Boyd, Boyd
2008
The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature (20.12.2009)

“For both artists and audiences, art’s capacity to ensnare attention is crucial: for the artist, to accrue status; for the audience, to motivate engagement.”

“engagement in the activity—matters before meaning”

“Repetition is the simplest form of elaboration, but since pure repetition holds little interest, repetition of a bold idea with variation offers him the best prospects of holding the attention of listeners with the imaginative resources he has.”

“Yet if we normally engage in art simply because it can command our attention, meaning, in academic contexts, elbows its way to the fore, because the propositional nature of meaning makes it so much easier to expound, circulate, regurgitate, or challenge than the fluid dynamics of attention.” Academia analyses meaning in art, because attention is fluid and dynamic and difficult to hold still and analyse.

“The average shot length in Hollywood movies has been shrinking as viewers have learned to assimilate film faster and to cope with the information rush of the modern world. Nabokov has influenced writers from acclaimed oldsters (Italo Calvino, W. G. Sebald, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Orhan Pamuk) to feisty youngsters (Zadie Smith, Marisha Pessl) by introducing into fiction something akin to modern film’s reduction in shot length, its rapidity of changes of subject or perspective.”

“Character is one kind of pattern particularly significant for social animals: identifying individuals and discerning consistent differences of personality”

“Character clues come thick and fast in fiction.”

“At a more general level, humans are extraordinary open-ended pattern detectors, because we so compulsively inhabit the cognitive niche. Art plays with cognitive patterns at high intensity. The pleasure this generates is an essential part of what it is to be human and matters both at the individual level, for audiences and artists, and at the social level, for the patterns we share (in design, music, dance, and story). The pleasure art’s intense play with patterns affords compels our engagement again and again and helps shape our capacity to create and process pattern more swiftly. Perhaps it even helps explain the so-called Flynn effect, the fact—and it seems to be one—that IQs have risen with each of the last few generations”

“And with their high intensity of pattern and their fixed form, works of art should provide ideal controlled replicable experiments for the study of both rapid and gradual pattern recognition in the mind.”