Carta a Isparta

Dear Yasemin:

I'm glad you like my photos, posting them to my photoblog is almost a compulsive activity for me anyway but I'm glad when someone likes them. And yes, it's true what you say about attention, photographing makes you look at things differently, you notice them more than you did previously.

And now I mention attention, there's one more reading I'd like to recommend to you, which might be relevant for your project: On the Origin of Stories, one of the most significant books of literary theory I've read lately, by Brian Boyd. I've written a few things on it but unfortunately they're in Spanish, I'm getting lazy and I write little in English these days. Well, ATTENTION is one of the main concepts he uses in order to theorize about art, narrative, and anthropology. What he does is to elaborate on the social and evolutionary functions of art, it's a bit of an "evolutionary poetics" in the line of Darwin's Origin of Species. What I find he does significantly is to connect current scientific theories about the mind, social cognition, and about human origins with the whole complex of humanist reflection about myth, symbolism and literature. Well, I don't know whether it will work for you, the same things work out differently in different minds, but I think it may be quite relevant as a theoretical grounding for mythical approaches to literature, and a good bridge to the cognitive blending theories by Mark Turner I mentioned. By the way, many of Turner's papers on conceptual integration can be found online at his website, "Blending and Conceptual Integration"  http://markturner.org/blending.html
And I'll be around if you want to discuss anything on matters mythical and narratological.

Best regards from Galicia,

Jose Angel

Atención a la atención