Philosophy, Dreaming and the Literary Imagination

Philosophy, Dreaming and the Literary Imagination PDF Author: Michaela Schrage-Früh
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319407244
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the intersections between dreaming and the literary imagination, in light of the findings of recent neurocognitive and empirical research, with the aim to lay a groundwork for an empirically informed aesthetics of dreaming. Drawing on perspectives from literary theory, philosophy of mind and dream research, this study investigates dreaming in relation to creativity and waking states of imagination such as writing and reading stories. Exploring the similarities and differences between the 'language' of dreams and the language of literature, it analyses the strategies employed by writers to create a sense of dream in literary fiction as well as the genres most conducive to this endeavour. The book closes with three case studies focusing on texts by Kazuo Ishiguro, Clare Boylan and John Banville to illustrate the diverse ways in which writers achieve to 'translate' the experience and 'language' of the dream.

Philosophy, Dreaming and the Literary Imagination

Philosophy, Dreaming and the Literary Imagination PDF Author: Michaela Schrage-Früh
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319407244
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the intersections between dreaming and the literary imagination, in light of the findings of recent neurocognitive and empirical research, with the aim to lay a groundwork for an empirically informed aesthetics of dreaming. Drawing on perspectives from literary theory, philosophy of mind and dream research, this study investigates dreaming in relation to creativity and waking states of imagination such as writing and reading stories. Exploring the similarities and differences between the 'language' of dreams and the language of literature, it analyses the strategies employed by writers to create a sense of dream in literary fiction as well as the genres most conducive to this endeavour. The book closes with three case studies focusing on texts by Kazuo Ishiguro, Clare Boylan and John Banville to illustrate the diverse ways in which writers achieve to 'translate' the experience and 'language' of the dream.

The Strength to Dream

The Strength to Dream PDF Author: Colin Wilson
Publisher: Aristeia Press
ISBN: 9781913209018
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this intense and revealing essay, Wilson analyses our literary heritage from the standpoint of existential criticism. Using specific examples and detailed biographical data, he reveals a fact that we tend to ignore: that almost all modern literature is an ode to despair, a stubborn cult to the man in the street, to the defeated, the loser. The prevailing romantic disability we suffer has diminished the stature of man to unforeseen levels. The imagination to which Wilson appeals in this book is a power capable of transcending the immediate, of freeing us from the limits of what is possible. Those who can imagine in this way have dominion over the earthly world and for that reason alone are liberated from the futility of the ordinary. To imagine is to invoke the impossible, to reject things as they are and dare to shape them as they should be. "...art in the twentieth century - literary art in particular - has ceased to take itself seriously as the primary instrument of existential philosophy. It has ceased to regard itself as an instrument for probing questions of human significance. Art is the science of human destiny." Colin Wilson "Existential criticism is therefore the attempt to judge works of art by the contribution they make to the science of living, to judge them by standards of meaning as well as impact." Colin Wilson

Dreaming by the Book

Dreaming by the Book PDF Author: Elaine Scarry
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 146684552X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Get Book Here

Book Description
A pathbreaking work about the way literature teaches us to use our imagination. We often attribute to our imaginative life powers that go beyond ordinary perception or sensation. In Dreaming by the Book, the noted scholar Elaine Scarry explores the apparently miraculous but in fact understandable processes by which poets and writers confer those powers on us: how they teach us the work of imaginative creation. Writers from Homer to Heaney, Scarry argues, instruct us in the art of mental composition even as their poems progress: just as painters understand paint, composers musical sounds, and sculptors stone or metal, verbal artists understand and deploy the only material in which their creations will get made - the backlit tissue of the human imagination. In her brilliant synthesis of cognitive psychology, literary criticism, and philosophy, she explores the five principal formal practices by which writers bring things to life for their readers; she calls them radiant ignition, rarity, dyadic addition and subtraction, stretching, and floral supposition. The transforming power of these mental practices can be seen in their appearance in great literature, of course, but also in applying them to - and watching how they revise - our own daydreams. Dreaming by the Book is not only an utterly original work of literary analysis but a sequence of on-the-spot mental experiments.

Philosophy of Dreams

Philosophy of Dreams PDF Author: Christoph Turcke
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300188404
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book Here

Book Description
div A sweeping reconstruction of human consciousness and its breakdown, from the Stone Age through modern technology/DIV

Literature, Philosophy & the Imagination

Literature, Philosophy & the Imagination PDF Author: Albert William Levi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Imagination
Languages : en
Pages : 548

Get Book Here

Book Description


The High Medieval Dream Vision

The High Medieval Dream Vision PDF Author: Kathryn Lynch
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080476641X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the High Middle Ages, the dream narrative was an enormously popular and influential form. Along with the romance, it was perhaps the genre of the age. It has come down to us in such classics twelfth to fourteenth-century classics as The Divine Comedy, the Romance of the Rose, Piers Plowman, Chaucer's early poetry, and the works of Guillaume de Machaut. This book redefines the dream vision by attending to its role in philosophical debate of the time, a conservative role in defense of the high medieval synthesis of reason and revelation. Lynch shows how the epistemological basis of this synthesis and the theories of visions that emerged from it drew on Arabic commentaries of Aristotle. These theories informed poetic visions modeled on Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, a work she discusses in detail before turning to Alain de Lille, Jean de Meun, and Dante. A final section, on John Gower's Confessio Amantis shows how fourteenth and fifteenth-century writers extended and finally moved beyond the conventional form of the dream vision.

