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Why Study Literature? Metaphors, for one Walt Whitman, in a late essay entitled "An Old Man's Rejoinder" argues that context is essential to understanding any work of art: "No great poem or other literary or artistic work of any scope, old or new, can be essentially consider'd without weighing first the age, politics (or want of politics) and aim, visible forms, unseen soul, and current times, out of the midst of which it rises and is formulated" (1249). Words, Words, Words “Years ago, the cognitive scientist David Swinney helped uncover the fact that when we read a simple word like “bug,” we activate not only the more common meaning (a crawling, sixlegged creature), but also the bug’s less frequent associations— spies, Volkswagons, and glitches in software. Swinney discovered that the brain doesn’t find just one simple meaning for a word; instead it stimulates a veritable trove of knowledge about that word and the many words related to it. The richness of this semantic dimension of reading depends on the riches we have already stored, a fact with important and sometimes devastating developmental implications for our children. Children with a rich repertoire of words and their associations will experience any text or any conversation in ways that are substantively different from children who do not have the same stored words and concepts” (Wolf 9) “Think about the implications of Swinney’s finding for texts as simple as Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go! Or as semantically complex as James Joyce’s Ulysses. Children who have never left the narrow boundaries of their neighborhood, either figuratively or literally, may understand this book in entirely different ways from other children. We bring our entire store of meanings to whatever we read—or not” (Wolf 9) Reading: food for the brain “what happens when meaning is added to words. For example, they studied how the brain reads pseudo words like “mbli” and real words like “limb,” in which the letters were the same but only one combination of them was meaningful. In each case, the same visual areas initially activated. But the pseudo words stimulated little activity beyond their identification in the visual association regions. For real words, however, the brain became a beehive of activity. A network of processes went to work: the visual and visual association areas responded to visual patterns (or representations); frontal, temporal, and parietal areas provided information about the smallest sounds in words, called phonemes; and finally areas in the temporal and parietal lobes processed meanings, functions, and connections to other real words. The difference between the two arrangements of the same letters—only one of which was a word—was almost half a cortex” (Wolf 35) “Comprehension processes grow impressively [ . . . where people] learn to connect prior knowledge, predict dire or good consequences, draw inferences from every dangerfilled corner, monitor gaps in their understanding, and interpret how each new clue, revelation, or added piece of knowledge to unpeel the layers of meaning in a word, a phrase, or a thought. That is, in this long phase of reading development, they leave the surface layers of text to explore the wondrous terrain that lies beneath it” (Wolf 138) “We may never fly in a hot-air balloon, win a race with a hare, or dance with a prince until the stroke of midnight, but through stories in books we can learn what it feels like. In this process we step outside ourselves for ever-lengthening moments and begin to understand the “other,” which Marcel Proust wrote lies at the heart of communication through written language” (Wolf 86) “As David Rose, a prominent translator of theoretical neuroscience into applied educational technology, puts it, the three major jobs of the reading brain are recognizing patterns, planning strategy, and feeling” (Wolf 140) “Another feature of the language of books involves a beginning understanding of what might be called “literacy devices,” such as figurative language, particularly metaphor and simile. Consider these similes from the example above: “cheeks like rose petals, and hair like golden silk.” Such phrases are both linguistically lovely and cognitively demanding. Children are being asked to compare “cheeks” to “rose petals” and “hair” to “silk.” In the process, they are gaining not only vocabulary skills, but also practice in the cognitively complex use of analogy. Analogical skills represent an extremely important, largely invisible aspect of intellectual development at every age” (Wolf 89) Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: HarperCollins, 2007, Print. Myth “The mythology of a nation is the intelligible mask of the enigma called the ‘national character.’ Through myths the psychology and world view of our cultural ancestors are transmitted to modern descendants, in such a way and with such power that our perception of contemporary reality and our ability to function in the world are directly, often tragically affected” (Slotkin 3) “A people unaware of its myths is likely to continue living by them, though the world around that people may change and demand changes in their psychology, their world view, their ethics, and their institutions” (Slotkin 5) “Myth is essential conservative” (Slotkin 14). It is interested in preserving the status quo, perpetuating a line of thinking about an event or behavior that is fixed, inviolable? unchanged, insusceptible to the current events. Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence; the Mythology of the American American Myths
© 2009 David Bordelon
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