XMCA Mail 2003_08: Re: literature and psychology

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Re: literature and psychology

Whatever happened to our former listmembers who used to regularly remind us
with poetry that prose is not the only path to insight?

>I apologize for failing to respond to the question about literature
>and psychology. I do so now only because the other tasks facing me
>are difficult, so I can play at working instead.
>
>If you have not done so, it is worth dipping into Vygotsky's *Psychology
>of Art* which is not in the collected works. The first chapter is
>fascinating, among other things, for Vygotsky's adoption of ideas from
>Plekhanov, an important Marxist thinker in the early USSR, which adopted
>a base/superstructure distinction and located psychology vis a vis
>ideology on the sociopolitical regime (underpinned by economic system)
>on the other. And the examples are all from literature, which is the
>subject of the treatise.
>
>But mostly we are talking about (at least I was talking about) the
>insights from literature which can be found in a lot of LSV's writting.
>
>We could start with Mandelshtam, a poet: I forgot the word I wanted to
>say, and thought, unembodied, returned to the hall of shadows. This
>epigram for the chapter on Thought and Word in "Thinking and Speech" (1987)
>is full for literary examples as sources of illustration and discovery
>of principles that LSV then seeks to confirm in different ways. There is
>the famous scene from War and Peace where the two-to-be lovers, levin and
>kitty, speak in the initial letters of the words to declare their love,
>the group of drunks using a single word to mean many different things.
>(from Dostoevski). Somewhere LSV uses Pierre trying to decide whether or
>not to go to Borodino to fight Napolean as an example of a decision
>making artifact: using dice to decide the outcome.
>
>One of the great things about teaching in a communication department is
>that all of human culture is allowable as legitimate sources of insight
>into important principles. Montage in music and film, narrative of course,
>poetry (I will try to post a couple of poem's which have had a profound
>influence on my thinking about language, thought, and development).
>
>There are, of course, many different ways in which to use literature, art,
>film, etc as a working cultural historical activity theorist. Yrjo
>uses a Finnish folk tale and Huck Finn to talk about Zones of Proximal
>Development and a
>Peter Houg novel to talk about development. Puzerei in Russia actually
>used Dostoevsky as a major source of data for elaborating on the concept
>of perezhivanie, one of those words we worry a lot about on xmca (literally
>experiencing, but probably more closely approximated by the idea of having
>a very intense experience).
>
>My own practice has been to use literature as a source of ideas and to seek
>(or stumble over!) the insight they provide into very different domains,
>such as the organization of kids' activity using computers.
>
>Phew. Now time to turn back to work and pretend its play, instead of the
>other way round!
>mike

Jay Lemke
Professor
University of Michigan
School of Education
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48104