Fictional Realities

Fictional Realities PDF Author: Jan Johann Albinn Mooij
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9781556194290
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book Here

Book Description
This work is a study of the role of the imagination. It focuses on the imaginative use of language in literature (poetry and narrative prose) and also touches on some more comprehensive issues, for the questions regarding the relationship between mind, reality and unreality. The first two chapters survey thinking about the imagination in the history of philosophy. The main trends and the main problems are discussed, particularly in respect of the (positive or negative) evaluation of imagination. The subsequent chapters investigate the role of the imagination more closely. discussion are the nature of narrativity, of fictional discourse and fictional objects, of realistic fiction, of symbolism and metaphor. The similarities, both real and imagined, between literature and the other arts are explored. In all chapters attention is paid to the problem of the value of art and literary imagination. The last chapter addresses this issue head-on. In particular, it attempts to define the value of literature in relation to science.

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination PDF Author: Amy Kind
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317329457
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 503

Get Book Here

Book Description
Imagination occupies a central place in philosophy, going back to Aristotle. However, following a period of relative neglect there has been an explosion of interest in imagination in the past two decades as philosophers examine the role of imagination in debates about the mind and cognition, aesthetics and ethics, as well as epistemology, science and mathematics. This outstanding Handbook contains over thirty specially commissioned chapters by leading philosophers organised into six clear sections examining the most important aspects of the philosophy of imagination, including: Imagination in historical context: Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Husserl, and Sartre What is imagination? The relation between imagination and mental imagery; imagination contrasted with perception, memory, and dreaming Imagination in aesthetics: imagination and our engagement with music, art, and fiction; the problems of fictional emotions and ‘imaginative resistance’ Imagination in philosophy of mind and cognitive science: imagination and creativity, the self, action, child development, and animal cognition Imagination in ethics and political philosophy, including the concept of 'moral imagination' and empathy Imagination in epistemology and philosophy of science, including learning, thought experiments, scientific modelling, and mathematics. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind and psychology, aesthetics, and ethics. It will also be a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as psychology and art.

A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream

A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream PDF Author: Elliot R. Wolfson
Publisher: Zone Books (Mit Press)
ISBN: 9781935408147
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
An exploration of the wakeful character of the dream and the dreamful character of wakefulness. Dreams have attracted the curiosity of humankind for millennia. In A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream, Elliot Wolfson guides the reader through contemporary philosophical and scientific models to the archaic wisdom that the dream state and waking reality are on an equal phenomenal footing--that the phenomenal world is the dream from which one must awaken by waking to the dream that one is merely dreaming that one is awake. By interpreting the dream within the dream, one ascertains the wakeful character of the dream and the dreamful character of wakefulness. Assuming that the manner in which the act of dreaming is interpreted may illuminate the way the interpreter comprehends human nature more generally, Wolfson draws on psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and neuroscience to elucidate the phenomenon of dreaming in a vast array of biblical, rabbinic, philosophical, and kabbalistic texts. To understand the dream, Wolfson writes, it is necessary to embrace the paradox of the fictional truth--a truth whose authenticity can be gauged only from the standpoint of its artificiality. The dream, on this score, may be considered the semblance of the simulacrum, wherein truth is not opposed to deception because the appearance of truthfulness cannot be determined independently of the truthfulness of appearance.

Dreaming

Dreaming PDF Author: Jennifer M. Windt
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262028670
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 825

Get Book Here

Book Description
A comprehensive proposal for a conceptual framework for describing conscious experience in dreams, integrating philosophy of mind, sleep and dream research, and interdisciplinary consciousness studies. Dreams, conceived as conscious experience or phenomenal states during sleep, offer an important contrast condition for theories of consciousness and the self. Yet, although there is a wealth of empirical research on sleep and dreaming, its potential contribution to consciousness research and philosophy of mind is largely overlooked. This might be due, in part, to a lack of conceptual clarity and an underlying disagreement about the nature of the phenomenon of dreaming itself. In Dreaming, Jennifer Windt lays the groundwork for solving this problem. She develops a conceptual framework describing not only what it means to say that dreams are conscious experiences but also how to locate dreams relative to such concepts as perception, hallucination, and imagination, as well as thinking, knowledge, belief, deception, and self-consciousness. Arguing that a conceptual framework must be not only conceptually sound but also phenomenologically plausible and carefully informed by neuroscientific research, Windt integrates her review of philosophical work on dreaming, both historical and contemporary, with a survey of the most important empirical findings. This allows her to work toward a systematic and comprehensive new theoretical understanding of dreaming informed by a critical reading of contemporary research findings. Windt's account demonstrates that a philosophical analysis of the concept of dreaming can provide an important enrichment and extension to the conceptual repertoire of discussions of consciousness and the self and raises new questions for future research.