Henry James and the Creative Process

2019 ◽  
pp. 239-258
Author(s):  
Peter Schneck
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Contextual Factors ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
To Come ◽  
Distinct Features ◽  
The Brain

Creativity as a process may be said to constitute a particular mode of experience and to own a specific phenomenology which can be described, compared, and evaluated. Creativity can be viewed as a cultural practice whereby contextual factors, with the environment that lies outside the brain, must be considered beyond the exclusive biological and neural foundations of aesthetic experience. The work of Henry James presents a writer’s continuous attempt to come to a deeper understanding of the creative process at the center of his art, driven by an understanding of human experience as essentially based and grounded in creativity. Looking at James’s notebooks, his prefaces, and also some of his works, we can trace the creative process in all its complexity, as a particular mode of experience and also as a “method” or strategy to stimulate and sustain the creative state. James shows us that there are distinct features of “creative states” which are not exclusive to literary creativity. The diversity and innovativeness of human experience is a creative factor in itself, so that “everyday” little-c contributes to big-C. James’s thorough exploration of the creative process may be compared to more recent attempts in the sciences to understand creativity in cognition in general and literature in particular.

scholarly journals From Unconscious Inference to the Beholder’s Share: Predictive Perception and Human Experience

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anil K. Seth
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Brain Science ◽  
Bayesian Brain ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
Prediction Error Minimization ◽  
The Brain

Science and art have long recognized that perceptual experience depends on the involvement of the experiencer. In art history, this idea is captured by Ernst Gombrich’s ‘beholder’s share’. In neuroscience, it traces to Helmholtz’s concept of ‘perception as inference’, which is enjoying renewed prominence in the guise of ‘prediction error minimization’ (PEM) or the ‘Bayesian brain’. The shared idea is that our perceptual experience – whether of the world, of ourselves, or of an artwork – depends on the active ‘top-down’ interpretation of sensory input. Perception becomes a generative act, in which perceptual, cognitive, affective, and sociocultural expectations conspire to shape the brain’s ‘best guess’ of the causes of sensory signals. In this article, I explore the parallels between the Bayesian brain and the beholders’ share, illustrated, somewhat informally, with examples from Impressionist, Expressionist, and Cubist art. By connecting phenomenological insights from these traditions with the cognitive neuroscience of predictive perception, I outline a reciprocal relationship in which art reveals phenomenological targets for neurocognitive accounts of subjectivity, while the concepts of predictive perception may in turn help make mechanistic sense of the beholder’s share. This is not standard neuroaesthetics – the attempt to discover the brain basis of aesthetic experience – nor is it any kind of neuro-fangled ‘theory of art’. It is instead an examination of one way in which art and brain science can be equal partners in revealing deep truths about human experience.

scholarly journals From unconscious inference to the beholder's share: predictive perception and human experience

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anil Seth
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Brain Science ◽  
Bayesian Brain ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
Prediction Error Minimization ◽  
The Brain

Science and art have long recognised that perceptual experience depends on the involvement of the experiencer. In art history, this idea is captured by Ernst Gombrich’s ‘beholder’s share’. In neuroscience, it traces to Helmholtz’s concept of ‘perception as inference’, which is enjoying renewed prominence in the guise of ‘prediction error minimization’ or the ‘Bayesian brain’. The shared idea is that our perceptual experience – whether of the world, of ourselves, or of an artwork – depends on the active ‘top-down’ interpretation of sensory input. Perception becomes a generative act, in which perceptual, cognitive, affective, and sociocultural expectations conspire to shape the brain’s ‘best guess’ of the causes of sensory signals. In this paper, I explore the parallels between the Bayesian brain and the beholders’ share, illustrated, somewhat informally, with examples from Impressionist, Expressionist, and Cubist art. By connecting phenomenological insights from these traditions with the cognitive neuroscience of predictive perception, I outline a reciprocal relationship in which art reveals phenomenological targets for neurocognitive accounts of subjectivity, while the concepts of predictive perception may in turn help make mechanistic sense of the beholder’s share. This is not standard neuroaesthetics – the attempt to discover the brain basis of aesthetic experience – nor is it any kind of neuro-fangled ‘theory of art’. It is instead an examination of one way in which art and brain science can be equal partners in revealing deep truths about human experience.

Architectural Affordances

2021 ◽  
pp. 230-234
Author(s):  
Zakaria Djebbara ◽  
Klaus Gramann
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Human Brain ◽  
Action Potentials ◽  
Sensory Feedback ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Functional Relation ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Action And Perception ◽  
The Brain

In the article discussed in this chapter, the authors describe a framework of neuroaesthetics for architectural experiences that considers sensory feedback stemming from movement central for the experience of the built environment. As we move through space when experiencing architecture, our sensory impressions change, rendering the body and the brain as nondissociable agents of aesthetic experience. This interaction is described by the term affordance. The authors cast the human experience of the built environment to be predicated on the functional relation between action and perception and developed a neuroscientific experiment on architectural transitions to investigate how the human brain reflects architectural affordances. They found that varying sizes of transitions, reflecting different affordances, impact early perceptual processes, suggesting that our perception is indeed colored by the action potentials afforded by the composed space. In conclusion, the shape of space resonates with our embodied predictions regarding movement.

