Series:

Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance

2 total works

Cover of Cognitive Approaches to German Historical Film

This book explores how minds at the movies understand minds in the movies and introduces readers to some fundamental principles of Cognitive Studies—namely conceptual blending, Theory of Mind, and empathy/perspective-taking—through their application to film analysis. A cognitive approach to recent popular historical films demonstrates cinema’s potential to stimulate viewers’ critical thinking about crucial events of the past century. Diverging from the focus on narrative processing in traditional cognitivist theory, this book examines film reception and production in the context of the latest developments in cognitive and social psychology. Turning to German cinema as a case study for this interdisciplinary partnership, Jennifer Marston William offers a fresh look at some internationally successful films of the twenty-first century, including Nowhere in Africa, Goodbye, Lenin!, Sophie Scholl, Downfall, The Lives of Others, and TheBaader-Meinhof Complex.

Cover of Restoring the Human Context to Literary and Performance Studies
Restoring the Human Context to Literary and Performance Studies argues that much of contemporary literary theory is still predicated, at least implicitly, on outdated linguistic and psychological models such as post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and behaviorism, which significantly contradict current dominant scientific views. By contrast, this monograph promotes an alternative paradigm for literary studies, namely Contextualism, and in so doing highlights the similarities and differences among the sometimes-conflicting contemporary cognitive approaches to literature and performance, arguing not in favor of one over the other but for Contextualism as their common ground.