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Piaget And Poetry: Formal Thinking In The Humanities, James A. Mcshane

ADAPT Program: Essays

My argument in its broadest outline is not surprising: sophisticated poetry requires formal operations. Poems are, after all, statements of a propositional nature, verbal constructs of carefully integrated parts, often non-linear in their arrangements, analogical (analogy itself requiring proportional reasoning) in their presentation, and (as Aristotle noted) dependent for their intelligibility on the reader's judgment of the contextually probable. What interests me is the number of ways the Piagetian analysis of pre-formal thought illuminates those often disturbing readings, to our eyes unfathomable readings, which we are given by our less proficient students. I am further interested in what Piaget has …