@AmenZwa

I love your min delta / max delta metaphor. It does explain why many of us are good at one side of the teaching / research spectrum but bad at the other.

There is another aspect to acquiring knowledge that turns this around. As teachers we want to create moments where the student recognises the true nature of a relationship, beyond the rehearsed formula. Those moments require the student to see the familiar afresh, and then to re-construct their earlier half-knowledge in new terms. This makes the teacher a delta maximiser.

Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky (an outcast under Stalin) developed an entire theory of aesthetics based on this concept of "defamiliarisation". Art for Shklovsky is meant to break the false safety of the habitual view.

"Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life: to make the stone stony."

This too is the role of the academic teacher. To let the student experience the stonyness of the stone.

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/first/en122/lecturelist-2015-16-2/shklovsky.pdf

@composergreg

Oh, this is illuminating. A "compositional approach to performance" as dual to "improvisational composition" makes perfect sense for Gould. And as you suggest, Gould stays true to the material, no self-indulgence.

I am not a musician myself, but as a lecturer I experience a similar tension: the exposition must be free and created afresh in front of the students, and yet it must remain true to the canon.

@chashale

Lately I've become obsessed with the concept of #defamiliarisation by literary theorist Viktor #Shklovsky. Make the familiar become unfamiliar, understand a thing by making it strange. Once you recognise the principle, you see it at work everywhere. So in this photograph!

#Feininger was important to me when I started snapping as a young man. His handbook was my guide for many years, his photographs served as the standard. I now see that they are exercises in defamiliarisation.

#Shklovsky on #Tolstoy:

"Things that have been experienced several times begin to be experienced in terms of recognition: a thing is in front of us, we know this, but we do not see it. This is why we cannot say anything about it. Art has different ways of de-automatizing things; in this article I would like to show one of the methods very frequently used by L. Tolstoy—the writer who…presents things the way he sees them, who sees things fully but does not change them."

Also I think #Tolstoy was reading #Thackeray when he was fighting in the Crimean War? And #Shklovsky was writing literary criticism on the other front from #Wittgenstein. Could be fun to write something on "What we read while fighting." Or even "What pacifists read at war." Not that they all necessarily became pacifists. Just thinking aloud...