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 The Baader-Meinhof Complex.

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and Performance Studies argues that much of contemporary literary theory is still predicated, at least implicitly, on outdated linguistic and psychological models such as post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and behaviorism, which significantly contradict current dominant scientific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.

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 The Baader-Meinhof Complex.

By exploring the concept of the "tender gaze" in German film, theater, and literature, this volume's contributors illustrate how perspective-taking in works of art fosters empathy and prosocial behaviors. The gaze, understood as a way of looking at others that involves contemplation and the operation of power, has an extensive history of iterations such as the male gaze (Mulvey), the oppositional gaze (hooks), and the postcolonial gaze (Said). This essay collection develops a supplemental theory of what Muriel Cormican has coined the "tender gaze" and traces its occurrence in German film, theater, and literature. More than qualifying the primarily voyeuristic, narcissistic, and sexist impetus of the male gaze, the tender gaze also allows for a differentiated understanding of the role identification plays in reception, and it highlights various means of eliciting a sociopolitical critique in works of art. Emphasizing the humanizing potential of the tender gaze, the contributors argue that far from simply exciting emotional contagion, affect in art promotes an altruistic, rational, and fundamentally ethical relationship to the other. The tender gaze elucidates how perspective-taking operates in art to foster empathy and prosocial behaviors. Though the contributors identify instances of the tender gaze in artistic production since the early nineteenth century, they focus on its pervasiveness in contemporary works, corresponding to twenty-first-century concerns with implicit bias and racism.

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.

Explores the storytelling of Anna Seghers and other 20th-century writers who faced the tensions between aesthetics and politically conscious writing, between conformity and resistance. While Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay "The Storyteller" (1936), lamented the decline of the storytelling tradition in the age of the modernist novel, Anna Seghers and other twentieth-century German writers went on to chronicle the century's darkest days in creative and compelling ways. This volume is at its heart a tribute to Germanist Helen Fehervary, whose work, particularly on the prose of Anna Seghers, continues to inspire scholars who examine narration and storytelling. The subtitle quotation, "for once, telling it all from the beginning," is a translation of the phrase "einmal alles von Anfang an erzahlen," from Seghers's exile novel Transit, in which she told notonly her own story but that of countless others who faced existential challenges in their attempts to escape the Nazi regime. This volume examines a number of such writers, exploring the tensions between aesthetics and politically conscious writing, as well as individual struggles involving conformity and resistance in a totalitarian state. Contributors: Peter Beicken, Hunter Bivens, Kristy R. Boney, Ute Brandes, Stephen Brockmann, Sylvia Fischer, Jost Hermand, Kristen Hetrick, Robert C. Holub, Weijia Li, Elizabeth Loentz, Michaela Peroutkova, Benjamin Robinson, Christiane Zehl Romero, Marc Silberman, Andy Spencer, Luke Springman, Amy Kepple Strawser, Jennifer Marston William. Kristy R. Boney is Associate Professor of German at the University of Central Missouri. Jennifer Marston William is Professor of German and Head of the School of Languages and Cultures at Purdue University.