Structuralist? The idea that all of these different systems disseminate meaning differently

Elliot Eisner, in his article 'Arts and the creation of the Mind' made a very similar argument. he drew comparisons between the brain and the mind - the brain being a biological endowment and the mind being a productive of cultivation by culture and engaging in the arts. One of the biggest tangible experiences that the Arts (here, specific to language) is that of recall (which a private experience) and imagination driven by recall which can them be used to derive social or public utility from the Arts that you have interacted with. This understanding is very different from mere recollection, because you recall it and then you apply your own scheme of thinking to produce new meaning, and new methods of processing the world around you.

I think the concept of "othering" is relevant here which resonates with me rather strongly, given what I see about diversity and understanding diversity at home in India and in university. It's actually incredibly hard to identify when you yourself are engaging in other and like the author points out, often times you are only trying to fit the glorious notion of 'other' into your own mold of what is familiar

This excerpt draws a lot of attention to "erasure" as a concept and how the experiences of entire cultures, lifestyles and groups have been erased from the account of the world by western, white, colonial powers. "proving the existence of black culture" is surprisingly easier said than done, especially because empires have been built on a culture of excluding those narratives. And we have individuals like the author fighting every day, using language, using arts etc. to establish such a missing narrative

Once again, it reminds me of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in that a dialect is probably a unit of language that is built up from a particular way of thinking (that is most likely culturally influenced). I think this is a very powerful statement.

Maybe it's difficult to standardize because there's so much the critic draws from personal experience that can't be controlled for.

Cannot study literary phenomena outside of interrelationships, like Tynjanov said

Ties in which Hernstein's article on what is close reading? One approach doesn't seem to be sufficient, given the corpus of data available

Oddly calming - takes the pressure off of the mad race to "know everything"

What about conformity? Shouldn't conformity play into experiences of shared culture because even if you are screwing around, people are your will be doing that too, and eventually you are bound to converge on something.

That's incredibly daunting and also application to fields other than just books.

Ia thought of "decision fatigue". If we have all these immense resources available but no direction on how to begin or use them, we probably will never access them or apply ourselves