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It has been known for a long time, since the famous experiments of Alice Isen (e.g. Isen & Levin, 1972), that feeling happy facilitates the helping of others. In the second experiment of the current study, Schnall et al. included a control group in which participants became happy at watching a television episode that was funny. The results were that participants who watched the elevation clip had more subjective feelings of elevation and also did substantially and significantly more actual helping than those who watched the funny clip.

In a TVO “Flying Solo” clip, the University of Toronto literary theorist Nick Mount was asked to talk on what art can and cannot do (click here). He says that although art might inspire, the Holocaust contradicts the idea that literary art can make us better, and he cites George Steiner’s assertion: “We know that [...]

Most people, when they think about it, can point to signs that have failed them: the hospital complex that felt like a labyrinth or the exit they always almost miss. But the truth is that signage today is far better than it’s been at any other point in history. A century ago, sign design wasn’t a profession to speak of; the signs that guided riders and pedestrians (there weren’t many drivers yet) tended to be informal and ad hoc. As the automobile took off, the world found it needed traffic engineers, and it was these men and women who were the first to think seriously about sign systems.
Julia Turner/Slate.com

Si on simplifie, outrageusement, ce portail de la littérature, on peut ainsi penser qu’il ouvre sur deux voies, apparemment contradictoires : chercher à inventer, chercher à dire la vérité. Mais heureusement il existe beaucoup d’autres approches, d’autres théories, parfois sur-utilisées, dans les cours de création: l’Oulipo et les différents exercices auxquels se sont adonnés ses membres, par exemple. Le ludisme littéraire.

Paul Silvia says aesthetics are usually about taking pleasure in things, for instance because they are beautiful. He offers what he calls a tour of unusual emotions that can’t be grouped with pleasure. He describes three families of such emotions: knowledge emotions (interest, confusion, and surprise), hostile emotions (anger disgust and contempt), and self conscious emotions (pride, shame and embarrassment) which occur in fiction.

They are the forms that break new ground, use unexpected combinations to express either new ideas or long standing ones that benefit from little shocks or big pushes. They can ask big questions. They can offer researched answers. But after looking at them side by side for about a decade I’ve come to a conclusion that their root difference is: new music actively gathers to it an audience whereas poetry seems content being left alone.

Robert Frost famously said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Indeed, translation has traditionally been married to the notion of what is lost, and this makes sense, if one looks at a poem like a Renaissance painting: the original being of highest quality and any replica a necessarily poor copy. But what if, like everything else in the world, it’s not so black and white?
Ellen Welcker/The Quarterly Conversation

The poem state is manic: written as if it talks fast, talks much, talks an ear off; it grasps what it can, perhaps stays too long, but it is glitteringly present, evanescent, has the amiability of a high. But the real danger of the poem is the change it makes in its poet: convinced that the poem is transcribed from the muse, pure dictation, the poet is gulled into thinking that the writing will be lasting, will be a contribution, and the poet, heady, not yet coming down, has the manic state of his art:
-from Maisonneuve

Despite Barthes’ obituary for the author, the cult of authorship persists. Publishers around the world are breathing fresh life into deceased famous authors by posthumously releasing their “lost” works. In 2009, new books by Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and in a delicious twist of irony, Roland Barthes, hit the shelves.
Emily Landau/The Walrus

Overview | How do stereotypes inform our ideas about others? How can we go beyond these misconceptions for a truer look at an “other”? In this lesson, students read a gently humorous essay examining British stereotypes about Americans, consider stereotypes and misconceptions of people in various groups and write lighthearted personal essays.
Amanda Christy Brown and Holly Epstein Ojalvo /Teaching and Learning with the New York Times