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Camus’ essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, is a study of what Camus calls “the Absurd”. This chapter explores the various interpretations of that idea, including human mortality and the absurdity of repetition.

This chapter looks at different cultural examples of the tensions between ritual and sincerity over time. First, it discusses the interplay of law and love, Judaism and Christianity, and ritual and sincerity in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Second, it looks at the history of architectural ornament, which is ritual-like in its repetitions and rhythms and in its concern with boundaries and framing. Here the ritual/sincerity tension plays out typically as conflict between ornament and pedagogy. Iconoclasm is a core theme of this section. Finally, it compares the formal features of music to those of ritual. Like ritual, music is a way of establishing and crossing boundaries, and of ordering a messy world through techniques of intonation, rhythm, and ornament. The tension between ritual and sincerity culminates in 20th-century attempts to move beyond the conventions of tonality completely.

This chapter presents techniques for warding off the dulling effects of repetition and drill, components that are often necessary in preparing performance. Techniques include varying the speed of repetition, varying repetition patterns, practicing intermittent repetition, and creating alternate versions. Assessing security in relation to repetition is considered, as well as the danger of getting stuck in repetition for its own sake.

This chapter reflects on the findings of the book as a whole. It considers the epistemological status of ‘applied musicology’, concluding that it lies somewhere midway between the cognitive neurosciences of music on the one hand, and postmodern music-sociological research on the other. It restates the belief that the richest and most vital source of information about the musical mind is the music that we as human beings produce, either as individuals or, more commonly, with others. Future prospects are set out, including the use of technology to undertake some of the more mechanical aspects of applied musicological analysis (such as the identification of repetition), leaving practitioners to use the limited time and resources available to them to make the judgements that only they can make: identifying, for example, when repetition derives from imitation—the central tent of zygonic theory, and crucial in determining intentionality and influence in musical interactions.

Objective statistical induction may be behavioural, instantial, or pro-subjective (Bayesian), depending on the form of judging inferential uncertainty. In the behavioral case, the unknown parameters are fixed and uncertainty is judged by measures of procedural trustworthiness (like significance and confidence levels, power and risk functions), interpreted through repeated conceptual experimentation. Various principles are invoked for optimizing the procedure in different problems. The instantial approach (likelihood inference, P-value testing, and fiducial inference) remains pegged to the instance at hand without visualizing repetition, and weighs uncertainty in non-standard ways, although often like the behavioural approach, it also has to appeal to sampling theory. In the pro-subjective Bayesian approach, the unknown parameters are subjectively random with a known prior distribution, and inference is based on their posterior distribution. Various kinds of priors (improper/proper, impersonal/personal) fit in different tastes and situations. The subjective approach, based on a fully known subjective probability model, ‘previses’ about future observables, conditionally fixing the observations, often assuming exchangeability to simplify the process. Comparison of the different approaches shows that each has a natural setting in which it is advantageous.

This chapter discusses the relation between representation and learnability in different approaches to reduplication. We show that Correspondence Theory (McCarthy and Prince 1995) and Raimy (2000) both increase the representational possibilities for phonological theory but that only the Raimy (2000) approach has a natural simplicity metric which helps constrain the hypothesis space a language learner is confronted with. The least complex representation that maps to a surface reduplicated form in the Raimy (2000) theory can be identified based on the number of segments and precedence links. This unique least complex representation can then serve as the null hypothesis for a learner who will only consider more complex representations if confronted with positive evidence. Correspondence Theory on the other hand does not have any natural complexity metric to distinguish between phonetically identical but representationally distinct candidates which leads to an explosion in the hypothesis space for the learner. We conclude that the Raimy (2000) approach to reduplication is more representationally constrained than the Correspondence Theory approach and thus should be preferred.

This chapter explores effects of repetition and motion in Schubert's songs, together with moments of rhythmic irregularity. Analyses focus on three songs from Winterreise (poems by Müller) and three early Goethe settings. The chapter's themes are introduced with notes on “Auf dem Flusse,” Winterreise No. 7. An unusual declamatory schema is then shown to contribute to the frenzied flight in “Rückblick,” Winterreise No. 8. Three songs—“Wandrers Nachtlied I,” D. 224, “Die Nebensonnen,” Winterreise No. 23, and “Schäfers Klagelied,” D. 121—illustrate moments of rhythmic irregularity, speech rhythm, and the emergence of a reflective, deeply feeling self. The chapter concludes with an extended analysis of “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” D. 118. Gretchen's shifting psychological states are shown to leave their trace in the flow and articulation of her poetic syntax and in the phrase rhythm and hypermeter of Schubert's remarkable setting.

This chapter considers the life stories of American adults who score low on psychological tests measuring generativity. Research suggests that less generative adults tend to construct life stories that feature contamination sequences — scenes that begin very good but become irrevocably ruined or spoiled — and circular plots wherein protagonists fail to show progress or growth over time. The chapter traces the ideas of contamination sequences and circular narratives in the theoretical writings of Freud and Silvan Tomkins, and describes efforts to undo contamination in life stories of recovery, rehabilitation, and reform. Among the most powerful redemptive narratives in contemporary American culture are those associated with Alcoholics Anonymous and criminals' efforts to reform their lives.

