You cancelled your ancestryDOTcom services
this morning but have until 28 August to use the three-month free subscription.
You told them that you don’t have the time at present but that Ancestry is a
good service. More honestly you have lost interest. Fiction is more fun. –
Amorella
0907
hours. Family is full of fiction just like everything else. The best part of
the service was discovering that one of my ancestors probably knew Geoffrey
Chaucer personally. This is so very cool, even as a thought. I respect my
ancestors and I have their names so that I make up a chart for the boys one of
these days. It is good to know your background, at least the essentials. I put
them to use in Grandma’s stories. DNA takes priority.
Mid-morning. You are in the shade facing
east in the parking lot near the earth dam at Pine Hill Lakes Park. – Carol
called and suggested you walk because it is a pleasant morning so you told her
not to come back; instead you walked down the hill north of the dam and to the
shelter with picnic table and back to the bridge, took a couple photos then
walked back up which cause a bit of heavy breathing partly because you have
sandals on and not your athletic shoes. – Amorella
1007
hours. Plus I had my beret on and even in the shade it is warmer to me than it
is to Carol. Anyway, I did a fifteen to twenty minutes worth of walk at least
as far as energy and effort as far as I am concerned. I’m still perspiring. I
did bring some ice water, which helps. My knees and hips ached all the way to
the bottom. Coming up the hill was actually easier on my joints. Growing older
isn’t what it used to be. Today my goal is to complete the tweaking of chapter
two book two. It is interesting that at least at this moment I cannot remember
book one other than it is completed.
That was dreamland, boy. I can vouch for
that. _ Amorella
Such
humor; vouching implies you exist as a separate entity. Though from my
perspective you surely have the authenticity to say the word others would
disagree.
My
short sleeve shirt is still damp from perspiration and I am tired. (1045)
Mid-afternoon. You are waiting for Carol at
Kroger’s on Mason-Montgomery after a late lunch at Panera/Chipotle. Carol had a
lot to talk about at lunch, all family stuff which comes with having three
sisters – at least that’s how you see it. Your family has very little to talk
about because there isn’t much talking – one of those Orndorff traits. –
Amorella
1547
hours. I make up for the lack of talking with all these postings. The classroom
is one of the few places I liked to hear my voice because I was saying stuff
that I felt was important to the education of my students. The postings are an
escape valve so to speak because it allows me to keep my mind less cluttered.
That’s what it seems anyway. I would rather read words than hear them. It is
hot out here, ninety degrees or so. I am facing south and have the two west
windows up to keep out the sun’s rays and the two east windows down in the
Avalon. It would be terrible in the Honda. If we are going to keep it we need
to get the windows tinted. Carol was only going to be in the store a few
minutes for milk and carrots. We DVRed five programs last night, surely we will
watch one or two.
You are home catching up on email and you
found a good article from "Edge" on how stories are a part of humanity. You were
concerned that it is too long and not really relevant but this is not the case.
When I said, ‘Drop it in,’ you weren’t sure it wasn’t your own voice. Ironic,
huh? Add and post, boy. - Amorella
** **
JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL is a Distinguished Research Fellow in the English
Department at Washington & Jefferson College. He is the author or editor of
six books, including The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
(a New York Times Editor’s Choice Selection and a finalist for the LA
Times Book Prize).
THE WAY WE LIVE OUR LIVES IN STORIES
There's a big question about what it is that makes people people. What
is it that most sets our species apart from every other species? That's the
debate that I've been involved in lately.
When
we call the species homo sapiens that's an argument in the debate. It's an
argument that it is our sapience, our wisdom, our intelligence, or our big
brains that most sets our species apart. Other scientists, other philosophers
have pointed out that, no, a lot of the time we're really not behaving all that
rationally and reasonably. It's our upright posture that sets us apart, or it's
our opposable thumb that allows us to do this incredible tool use, or it's our
cultural sophistication, or it's the sophistication of language, and so on and
so forth. I'm not arguing against any of those things, I’m just arguing that
one thing of equal stature has typically been left off of this list, and that’s
the way that people live their lives inside stories.
We live in stories all day long—fiction stories, novels, TV shows,
films, interactive video games. We daydream in stories all day long. Estimates
suggest we just do this for hours and hours per day—making up these little
fantasies in our heads, these little fictions in our heads. We go to sleep at
night to rest; the body rests, but not the brain. The brain stays up at night.
What is it doing? It's telling itself stories for about two hours per night.
It's eight or ten years out of our lifetime composing these little vivid
stories in the theaters of our minds.
