Ways of Knowing Record Type: Review   ID: 346
The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading Olson, David R.
I have advocated a cultural approach to EEs and EHEs that makes it possible to amplify their meaning and connect these anomalous experiences to the world. In this connection it has been suggested to me that I am really taking a literacy approach, which caused me to do a double take. I took literacy to be synonymous with reading comprehension. Olson takes this to the limit in this book in which "he argues that writing provides our dominant models for thinking about nature and the mind, and shows how our understanding of the world and ... of ourselves are by-products of our ways of creating and interpreting written texts" (dust jacket). In connection with amplifying the meaning of exceptional experiences, however, I feel other cultural ways of doing so are art, recreational pursuits, music, film, sports, and the performing arts. It is true that people will find more ideas and information in books than in popular culture or ordinary conversation. According to Olson, reading can serve as a means of reading the world itself in new ways. Certainly this has been true for me. In one chapter he says literacy is social—one "learns how to participate in the discourse of some textual community" (p. 273). In a very real sense, this is the aim of this Journal—to create and introduce texts on all aspects of exceptional human experience in order to consolidate this domain of human knowledge.
Publisher Information:	New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 318p

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