Associating New World Components

Readers may discover that components of the text world have become passively combined from parts of meaning units, rather than from whole meaning units, e.g., whole sentence meanings. These unit parts can also be textually distant from each other. The chapter illustrates this ‘analytical’ phenomenon by using some lines from Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’. The exploration addresses the difference between a ‘first’ reading and later re-readings, and the role of the reader’s knowledge of the text’s context. A passive reinforcement of text themes experienced as repeated, as well as certain kinds of ‘forgetting’, emerge as crucial. The chapter also addresses the best way to understand what passive synthesis ‘is’.