Texture refers to the surface characteristics of an object resulting from the quality and arrangement of its particles or constituent parts. One extensive set of experiments focused on the segmentation into discrete regions of visual stimuli composed of dots or micropatterns. The original work contrasted different statistical distributions of the lightness of the dots, but soon shifted to the geometrical properties of the micropatterns. Another extensive set of experiments focused on the perception of emergent global surface properties created by the successive transformation of random noise patterns. For visual Glass patterns, transformations can lead to the perception of rotation, radial expansion, symmetry, contour, and linear movement. For auditory noise patterns, repetition can lead to the perception of pitch. It is important to distinguish between direct passive perceiving and attentive active perceiving. Structure in the physical world may not be perceivable.

Moderns assume that good is repetitious and evil is innovative, but for Lewis, the opposite is true. His theory of pleasure forms the basis of his relational view of life and for several other interests: reading, epistemology, and joy. Pleasure, under the category of gift, also relates his cultural theory to his Christian theology, since they share a common pattern or structure.

This chapter reviews cases of amnesia and evidence from functional brain imaging to provide insights about the nature of memory supported by the hippocampal memory system. The case of the famous amnesic patient H. M. show that memory can be distinguished from other psychological faculties. Furthermore, studies on H. M. distinguish declarative memory, which was severely impaired in his case, and spared working memory and non-memory perceptual, motor, and cognitive capacities. In addition, H. M. and other patients with damage to the hippocampal region had several preserved learning capacities including intact perceptual learning, motor skill learning, cognitive skill learning, pattern classification learning, classical conditioning of motor reflexes, and repetition priming. Thus, his memory impairment has been characterized as a deficit in explicit, declarative, or relational memory. Parallel studies using functional imaging of the brain have shown that the hippocampus is activated during encoding and retrieval in declarative memory.

This chapter tests the Component Theory of Skill Acquisition against phenomena reported in relation to the mental lexicon. Research on repetition priming with tasks such lexical decision is reviewed, as are theories of priming, and concepts, debates, and variables underlying the existing paradigm, such as single and double dissociation, modularity, age of acquisition, word frequency, and the innateness of language. The ability of a skill acquisition account to explain lexical data is considered, resulting in the conclusion that practice and transfer effects are similar in lexical and skill acquisition domains, supporting the existence of universal principles of learning. This argument is further developed with the proposal that the nature of a person's mental lexicon reflects their experiences with the linguistic world, and so should exhibit the distributional characteristics of this world. Evidence in support of this claim is presented, including work by Kirby, Zipf, and new data extracted from databases of word usage. The Component Theory of Skill Acquisition is assessed as providing a satisfactory account of lexical phenomena. However, at this point in the book, the theory is still missing a mechanism that would indicate how a lexicon might work. The beginnings of a proposal for such a mechanism are provided in the final sections of the chapter, where the work of Halloy on complex adaptive systems is introduced.

This chapter studies the relationship between one of the central preoccupations of educators (the need not just to teach but also somehow to enforce the retention of knowledge) and one of pedagogy's principal anxieties (the fact not only that students forget lessons they have learned, but also that such forgetting is quotidian and unexceptional, a natural property of the mind). Schoolmasters, translators, and commentators were anxious that the schoolboy's experience of reading Virgil's Aeneid brought him into dangerous proximity with what David Quint calls the poem's investigation of ‘the therapeutic effects of forgetting’. This chapter engages with a broad range of materials, from the Aeneid itself and the translations of Books Two and Four executed by the Earl of Surrey, to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century directives for teaching Virgil's epic. It concludes with a reading of several significant Virgilian moments in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. The chapter argues that there is a sense in which the history of epic in early modern England can be read as a history of forgetting epic, and that the poetry of the 1590s manages to dwell not on the consolidating moment of the schoolboy's encounter with ancient epic, but on the seas of smaller texts those schoolboys encountered under the watchful eye of their masters. Counterintuitively, the project of forgetting epic is a form of remembering mastery, and poetic modes such as pastoral draw a significant amount of their power from the poet's dream (unless it is a nightmare) that a master is either watching him or about to re-enter the schoolroom.

This is the last of five chapters on the text of the Old Testament, and discusses Hebrew poetry in the context of the Hebrew (Old Testament) Bible. The introductory section looks at recent work on the discovery of the verse traditions of the ancient Near East, and discusses the difficulty of reading Hebrew poetry, the Hebrew poet's resources (tradition versus innovation) and the poet's voice and the lyrical first person singular (the lyrical ‘I’). The second section discusses the issue of differentiating between prose and poetry, the third discusses metre and rhythm, and the fourth discusses parallelism. Further sections discuss building blocks (line, half‐line, and couplet), the segmentation of poems, repetition, the exploitation of sound, figurative language, and poetic diction. The last section of the chapter looks at the matter of holding the reader's attention.

Arguments against the unity of Genesis seem strong. These arguments include variation in style, language, divine names, and theological viewpoints, repetitions and doublets, and internal contradictions. However, while Hermann Gunkel read these features as reflecting the confusion of oral tradition, recent literary criticism has begun to recognize that they are expressions of deliberate literary artistry.