Dreaming by the Book

by Scarry, Elaine

• ISBN13: 9780374143985
• ISBN10: 0374143986
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-10-01
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)

Summary

We often attribute to our imaginative life powers that go beyond ordinary perception Or sensation. In Dreaming by the Book, the noted scholar Elaine Starry 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

Author Biography

Elaine Scarry is Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics at Harvard University.

Table of Contents

PART ONE: Making Pictures
On Vivacity	3	(7)
On Solidity	10	(21)
The Place of Instruction	31	(9)
Imagining Flowers	40	(35)
PART TWO: Moving Pictures	75	(174)
First Way: Radiant Ignition	77	(12)
Second Way: Rarity	89	(11)
Third Way: Addition and Subtraction	100	(11)
Fourth Way: Stretching, Folding, and Tilting	111	(47)
Fifth Way: Floral Supposition	158	(37)
PART THREE: Repicturing
Circling Back	195	(11)
Skating	206	(15)
Quickening with Flowers	221	(28)
Conclusion: Teaching Made-up Birds to Fly	239	(10)
Acknowledgment	249	(6)
Notes	255	(26)
Index	281