I'm not here to downplay any of those other entries into the
"what makes us special" sweepstakes. I'm just here to say that one
thing that has been left off the list is storytelling. We live our lives in
stories, and it's sort of mysterious that we do this. We're not really sure why
we do this. It's one of these questions—storytelling—that falls in the gap
between the sciences and the humanities. If you have this division into two
cultures: you have the science people over here in their buildings, and the
humanities people over here in their buildings. They're writing in their own
journals, and publishing their own book series, and the scientists are doing
the same thing.
~~~
You have this division, and you have all this area in between the
sciences and the humanities that no one is colonizing. There are all these
questions in the borderlands between these disciplines that are rich and
relatively unexplored. One of them is storytelling and it's one of these
questions that humanities people aren't going to be able to figure out on their
own because they don't have a scientific toolkit that will help them gradually,
painstakingly narrow down the field of competing ideas. The science people
don't really see these questions about storytelling as in their jurisdiction:
"This belongs to someone else, this is the humanities' territory, we don't
know anything about it."
What is needed is fusion—people bringing together methods, ideas,
approaches from scholarship and from the sciences to try to answer some of
these questions about storytelling. Humans are addicted to stories, and they
play an enormous role in human life and yet we know very, very little about
this subject. There's an important growth area here for new understanding.
Storytelling is great, we all love stories, but do we need empiricism,
too, or can we let stories run away from us and lose track of empirical
reality? That's certainly a danger.
One of the major problems that I dealt with in my academic career
coming out of the humanities was a tremendous frustration, to the point of
almost paralysis, with the lack of an empirical foundation for any of the work
that gets done in the humanities.
There are all kinds of storytelling. You have a question about X, Y or
Z, and it's very easy for a talented PhD-wielding, high IQ person to tell a
wonderful and engaging story about it. The story is often very credible, and
very plausible, and very good, but the problem is that scholar B and scholar C
have their own very plausible excellent stories as well.
A great deal of my work, especially earlier on in my career, was about
going into the sciences and ransacking them, and trying to hijack the
methodologies that are used to help scientists choose between competing
stories. Scientists are telling stories, too. That's what a hypothesis is. You
have the question, and you make up a story about how to account for the
phenomenon. The advantage that sciences have over the humanities (one of them)
is that science has methods for helping winnow down the field of competing
hypotheses.
The argument has always been that none of those methods work in the
humanities. That idea is bunk. It's like saying before people went to the moon,
"You can't get to the moon because no one has ever been there." But
no one had ever tried really before. It's not like people had tried desperately
to make empirical methods work in the humanities, and then failed, and then
moved on to something easy like string theory. They didn't put their shoulder
into it and give up. We just have a thought habit that this is a field where
it's strictly qualitative, and quantitative methods can't work, but that's
false. You can find a lot of proof of concept studies that have been done.
There's empirical work in the humanities that's quite good.
The main fear people have about importing empirical methods,
scientific methods into the humanities is that somehow what's special about the
humanities would be vaporized. It would become just like robotic, literary scholars
would come to work in lab coats or something and the field would be sterilized.
But it's really easy for the two things to co-exist. You need good scholarship,
you absolutely do. You need good historians, and good literary theorists, and
good literary critics, and none of that work is at odds with work that is
methodologically scientific. There will be certain questions that can be
addressed in a fairly rigorous scientific manner, and some questions that
really can't.
~~~
I got to this place—this place between the sciences and the humanities—close
to 20 years ago when I just started out in graduate school. I went to graduate
school in literary studies, English. I wanted to be a scholar when I grew up,
and a scholar I thought was someone who discovered things, or made some sort of
small contribution to human self-understanding. Then I got into graduate
school, and at the time the academic humanities were still quite firmly in the
grip of postmodernism.
I would go to work as a graduate student every day, and I was told by
my professors that, okay, we'll read, we'll write, but it's all kind of
hopeless. The odds of us ever understanding anything are vanishingly small.
It's a dog chasing its tail forever. I was frustrated by that; I wanted to try
to find something like more reliable and more durable answers to the questions
that I was addressing because I thought they were important questions.
I started looking around and thinking about, how do we do this? What's
a good model for generating more reliable knowledge? I didn't have to think
about it very hard. I said, "Well, the sciences seem to do this. The
sciences seem to do a nice job. They have their mistakes, they backslide, they
go in circles now and then, but most people allow that over time there's a gradual
improvement in our understanding of the universe that wasn't there
before." The humanities, in large part, have trouble making the same
claim.
My career, especially in the early part, was about seeing how far I
could get applying a more scientific model to the sorts of questions that I
wanted to ask about art, those questions about literature in particular.
