A Conference on Entrenchment and Plasticity

A Conference on Entrenchment and Plasticity

Friday – Saturday, April 15 – 16
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

This conference is an interdisciplinary exploration of how form arises from practice. Grammatical, literary, and cultural structures become entrenched over time and with repetition. Ideas and behaviors become increasingly routine, ritualized, automatic, opaque to self-reflection, and difficult to eradicate. But these processes of entrenchment – which might seem to lead only to stagnation – are, in fact, instrumental in cultural, literary, and linguistic change, as well as in learning and change in the individual. Three keynote lectures and an interdisciplinary panel discuss entrenchment as part of our famed capacity for neural and psychological plasticity, and its relevance across disciplines.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Collaborative Research Grant, the Dept. of Linguistics, the Comparative Literature Program, the Dept. of French and Italian, the Dept. of English, the College of Letters and Science, and the Literature and the Mind Initiative.

Website: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=148039295257073