Preludes to Insight

About this book

"The Eureka! experience, or insight, is the gem of creative endeavor. It is that glittering but often frustratingly elusive moment of understanding or discovery that moves creative and scholarly work in productive directions. But where does insight come from? How might it be invoked or encouraged? Can it be? These are just a few of the questions that Preludes to Insight addresses through a focus on incubation - an interval of time in the paradigmatic creative process directly prior to illumination." "Commonly conceived as the province of subconscious and/or partially conscious cognition, incubation, despite its widely acknowledged generative power, has retained an air of mystery. Preludes to Insight seeks to unravel the mystery further, with an ultimate intention of diminishing the conceptual gap that tends to differentiate creative and expository writing processes, while providing expository writing instructors with strategies for developing incubation-sensitive, insight-inducting pedagogies. The book pursues its purposes through extensive synthesis of published theoretical and empirical scholarship from various disciplines, as well as through original empirical scholarship in the teacher-research tradition."--Jacket.