When I was in graduate school I saw several problems with the business
model in academic literary studies: bad theory, bad method, bad attitude, bad
ideology.
On the bad-theory front, what we had was a domination by Freudian
theories, psychoanalytic theory, and very rigid versions of social
constructivism, this idea that everything is pure nurture and no nature. I knew
those models were out of date, so part of what my work was about was updating
the model—the theory—to make it consistent with the best thinking in the
sciences of the mind.
The other problem was a problem that I discussed a little earlier,
this idea of, okay, so you have better theory to guide your research, and you
will come up with ideas, but how do you know if your idea is true? I wanted to
see if there were ways of quantifying some of the questions that you approach
in the humanities, and submitting them to statistical analysis, and scientific
testing, and falsification, and all of that stuff.
In the early days—the late ‘90s, early 2000s—I was doing things like
having teams of readers, students, and together we would content-analyze
folktales from all around the world. We would get a corpus of folktales from
maybe 100 different cultures, hundreds of tales from every culture. This would
be much easier to do now because you would have the computer tools to automate
a great deal of it. We had to go out in the libraries, get the collections,
scan them laboriously, and we'd ask questions that were very, very simple, and
very, very basic.
For example, a question: Are female characters underrepresented in
literature? Are there fewer female characters in literature? At first glance,
just from your normal reading, you say, "Yes, it seems that way." And
then you would say, "Well, what about in, I don't know, Elizabethan plays,
and what about in folktales? What about on TV? What about in films? What about
in other cultures? What about in other centuries?"
The argument had always been, yes, female characters are
underrepresented because of sexism in the West. We said, "How do we find
out if that idea is true?" What we did is we got this big body of
folktales, and we'd look to see if we'd find the same relationship. We had a
couple different ways of looking to see whether or not females were
underrepresented in those samples. One thing you could do, is to read tales,
and have the coders literally code: Who is the main character? How many
characters are there? How many males? How many females? We also had the
computer count pronouns: he/him versus her/she et cetera. We found very, very
little evidence for the sort of Western patriarchy argument because what we
found basically all around the world was that female characters were
underrepresented across the board. We did not find cultures where you had
parity. We did not find cultures where you had more leading female characters
than leading male characters.
~~~
Often times, with a very simple question like this, the response will
be this is the humanities, this is about books, this is about words, and there
is no way of ever knowing the answers to these questions for sure, so all we
can do is argue about it forever. But this study showed that with a little bit
of elbow grease and a little bit of ingenuity, there's a way to go out and get
something like an answer to this question.
~~~
The tension between the humanities and the sciences is old, and it's
ongoing. So you have the "two cultures" clash that has been
ameliorated in some areas, and people on the sciences side and the humanities
side have all been trained to say the right things now, but the tension is still
there. I'm in a somewhat interesting position to evaluate the arguments on both
sides. People in the sciences are frustrated, and they think the people in the
humanities are sort of thick skulled, and recalcitrant. People in the
humanities think that the sciences are cocksure, and hubristic and intent on
colonizing everything. They are afraid that what the sciences really want is to
take over the whole shebang. They want their science building and they want the
humanities building as well.
I do think that the people in the sciences, people in my camp even,
could do a better job of talking about things, and dealing with some of the
concerns. The humanities people are concerned with a feeling of evaporation—what
science really does is it explains away magic. The humanities, and art,
especially, can be viewed as the last bastion of magic, this unexplainable
thing, this truly mysterious thing. We don't know how it works, we don't know
why it works, we just know it works. Part of the reason humanities people haven't
wanted science involved in this effort to understand art is this feeling that
it would be explained, and if it's explained, it would be explained away.
Then there's a lot of misunderstanding, and it's basically an
either/or mentality. You can either have scientific tools, approaches and
methods, or you can have traditional scholarship where, of course, what's
needed is a toolkit that has both things. You would have certain problems that
would yield to this set of tools, and you had other problems that would be more
appropriate for that sort of tool.
Another major concern in the humanities has to do with determinism and
reductionism, the sense of reductionism, the idea, again, that something like
Shakespeare would be dismissed as a drama of selfish genes, just boiled down to
selfish genes. What's the answer to Shakespeare? "Oh, selfish genes".
Part of what's going on there is a confusion about what the word
"reductionism" means. The word has that sense of reducing—grandeur or
greatness would be reduced—where that's not really what scientists mean by
that. "Reduction" means explanation. It's not really such a scary
concept. But I do think that there's been an effort from the science side
possibly to conquer the opposition. And it hasn't gone very well. Probably a
stronger diplomatic push is called for.
