Humanities in the Digital Age –
articles
Index
Portfolio Cognition & Embodiment.........................................................................................................2
Williams (1961) The Long Revolution. Chapter: The Creative Mind. 3-40...............................................2
Video: Embodied Cognition – THUNK.....................................................................................................4
Herman (2010). Narrative Theory after the Second Cognitive Revolution..............................................4
Lakoff & Johnson (2008) Metaphors We Live By.....................................................................................6
Trites (2014) Literary Conceptualizations of Growth. Metaphors and Cognition in Adolescent
Literature. Chapter 4: A Case Study......................................................................................................10
Dewey (1934) Art as Experience. Chapter 1: The Live Creature............................................................12
Portfolio Whose Voice..........................................................................................................................13
Papadopoulos (2008) Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21 st Century. Section IV: Mobility
and Migration. 162-221........................................................................................................................13
Molenaar & El-Kamouni-Janssen (n.d.) Turning the Tide: The Politics of irregular migration in the
Sahel and Libya.....................................................................................................................................19
De Medeiros (2018) European Refugee Crisis: Where Do Public Intellectuals Stand?...........................20
The 6 Types of Documentary Films.......................................................................................................21
Jabour (2012) Iraqi Memories. A Personal and Poetic Exploration of Homecomings, Departures and
Arrivals from a Theatre Director Who Fled Iraq in 1987 and Returns Home Again...............................22
Okorie (2018) This Hostel Life: Under The Awning................................................................................23
Huber (2023) Decolonizing Irishness: Assertions of Afro-Irish Self-Determination in Nicky Gogan and
Paul Rowley’s ‘Seaview’ and Melatu Uche Okorie’s ‘This Hostel Life’...................................................23
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,Portfolio Cognition & Embodiment
Williams (1961) The Long Revolution. Chapter: The
Creative Mind. 3-40
The word ‘creative’ has many positive references. Even though this sounds like a good thing, it also
involves difficulties of meaning Williams will dive into its history.
An artist’s activity is ‘creation’, but the word used in ancient Greek was ‘imitation’, as an artist imitates
a pre-existing reality.
Plato: Idea material thing imitation. In short, an artist is able to teach the highest reality
because he penetrates mere appearance and embodies in his work the divine Idea.
Aristotle: imitation is a form of learning through universal statements, the permanent and the
necessary. Universals are the embodiment of general truths about human nature, the divine
Ideas, which the artist embodies.
Art is thus imitation and not creation.
Emergence of 4 doctrines of art.
1. Art is an imitation of the hidden reality, making it a form of revelation.
2. Art is a perpetual imitation and embodiment of the ‘Idea of Beauty’. This included the idea of
imitating.
3. Art is the ‘idealization’ of nature.
4. Nature is God’s art. Art is a form of energy that vies with nature (same purpose).
o Nature is God’s creation, art is man’s creation.
When imitation, the learning of reality, becomes creation, man making new reality, a critical stage in
art and thought has been reached.
A poem is ‘the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as
existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.’ (Shelley, n.d.).
Shelley: all things exist as they are perceived.
The idea that art represented a superior reality was opposed. Plato called art fiction, and thus inferior
to reality. The new psychology, particularly Freud, claimed that there is a reality beyond man’s reach:
the ‘unconscious’. Freud argued that the material of art was phantasy, as contrasted to reality. For
Jung, the ‘creative’ is an inaccessible reality being placed within man himself, and only a gifted person
is able to penetrate this region.
Another approach is that the activity of our brain is that each one of us has to learn to see. Without
the ‘rules of seeing’ (Young), we could not in any sense see the world around us. There would be no
reality of familiar shapes, colors and sounds. The sensual information around us has to be
interpreted. In this way, we create the world we speak about. In this sense, reality as we experience it
is a human creation 2 main sources:
1. The human brain.
2. The interpretations carried by our cultures.
Biological function: a form of interaction with the environment that allows humans to
maintain their life and to achieve greater control over the environment in which this must be
done.
We ‘see’ the world according to certain rules, however these are neither fixed nor constant. We can
learn new rules and new interpretations and as a result view the world in another light. In each
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, individual, the 2 main sources are a kind of creation. Particular cultures carry particular versions of
reality. In between cultures there are also individuals who bring their own variations to these
particular versions of reality.
New areas of reality can be ‘revealed’, or ‘created’, which don’t have to be limited to one
individual and can be communicated or carried on by the rules of a culture.
The theories that want to define imitation and creation are seen as attempt to define the relationship
between 2 areas of fact: ‘reality’ and ‘art’. The assumption is that art is the imitation of reality, which
proposes a fundamental duality. Modern positions deny the premise of a duality. Modern thinking:
Representational: sees art as offering an ordinary description/reproduction of reality, in the
most common and objective terms.
Romantic: art is not merely a representation of reality, but this representation is modified by
the artist’s subjective emotional reactions to it. Reality is organized, selected and idealized by
the artist’s personal vision.
Abstract: art is neither the reproduction of reality, nor the subjective modification of reality,
but the direct expression of purely ‘aesthetic’ experience. The representation in art is not of
reality, but of the artist’s vision. However, this view is again based on the assumed duality of
art and reality.
Perception opens doors to ending the duality, and thus transforming our thinking about art. Body and
environment are in constant determining relations. Williams describes it is man’s nature to be
continually learning by the process of creation, the processes of organization and reorganization of
reality (eg. after a death). This makes it clear that man can be called a creator.
All living forms have communication systems of a kind. Through social organization and tradition, man
has invented gesture, language, music, mathematics, etc.
Substantial knowledge = the intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves as
one with the whole.
Abstract knowledge = we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in
antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, thing to thought, death to life.
The process of interpretation is vital to understand our environment so that we can live more
successfully in it. However, we have many ways of describing. Through gesture, language, image or
learned rules. Eg. how language changes with time (the word ‘selfie’, or ‘tweeting’ are new to modern
times). What we call an ‘art’, is one of a number of ways of describing and communicating, which are
developments of ways commonly used (eg. dance, poetry). The arts are thus certain forms of general
communication.
A difficulty with the arts is that for example a painting, like other visual objects, has to be interpreted
and described before it is seen. This means that nobody can see the artist’s actual work unless he and
the artist can come to share the complex details and means of a learned communication system. Art
cannot exist unless a working communication can be reached, which both spectator and artist have to
participate in. When art communicates, a human experience is actively offered and actively received.
Below this activity threshold there can be no art.
Creative imagination = the capacity to find and organize new descriptions of experience.
An artist’s way of remaking himself is by work, which is remaking the environment, and in learning to
work, remaking himself. We respond to disturbance not only by remaking ourselves but, if possible,
by changing the environment.
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