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ELLEN SPOLSKY, Sent Away from the Garden? The Pastoral Logic of Tasso, Marvell, and Haley

between concrete sense perceptions and categories or abstractions, and
that is the looping of error-correcting brain processes.
The predictive processing hypothesis has allowed us to amplify
the articulation of an inherited literary-historical understanding of
both archetype and genre. From this new perspective, we can under-
stand either of them as a template that guides cognition by triangula-
tion. Both the author who provides the trigger clues and the audiences
who have the cultural experience, each individually evoking a version
of a schema labeled pastoral, initiate the predictive processing work
of guessing and correcting. But even satisfying corrections age, and
the work has to be redone; if the pastoral recurs it is because we still
need it. As the dilemma played out in The Nether shows, even those
who describe themselves as convinced materialists might consider that
that reality (or not) of internet avatars such as the child victims at The
Hideaway may reopen some old questions.

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