I was certainly in the warrior camp earlier on in my career. I wrote
some angry things, "angry-young-man" type books, manifestos, and
while I don't take anything back it was not a good strategy. People got their
hackles up, and they got their claws out, too, and nothing really happened.
Was I too pugnacious in my earlier work? To some extent, yes, I was.
The question is what do you hope to achieve? In my case what I hoped to achieve
was a sea change. In the manifesto-type book that I wrote around 2008 I said
that what I was aiming for was "totally disciplinary upheaval." I was
going for a revolution. I argued the case just that boldly the whole way
through, and with quite a lot of polemical strength. It was a very tough
polemic. I'm proud of that book, but it didn't achieve much. It did not produce
total disciplinary upheaval. What it did was strongly marginalize me within the
field.
A few years later I wrote another book—my most recent book—about the
same questions about the relationship between science and art and I just wasn't
as aggressive as I was before. And it was fine. I got to make the same points,
but people didn't see me as scary, people didn't see me as off-putting. I
didn't sound like the type of guy that you maybe wouldn't want to have in your
department because he was too aggressive. That book will do a lot more to push
the sort of agenda that I'm interested in. Playing nice in that case seemed to
have been a better strategy for getting what I wanted.
~~~
If I were to build my own English department from scratch, what would
that department be like?
A lot of it would be very similar to how it is now. You would still
read the great authors, and the new authors, and you would still have literary
criticism, literary theory. But you would also have courses in human
psychology. You would have courses that would address this big question: Why do
we even have literature at all? Why do we have stories at all? Why do we care
so much about fiction? These are the kind of things that are so big and basic,
and so obvious that most people in literary studies don't even think about
them. Or if they do think about them, it's in a vague sort of way.
I would have courses that were cross-listed with the math department:
basic classes on statistics, basic classes on research methods for the social
sciences. A lot of the questions that literary scholars are addressing are very
basic psychology questions that can be addressed in a lab.
Just to give one more example, my colleagues and I, including Joseph
Carroll and a couple psychologists, were interested in some questions about how
people respond to literature. There's a whole field of literary studies called
reader response literary studies. Reader response is what it sounds like. It's
basically how do people respond to literature? What happens? What's going on in
their heads? What's going on with them emotionally? The way that work has
typically been done is by a scholar sitting in an armchair and telling you the
answer. This is how people respond. But it's an empirical question, it's a lab
question.
What we did was we asked people. In concert with this team of
psychologists, we got people, avid readers, to tell us how they responded to
these literary works. We were able to get a whole bunch of data, and answer a
whole bunch of questions about this basic question, what is going on with
people as they read and respond to literature?
One of the big questions revolves around the question I suppose of
whether or not the author is dead. This is this famous mantra, this idea that
the author is dead. One thing that the mantra suggests is that the author
doesn't have very much power, that power resides with the reader. In most
literary theory courses you learn that response to literature is highly
idiosyncratic. It's going to strongly reflect your biases, whether you're a man
or a woman, how old you are, what your background is, and so on and so forth.
There's a lot of truth in that. And we did find that.
But for the most part what we found in a survey of maybe 600 people,
was that the main story is by far uniformity. People agree on what's going on
in a story, and they agree on what a story means. They have the same sort of
emotional reactions to the characters, and they hate the same characters, they
like the same characters.
If you have a big group of people all reading the same book, what
you're seeing is not a diversity of response, a great deal of idiosyncratic
response, what you're seeing is a mental and emotional attunement among those
readers.
Now, from a common sense point of view I can see a lot of people
listening to this and saying, "Well, of course, I knew this already."
But we didn't know it already. This was a question that was very much in
dispute, and most people in the academic humanities would have voted the other
way, more towards idiosyncratic response. That would be one example.
~~~
The question, "why fiction?" has very much been on my mind
lately, and it's one of these things that, again, is so big, and so obvious that
most people just don't think about it. It seems obvious to people that human
beings love stories. But if you think about it, it's not at all obvious that
human beings should love stories, especially fictional stories. If you imagine
us, as hunter-gatherers out on the savannah, life is very hard, narrow margins,
and you would think that you're better off going without story. It's a lot of
time and a lot of energy spent on story.
What might the benefit be to outbalance the costs? There are a whole
bunch of different competing theories for this idea, and not a lot of data yet
to help us decide between them. The main thing about these different theories
for why we have fiction is that they are largely compatible with each other,
it's not an either/or situation. If you ask yourself, "What's my hand
for?" You would say, "My hand is a tool I use to grab stuff; it's a
tool I use to communicate; it's a tool I use to reach out and caress people;
it's a tool I use to reach out and punch people. It's a multipurpose tool; it
does a whole bunch of different things." The same is probably true of
story. Story has probably been shaped by different evolutionary pressures to do
different things.