Creativity in Modernist Literary Writers

2019 ◽  
pp. 319-335
Author(s):  
Suzanne Nalbantian
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Sleep Mode ◽  
Dynamic Interactions ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Anais Nin ◽  
Conscious Processing ◽  
Transformative Process ◽  
Literary Devices ◽  
The Brain

This chapter presents a theory of creativity as a transformative process, derived from the study of a group of modernist writers used as case studies. Such transformation has analogues in the neuroscientific study of creativity, which deals with dynamic interactions between nonconscious and conscious processing. Certain literary authors illuminate the extent to which the creative process is conscious and top-down yet also nonconscious and bottom-up according to different states of the brain at different stages of the creative process. The prefix “trans” describes the brain’s interconnectivity that is exemplified in the transforming strategies that contribute to the artistry of these authors. Writers like Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Anaïs Nin transform their life material into the art of their fiction through a variety of literary devices that can be scrutinized. The autobiographical material derives from various preliminary modes of creativity—the default mode network (DMN) in Nin, the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep mode among the Surrealists, encoded emotional memories in the case of Woolf and Nin, and fragments of quotidian life in the case of Henry James, Joyce, and Faulkner. These writers were cognizant of their creative processes, writing about them in notes, letters, diaries, memoirs, and prefaces and enacting them in their creative works.

The Divided Self in the Fiction of Henry James

PMLA ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 447-460
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Free Spirit ◽  
Divided Self ◽  
Structural Consequence ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come

AbstractThe divided self in James’s fiction may be regarded as an inevitable structural consequence of James’s desire to dramatize the problem of the free spirit in an enslaving world. But the divided self required by art is not essentially different from the divided self known to psychology, and an understanding of the anxieties of that self, particularly of the “obsessive imagery” James uses to depict those anxieties, enriches our understanding of James’s work. The fear of a world that threatens one’s being issues in an elaborate development of an escape motif; of imagery of seizure by the eye and by the world of appearances; and of imagery of petrification, reflecting a dread of being turned into a mere tool or machine. James’s vision of “the great trap of life” permits him to come to terms with his own limitations and culminates in a searching philosophic examination of the problem of free will and determinism.

Senses of Vibration

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelly Trower
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Cultural Imaginary ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Senses ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Brain

The study of the senses has become a rich topic in recent years. Senses of Vibration explores a wide range of sensory experience and makes a decisive new contribution to this growing field by focussing not simply on the senses as such, but on the material experience - vibration - that underpins them. This is the first book to take the theme of vibration as central, offering an interdisciplinary history of the phenomenon and its reverberations in the cultural imaginary. It tracks vibration through the work of a wide range of writers, including physiologists (who thought vibrations in the nerves delivered sensations to the brain), physicists (who claimed that light, heat, electricity and other forms of energy were vibratory), spiritualists (who figured that spiritual energies also existed in vibratory form), and poets and novelists from Coleridge to Dickens and Wells. Senses of Vibration is a work of scholarship that cuts through a range of disciplines and will reverberate for many years to come.

Coaching skills for recovery a decade of providing coaching skills for recovery training at a healthcare NHS foundation trust

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Kathryn Cyrus
Keyword(s):  
Work Practice ◽  
Clinical Approach ◽  
Personal Recovery ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Coaching Skills ◽  
The Difference ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Brain

Purpose Overview of coaching for recovery. The paper aims to show an overview of work that was carried out over 11 years with groups of mental health and physical staff. As the facilitator who had run this course for the duration in Nottingham, this was an excellent opportunity to be at the forefront of a brand new project. Design/methodology/approach The introduction of the skills are taught over two consecutive days followed by a further day a month later. The idea of coaching is to be enabled to find the answers in themselves by the use of powerful questions and using the technique of the grow model, combined with practice enables the brain to come up with its own answers. Using rapport and enabling effective communication to deliver the outcome. Findings Evidence from staff/clients and the purpose of the paper shows that when you step back it allows the individual patients/staff to allow the brain to process to create to come up with their solutions, which then helps them to buy into the process and creates ownership. Research limitations/implications The evidence suggests that the approach that was there prior to the course was very much a clinical approach to working with clients and treating the person, administering medication and not focussing on the inner person or personal recovery. The staff review has shown that in the clinical context change is happening from the inside out. Practical implications “Helps change culture”; “change of work practice”; “it changed staff focus – not so prescriptive”; “powerful questions let clients come to their own conclusions”; “coaching gives the ability to find half full. Helps to offer reassurance and to find one spark of hope”. Social implications This has shown that the approach is now person-centred/holistic. This has been the “difference that has made the difference”. When this paper looks at the issues from a different angle in this case a coaching approach, applying technique, knowledge and powerful questions the results have changed. The same clients, same staff and same problems but with the use of a different approach, there is the evidence of a different outcome, which speaks for itself. The coaching method is more facilitative, therefore it illicit’s a different response, and therefore, result. Originality/value The results/evidence starts with the individual attending and their commitment to the process over the two-day course. Then going away for the four weeks/six for managers and a commitment again to practice. Returning to share the impact if any with the group. This, in turn, helps to inspire and gain motivation from the feedback to go back to work invigorated to keep going.

