PREFACE

Howard E. Gruber’s evolving systems approach to creativity has, in var-ious ways, influenced all the contributors to this volume. A central tenetin Gruber’s approach is that, in considering the creative thought andwork of a preeminently creative person, it is the person’s uniqueness thatbrings him or her to our attention in the first place. The discovery, novelty,breakthrough or change of paradigm represented by the person’s ideasand products is unlike those of anyone else. It follows that in order todeepen our understanding of the development of the person’s work, acase study is the best approach. Lavery, Hanchett Hanson, and Browereach use the case study to explore an aspect of the work of a highly creativeindividual.David Lavery studies the essays and poetry of the American anthro-pologist, historian of science and writer Loren Eiseley and the latter’s goalto feel at home when he is away from home. Lavery discusses some centralmetaphors in Eiseley’s thought and draws parallels between Odysseus’homeward journey and Eiseley’s professional and personal one.Michael Hanchett Hanson’s study focuses on the role of irony inGeorge Bernard Shaw’s writings about World War I, the Great War.Hanchett Hanson shows how Shaw’s use of irony contributed to his cre-ativity and reflected his moral passion.Richard Brower uses the social-psychological theory of social com-parison to trace the development of van Gogh as an artist. Brower’s studycontradicts the prevalent idea that the highly creative individual is a soli-tary figure who works alone, cut off from the world.Sara Davis describes her study of the relationship between reader andtext when the text is a romance novel. She discusses the heavy influence

of broad cultural norms concerning women and romance, but also showshow readers who initially had a very negative attitude to romance novels,constructed new meanings of the text once they began to read. Davis’interest in social context is indebted to Gruber, who believed that examina-tion of the effects of the social milieu is essential in the study of individualcreativity.Several authors mention Gruber’sNetwork of Enterprisewhich is atheoretical construct that also provides a methodological technique to mapa person’s enterprises over time. An enterprise is a purposeful activity ofsome duration (weeks, months, years) which consists of projects, tasks,and products. Gruber used theNetworkidea in the course of developinghis approach to the study of creative work. Laura Tahir, who directs thepsychological services in a prison, applies this tool to her work with twomembers of a group of young incarcerated men. Together with her use ofnarrative therapy—whose main focus is for those in therapy to “re-story”their lives—Tahir discusses the potential effects of her program on thefuture lives of the participants.Susan Rostan uses Gruber’s work on morality and creativity as a take-off point to examine extraordinary moral behavior in children of elemen-tary and high school age and traces aspects of its developmental courseacross these age groups. Rostan includes teachers’ perceptions of the ex-traordinary moral behavior they witnessed and discusses the importanceof teachers’ potential roles in the development of such behavior amongtheir students.Yeh Hsueh takes up the method ofCritical Explorationin education.He traces the origins of this approach to Jean Piaget’s development ofthe “clinical method” as a way of interviewing and working with children.Hsueh carefully describes the evolution of the approach in the 20th centuryand its current use by Eleanor Duckworth as a way of eliciting maximumparticipation and creative thinking in the classroom.Helen Haste uses a broad brush to examine questions of how best toeducate young people for moral and civic responsibility. Her examinationincludes research studies in Western and Eastern Europe, North and SouthAmerica, and Asia. She emphasizes the importance of taking changingpolitical, social, and psychological world events (such as the entry of envi-ronmentalism into the public domain) into consideration in making deci-sions about curriculum. Haste discusses broad theoretical issues, questionsabout participation and practice, as well as the meaning of responsibilityat the individual level.It is easy to see in these brief descriptions that the essays in this volumeowe a collective debt to Howard Gruber—from an abstract-idea level tohe concrete adoption of method. At the same time, it is striking how manyof the contributors are presenting work in areas never explored by Gruber.This, perhaps, attests to the generativity and flexibility of Gruber’s theory