One of the ideas that I've been thinking about a lot is whether you
can develop a hypothesis about one likely function of fiction by focusing on
the form of fiction. What is fiction like formally? One of the most interesting
things to me about stories is that we think of stories as a wildly creative art
form, but within that creativity and that diversity there is a lot of
conformity Stories are very predictable. No matter where you go in the world,
no matter how different people seem, no matter how hard their lives are, people
tell stories, universally, and universally the stories are more or less like
ours: the same basic human obsessions, and the same basic structure. The
structure comes down to: stories have a character, the character has a
predicament or a problem—they're always problem-focused—and the character tries
to solve the problem. In its most basic terms, that's what a story is—a problem
solution narrative.
Why are stories that way? On one hand, it may be obvious to you that
stories are that way, that they're problem focused. That's the first thing you
would learn in your first day of creative writing class. You get there, your
teacher would say, "Hey, your story has to have a problem, a crisis, a
dilemma, otherwise no one's interested." But if you think about it, it's
not at all obvious that stories should be that way. You might really expect to
find stories that really did function as portals into hedonistic paradise.
Paradises where there were no problems and pleasure was infinite. But you
never, ever find that.
Why are stories so trouble-focused? You have quite a bit of
convergence among scholars and scientists who are looking at this from an
evolutionary point of view, and what they're saying is that stories may
function as kind of virtual reality simulators, where you go and you simulate
the big problems of human life, and you enjoy it, but you're having a mental
training session at the same time. There's some kind of interesting evidence
for this, that these simulations might help people perform better on certain
tasks.
So in the same way that children's make believe helps them hone their
social skills, it seems to be true of adult make believe, too. If adult make
believe is novels and films, it seems they're entering into those fictional
worlds and working through those fictional social dilemmas actually does, as
hard as it may be to believe, enhance our social skills, our emotional
intelligence, our empathy. That's kind of a neat finding. Maybe stories have a
function as a simulation of the big problems of life that helps us cope better
with those problems when we do experience them.
What about stories that are an exception to this rule? You will find
them, but you will have to scrape your brain to find them, to find examples,
and they will be very much exceptions that prove the rule. They will be extreme
statistical outliers. You will find stories that don't have that structure,
that character facing a problem and attempting to solve it.
You will note, though, that most of those examples, the things that
will spring readily to mind are not the things that most people consume.
Stories that depart from that basic structure have a tremendous amount of
difficulty finding audience. They typically find an elite academic-style
audience. For instance, Joyce's Finnegans Wake or something, it explodes
the structure of story. But Joyce, of course, was setting out on purpose to
explode the structure of story. A lot of 20th century writers realized,
"Holy cow, I'm working inside a prison, I'm working inside the prison of this
structure, and I'm going to blow it up, and I'm going to make everything
new." These were interesting as artistic experiments, and I adore some of
them, but they're exceptional, and importantly, they do not do a very good job
of seizing human attention and riveting human attention. People read them when
their professors force them to read them.
~~~
I have two daughters, and the question is what would I advise them if
they wanted to pursue study in the humanities? I would be for it. The more
interesting question for me is, and I get this question in my e-mail box a
couple times a week, from some student out there who asks, "I like your
work, I'm impressed by your work and I want to do the same thing. I want to tie
together humanities work and scientific work. I have these questions about
literature, or about painting, or about music that I'd like to pursue from a
scientific point of view. Where do I go? Where do I go for a good undergraduate
degree? Who can advise me in a PhD program?"
Those
are sort of heartbreaking letters to get because there's not many very good
places to send them. Typically I have to say with regrets that there's a couple
people I can mention, but after that, I have to say that if you are in between
the humanities and the sciences, the best way to go is to go to the sciences
because you will not get pushback on this path of inquiry from people in
cognitive science, or people from neuroscience, or people from psychology. But
you will face quite a bit of resistance probably if you try to go at this from
an academic humanities program.
From
– edgeDOTcom
** **
You did watch two shows, one was “Extant”
and the other Masterpiece Mystery’s “Hecule Poirot”. This episode brought about
the twenty-five year conclusion of David Suchet as Agatha Christie’s famous
detective. The first episode’s date was 8 January 1989. You also received the
final proof of the ebook cover for Great Merlyn’s Ghost One. Add and post. –
Amorella
***
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