Beaugrande, Robert De. “The Processes of Invention: Association and Recombination.” College Composition and Communication 30 3 (1979): 260-67. Print. YES

• B. begins by highlighting that the inventional process is always bound to a “common repository of knowledge and experience shared by writers and readers’ (260).  In other words, it relies on common sense and common knowledge.
• B. notes that all information and knowledge is actually stored in a network form . . . of which each node is a repository of particular information that can be associated with other nodes (260).  These associations are the “lines of the cognitive pathways” that store elements of knowledge (though he never says if this is purely lexical or somehow content based – form or content?).
• According to B., the act of invention is an activity situated between “ungoverned associating” (daydreaming) and the “mechanical reproduction of conventional knowledge” (i.e., reference works like dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.).  Textual merit is determined by the novelty or insightfulness of the combination and recombination of associations into new, emergent networks (261).  This was written in 1979!!!!
• A poetic closing: