Category Archives: Literature and narrative

Role of examples in social debate and research

Cartoon Warfare (Ann Applebaum, WP) In recent years “the personal is political,” a phrase whose origins are lost deep in the history of the women’s movement, has among other things come to mean that just about anyone is allowed to … Continue reading

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Cadences and harmonies of verbal and dramatic narratives

Several years before his death, the famous Estonian semiotician Yuriy Lotman came to Prague and the thing that I still remember from his talk is an admonition that boundaries are the places to study because that’s the most interesting phenomena … Continue reading

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Multiple perspectives-models-stories in fiction and science

AfterEllen.com – The L Word’s Vanishing Bisexual The L Word’s representation of bisexuality reflects popular and sometimes opposing ideas about bisexuality. One belief–represented best on the series by Jenny–is that those who identify as bisexual are merely experimenting with their … Continue reading

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Geena Davis and the importance of individual role-model narratives

CNN.com – Quotes from the Golden Globes – Jan 16, 2006 “As I was coming in, I felt a little tug at my skirt. And I looked, and there was a little girl maybe 8 or 10 in her first … Continue reading

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Posted in Cognition, Feminism, Literature and narrative | 1 Comment

Nature of the predictions genre

On The Media– NAMING RIGHT The key variables that differentiated the titles that had been number-one bestsellers from the titles that had failed to be were whether the title was literal or figurative, the word type of the first word, … Continue reading

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Transformation of symbols across cultural borders

NPR : Muslim Migrants, ‘Embracing the Infidel’ Author Behzad Yaghmaian spent two years traveling with Muslim migrants and collected their stories on safe houses, bribes, police custody, and human trafficking. He talks about his book, Embracing the Infidel: Stories of … Continue reading

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Urban Legends as examples of folk theories and cognitive models

Urban Legends Reference Pages: College (The Unsolvable Math Problem) This legend combines one of the ultimate academic wish-fulfillment fantasies — a student not only proves himself the smartest one in his class, but also bests his professor and every other … Continue reading

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Towards a cognitive morphology of the folktale

Propp and other formalists had many things figured out quite right. Then the structuralists came and elevated emergent properties to the level of meaning creation. This post is an analogy in the sense that it compares the idea of the … Continue reading

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My Week In Thought and Hermeneutic Suspicion

My Week In Thought This PBS essay neatly summarizes almost all the arguments I would ever make – or in some cases have made – in defense of video gaming. OK, there may be a fine line between vanity and … Continue reading

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Consequences of video games – and the cognitive aspects of data interpretation

The Video Game Revolution: “Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked” by Henry Jenkins | PBS The availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence. According to federal crime statistics, the rate of juvenile violent crime in … Continue reading

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