Of Dogs And Martyrs. Sherrington, Richards, Pavlov and Vygotsky  

Oleh:

Hardcastle, John

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education (Full Text) vol. 12 no. 1 (2005), page 31-42.
Fulltext: Vol. 12, No. 1, April, 2005, pp. 31–42.pdf (172.36KB)

Isi artikel

I. A. Richards’ psychological account of the poet’s experience was central to his The principles of literary criticism. He aimed to ‘rehabilitate’ English criticism through perspectives gained from scientific discoveries in psychology after the Great War. A chief source for this was the work of the neurophysiologist, C. S. Sherrington. The title of this piece refers to a remark made by Sherrington to the Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov: ‘the animal [a dog] seemed to me in a state of persecution best comparable with that of a Christian martyr’. Paradoxically, Vygotsky retold the story within a critique of Pavlov’s limiting accounts of human behaviour. Richards’ picture of the complexity of the poet’s experience—the balancing of conflicting impulses—also relied on an essentially reductive account of behaviour, in which the ‘extraordinary’ quality of the poet’s experience is traceable to the workings of the brain and the nervous system. In contrast, Vygotsky offered a powerful picture of semiotically mediated consciousness, dependent on human agency and purpose. The story restores neglected European historical perspectives to a key development in English studies.

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