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What we'll be doing today: Roll; Syllabus; Getting to know you; course site; theory; reading poems

Theory: a mental structure for framing discussion and thinking about ideas or issues.

The hermeneutic circle stipulates that one can understand a text (or any state of affairs) only by grasping in advance the relation of a specific part to the whole in which it belongs, even if one can only arrive at a sense of the whole by working through its parts [ . . . . ] reading a text requires the recognition of patterns, and a pattern is a reciprocal construction of an overall order and its constituent parts, the overarching arrangement making sense of the details by their relation to one another, even as their configuration only emerges as its parts fit together" (Armstrong 54).

“We can define art as cognitive play with pattern. Just as play refines behavioral options over time by being self-rewarding, so art increases cognitive skills, repertoires, and sensitivities. A work of art acts like a playground for the mind, a swing or a slide or a merry-go-round of visual or aural or social pattern. Like play, art succeeds by engaging and rewarding attention, since the more frequent and intense our response, the more powerful the neural consequences. Art's appeal to our preferences for pattern ensures that we expose ourselves to high concentrations of humanly appropriate information eagerly enough that over time we strengthen the neural pathways that process key patterns in open-ended ways” (Boyd).

“If on the other hand information is completely patterned, we need not continue to attend: if a stimulus remains unchanging, if the pattern can be predicted, the psychological process of habituation automatically switches off attention. The most patterned novel possible would repeat one letter, say, q, over and over again-a queue no reader would want to wait in. But an unpredictable combination of patterns repays intense attention and can yield rich inferences, although finding how to ascertain all the patterns and all the meaning they imply may not be easy” (Boyd).

Armstrong, Paul. How Literature Plays with the Brain.

Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories.

© David Bordelon 2015