing a number of emblematic parables, Miller discusses his early career, his work on the poetry of William Carlos Williams, and his famous essay “The Critic as H…[Read more]
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Bradley J. Fest deposited An Interview with Jonathan Arac in the group
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 4 months ago
This interview with literary critic Jonathan Arac was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh on May 19, 2015. Arac, a member of the boundary 2 editorial collective since 1979, speaks at length about his life and work. Addressing the impact of theory on his career, he discusses how he came to be associated with the New Americanists, his project…[Read more]
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Darren J. Borg started the topic CFP: Speculative Fiction and Eternal Life in the discussion
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 8 months ago
What is a life worth living?Speculative Fiction and Eternal Life Despite numerous post-apocalyptic storylines, many science fiction texts are a celebration of life and seek ways of prolonging it, whether artificially or by providing warnings against our current behavior in order to preserve the life that already exists. The fact that death and…[Read more]
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Lisa Zunshine deposited The Secret Life of Literature in the group
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 1 year, 5 months ago
An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history to examine patterns of “mindreading” in a wide range of literary works.
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Dustin Friedman deposited “The rarest, most complex & most lately developed form of aestheticism”: Olive Schreiner, decadence, and the aesthetic education of the senses in the group
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 1 year, 8 months ago
This essay focuses on Olive Schreiner’s personal correspondence and the allegories collected in Dreams (1890) to explore her complicated relationship to late-Victorian Decadence. I argue that Schreiner modified Decadent writers’ use of intersensoriality and synaesthesia to educate her readers into a new kind of common sense, one aligned with her…[Read more]
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Patrick McEvoy-Halston deposited Rollback: Leaving Women to Demons in Gene Wolfe’s Fiction in the group
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 1 year, 11 months ago
Gene Wolfe, living though Severian, re-experiences via Thecla’s characterization of him as not being worth enough to value highly for being what he thought he could only amount to her when he first met her, that is, simply a boy at hand, his own once being lured into the attentions’ of his mother and then dismissed by her when she was done usi…[Read more]
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Nicholas T Rinehart deposited Lateral Reading Lyric Testimony; or, The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in the Americas in the group
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 2 years ago
Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing the forward movement from a singular beginning in terms of birth, maturation, and inheritance. This model delimits a specialized field of study, but also obscures texts, practices, and archives that do not cohere with it. In the study of slave…[Read more]
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Magdalena Ostas deposited Wordsworth, Wittgenstein, and the Reconstruction of the Everyday in the group
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 2 years, 2 months ago
The connection between philosophy and real or everyday language belongs to Wordsworth’s early poetic vision. My interest in Wordsworth’s dialogue with philosophical thinking leads me to turn neither to studies tracing the varied philosophic influences on his poetics nor to those examining the influence of his collaborator Coleridge on his ear…[Read more]
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Magdalena Ostas deposited Interiority and Expression in Dickinson’s Lyrics in the group
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 2 years, 2 months ago
The argument in this essay is that Dickinson’s poetics of inner life makes us see anew the long-standing philosophical problem of expression. Dickinson’s poetry invests itself in an understanding of subjectivity that rearranges the anchors we often turn to in thinking about how lives and identities take on shape in expressive forms. Poetry for…[Read more]
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Will Fenton started the topic CFP: Library Company of Philadelphia 2021 Innovation Award in the discussion
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 2 years, 4 months ago
The Library Company of Philadelphia is delighted to welcome applications for its 2021 Innovation Award. The Innovation Award will recognize a project-digital or analog-that critically and creatively expands the possibilities of humanistic scholarship.
Proposals will be evaluated by a committee of leaders in higher education, research libraries,…[Read more]
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Will Fenton started the topic CFP: Library Company of Philadelphia 2021 Innovation Award in the discussion
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 2 years, 4 months ago
The Library Company of Philadelphia is delighted to welcome applications for its 2021 Innovation Award. The Innovation Award will recognize a project-digital or analog-that critically and creatively expands the possibilities of humanistic scholarship.
Proposals will be evaluated by a committee of leaders in higher education, research libraries,…[Read more]
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Aarthi Vadde started the topic Novel Dialogue: Season 1 now complete! in the discussion
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 2 years, 5 months ago
Novel Dialogue, a podcast sponsored by the Society of Novel Studies, has just completed its first season. We bring critics and novelists together for fun and sophisticated conversations about novels – how they are made and what to make of them.
For a full list of episodes, please check out https://noveldialogue.org/
Or subscribe at Apple…[Read more]
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Lisa Zunshine deposited Who Is He to Speak of My Sorrow? in the group
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 3 years, 2 months ago
This article suggests that comparative literature scholars may benefit from the awareness that different communities around the world subscribe to different models of mind and that works of fiction can thus be fruitfully analyzed in relation to those local ideologies of mind. Taking as her starting point the “opacity of mind” doctrine, the aut…[Read more]
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Ellen Spolsky deposited The Gap between Fairness and Law: Hamlet and Equity from a Cognitive Perspective in the group
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 3 years, 2 months ago
This essay explores the gap between the abstract ideal of fairness and the bodily materiality of retribution. My aim is to suggest how some current cognitive science affords a helpful way of talking about the breaks between abstractions, or thoughts of fairness, and the judgments and punishments produced by actual legal systems. It is remarkably…[Read more]
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Ellen Spolsky deposited Cognitive Poetics in the group
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 3 years, 2 months ago
In her introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, Lisa Zunshine, scholar in the field and its best historian, describes cognitive literary critics as working “not toward consilience with science but toward a richer engagement with a variety of theoretical paradigms in literary and cultural studies” (2015). Scholars from m…[Read more]
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Daniel Williams deposited Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel, by David Kurnick in the group
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 3 years, 3 months ago
Review of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel, by David Kurnick
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Daniel Williams deposited Slow Fire: Serial Thinking and Hardy’s Genres of Induction in the group
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 3 years, 3 months ago
This essay considers the use of “serial thinking”—an approach to representation and cognition that emphasizes repetition, enumeration, and aggregation—in the work of Thomas Hardy. Examining his first novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), it connects Hardy’s approaches to serial thinking with the discourse of Victorian logic (especially the work of J…[Read more]
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Daniel Williams deposited Down the Slant towards the Eye: Hopkins and Ecological Perception in the group
TM Literary Criticism on MLA Commons 3 years, 3 months ago
This essay reads Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry for its “ecological perception”: a perceptual modality involving the dynamic interaction between human bodies and environmental givens or potentialities. Linking Hopkins’s syncretic ideas about perception to the psychologist J. J. Gibson’s account of our sensitivity to environmental “affordan…[Read more]
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