Rereading as requirement : the cognitive demands of Mallarmé, Krysinska, and Proust
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation claims that three French-language authors from the late-nineteenth century designed their works to demand rereading. Worried that the public favored goal-oriented approaches to literature that narrowed their perceptions of the texts, they solicited rereading to cultivate alternative interpretive practices. For Stéphane Mallarmé, the problem was that readers targeted semantic content--an approach that he feared would diminish his poetry's sensorial effects. In Marie Krysinska's view, the issue was that people's inclination to assimilate new concepts based on what they already knew caused them look for familiar features and discard leftover details. Marcel Proust attacked the common practice of reading for the wisdom of the author because doing so seems to make readers struggle to evaluate the reliability of the information that they are given. By causing these approaches to fail and then inciting us to reexamine the passages that we misread, all three of these writers disperse our attention to aspects of literature that we otherwise tend to neglect. Ultimately, the claim is that Mallarmé, Krysinska, and Proust designed their texts to challenge interpretive habits that arise from what are now called "cognitive biases, " or mental inclinations that can be inferred from the patterns of errors that most people when they make intuitive judgments about uncertain situations. By cultivating our awareness of these biases and by furnishing us with opportunities to practice working through them, certain literary texts seem to have the potential to restructure our interpretive habits so that we learn to recognize, anticipate, and avoid some of the irrational interpretations to which we are prone.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2013 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Gardner, Darci Lauren |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of French and Italian. |
| Primary advisor | Landy, Joshua, 1965- |
| Thesis advisor | Landy, Joshua, 1965- |
| Thesis advisor | Alduy, Cécile |
| Thesis advisor | Wittman, Laura |
| Advisor | Alduy, Cécile |
| Advisor | Wittman, Laura |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Darci Lauren Gardner. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of French and Italian. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2013 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2013 by Darci Lauren Gardner
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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