Reviewed by: Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible Tony E. Jackson Zunshine, Lisa. 2008. Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. $65.00 hc. $25.00 sc. 232 pp. Lisa Zunshine’s Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible is a new entry in the field of cognitive poetics, a field that draws on theories from cognitive psychology to assess how literature affects readers. Her book is divided into three sections, each considering in detail a specific interplay of “strange concepts” and stories. The strange concepts are recurring cultural representations whose nature and significance can be linked to specific ‘cognitive universals’ that have been established in the fields of cognitive psychology and cognitive anthropology. Zunshine taps into these fields in order to study the ways in which “a given cultural representation…engages our evolved cognitive capacities” (2). Cognitive psychological studies across various cultures have concluded that humans come into the world with certain built-in concepts of the nature of living beings, or what may more generally be called ‘natural kinds’ of things (as opposed to manufactured or what may be called ‘artifactual kinds’ of things). In one set of experiments, as Zunshine explains, a child is [End Page 237] presented with a toy animal, say a skunk, that is altered in various ways: limbs are taken away, the fur removed, etc. “When asked to comment on the species of a hybrid animal such as a skunk altered to look like a zebra, even three-year-old children judge a skunk to be a skunk” (8). The skunk is taken for granted to have some “underlying ‘skunkness’” that continues to determine its identity. Only by changing some invisible “essence-conferring innards” of the skunk will a child understand it as having become a different animal. In a broad way the same holds true of many adult understandings of natural kinds of objects. By contrast, from a very young age we understand artifacts—that is, non-natural objects—in an entirely different way. Rather than being constituted by some invisible, more or less mysterious core, an artifact’s entire being is visible for all to see. Its use determines its nature. Even four-year olds think of “artifacts primarily in terms of their functions” (7). The “strange concepts” will have to do with the way stories play with these cognitive universals. It is commonly accepted that everyday essentialist notions always depend on a final, unexplainable, more or less mysterious…well, essence, that cannot itself be further explained in terms of sensible qualities. This means that there is always a potential conflict between our intuitive sense of an essence and our inability to capture that essence in language. “But,” Zunshine explains, “because we (cannot help but) assume that some essence is there, our failure to capture it…does not invalidate our implicit belief in it” (30, emphasis in original). The establishment of this irresolvable, self-perpetuating conflict between our built-in intuitive certainty and our linguistic uncertainty is an outcome of cognitive research, but is not typically in itself the kind of thing upon which cognitive research would focus. But of course it is just the kind of enigmatic conflict that both literature and literary study would find most interesting, and it underlies all the other strange concepts that Zunshine will consider. In the first section this conflict is explained through close-readings of a variety of kinds of texts, but especially in relation to the traditional comic plot that turns on the identity confusions caused by identical twins. Zunshine shows how these stories depend on both the humor and the anxiety of calling into question our intuitive sense of “individual essentialism,” our basic sense that an individual human being is constituted ultimately by “an ineffable special something” that can never quite be captured in language (24). By explaining the similarities and differences between Plautus’s play, Amphitryon, Dryden’s seventeenth-century version of the same story, and different versions of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, Zunshine both gives us interesting and new interpretations, and shows us in general how cognitive universals can be related to cultural specificities. As she says, she...