Conscious application of creativity dynamics as an approach to the formation and appreciation of literary creativity

Abstract

Creative works are always multifaceted and complex; therefore, I argue that literature specialists need to recognize how creativity develops within the literary domain and what criteria we can set as standards for the appreciation of literary creativity. In this paper, I attempt to provide a cognitive theoretical account of the factors or dynamics that underlie the creative literary production. This study has two major purposes. First, the paper explains specific, basic processes of literary creativity and reveals how they function in the composition and comprehension of creative literary works, demonstrating their applicability to both acclaimed canons and works of contemporary writers. Second, it draws on cognitive theories in order to emphasize the cognitive and developmental benefit of the conscious awareness, practice and application of the cognitive processes underlying literary creativity. The selected creative processes are fundamental to the composition of literary works; therefore, they are the most commonly used and recurrent in acknowledged literary works. They include retrieval of knowledge, conceptual integration, compression, ambiguity, association between categories, effectiveness, and problem solving. The paper also argues that these cognitive processes of literary creativity are interdependent and overlapping as the construction of one process entails the functioning of another.