Torquato Tasso and his Biographers

1896 ◽  
Vol 42 (179) ◽  
pp. 795-817
Author(s):  
William W. Ireland
Keyword(s):  
Letter Writing ◽  
Torquato Tasso ◽  
To Come ◽  
Papal States ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Brain

While at Belriguardo Tasso wrote a letter to the Cardinal, who directed the Inquisition at Rome complaining that the Inquisitor at Bologna had made too little of his confessions, and that he had granted him absolution rather as to a lunatic than to a heretic. He actually proposed to come to Home to be accused in serious form. and not only did Torquato suspect his friends of denouncing him to the Inquisition, but he also accused them of heretical opinions, perhaps founded on some expressions they had used in familiar conversation. The Duke of Ferrara had, indeed, reason not only to be annoyed, but even to be seriously alarmed, for, though the Inquisitor at Bologna took a sensible view of Tasso's revelations, it was by no means certain that the Inquisition at Borne should look upon the matter in the same light. To a shrewd man who took Tasso's whole conduct into consideration he might seem deranged; but the poet possessed a wonderful power of vivid letter writing, and could make his fancies wear plausible shapes. Then the Duke's own mother was known to have been a favourer of the doctrines of Calvin, and some of the taint of heresy might be supposed to cling to Alfonso himself. He had enemies at Rome, and nothing is more credulous of evil reports than hatred. Perhaps they might favour the accusations in the hope of dispossessing him of his principality and causing it to revert to the Papal States, as was actually done after his death. About the same time Torquato wrote to his friend Gonzaga, “Either I am not only of a melancholy humour, but as it were mad, or I am too cruelly persecuted.” After ten days' stay at Belriguardo Alfonso sent Tasso back to Ferrara to be treated by his own physician. According to the pathology of the times melancholy was owing to humours rising to the brain. To expel these purgatives were the proper remedy. The poet was far from being submissive to treatment, and if the doctors did him no good they could always defend themselves by saying that their patient did not carry out their prescriptions. Tasso was kindly received at the convent of the Franciscans at Ferrara, which he repaid by accusations founded upon his ever-brooding suspicions. At another time he avowed his intention of becoming a brother of the Order.

Hearing the Contradictions: Aesthetic Experience, Music and Digitization

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-302
Author(s):  
Nancy Weiss Hanrahan
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Aesthetic Judgment ◽  
Thick Description ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Primary Object ◽  
The World ◽  
Digital Environments ◽  
The Aesthetic

If, as Susan Buck-Morss (2003) suggests, aesthetic experience is an occasion for “making critical judgments about not only cultural forms but social forms of our being-in-the-world,” or if it is linked, in David Hesmondhalgh’s (2013) account, to the possibilities of collective flourishing, potential changes in the nature of that experience merit critical attention. This article reflects on the ways in which these social or ethical dimensions of the aesthetic experience of music are affected by digitization. It moves from a discussion of aesthetic experience as a form of encounter that refers to a common world, to consideration of recent work in music sociology that engages themes that emerge from that discussion: aesthetic judgment, and the question of difference and commonality. With illustrations from focus group interviews, I suggest that the quantization associated with digital environments is altering the cultural form of aesthetic judgment, just as personalization is changing the meaning of “difference” in this context. The essay is intended as a disclosive critique that takes as its primary object not the world observable through thick description or hermeneutic interpretation of actual cultural practice, but a world evoked through critical reflection on its actual and potential constellations of meaning.

Empirical Aesthetics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helmut Leder ◽  
Matthew Pelowski
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Contextual Factors ◽  
Framing Effects ◽  
Specific Situation ◽  
General Introduction ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Aesthetic Experiences ◽  
Extra Information ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Psychological Studies

In most people’s lives, aesthetic experiences are probably frequent and occur in multiple, often very different and idiosyncratic situations. Usually, aesthetic experience involves an episode with the experiencing person in a specific situation, stretched out over time, in which certain objects, their environment, and various constituting elements are brought together. In this chapter, the authors provide a general introduction on the importance of such contextual factors in aesthetic experiences. The chapter begins with a brief overview of the nature of aesthetic experiences as a topic beyond typical aesthetic objects, with regard to how aesthetic experiences emerge as interactions between person, objects, and environment, and thus how they are embedded in informational contexts. In particular, the importance of information context is discussed: how we frame, anticipate, explain, and understand the factors of our experience as we live them. Also examined is how, in psychological studies, extra information or titles presented with pictures and artworks, or instructions regarding the context—so-called framing effects—have been shown to affect aesthetic experiences. The chapter ends with an outlook on major challenges, goals, and future directions.

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