Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, Princeton UP, 2001, 304 p.
ISBN: 0-691-07076-8
Description donnée par l'éditeur:
Co-winner of the 2000 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism
Dreaming by the Book explores the almost miraculous processes by which poets and writers teach us the work of imaginative creation. Writers from Homer to Heaney instruct us in the art of mental composition, even as their poems progress. Just as painters understand paint, composers musical instruments, and sculptors stone or metal, verbal artists understand the only material in which their creations will get made--the back-lit tissue of the human brain. In her brilliant synthesis of literary criticism, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, Elaine Scarry explores the principal practices by which writers bring things to life for their readers.
Table of Contents
PART ONE: Making Pictures
1. On Vivacity 3
2. On Solidity 10
3. The Place of Instruction 31
4. Imagining Flowers 40
PART TWO: Moving Pictures 75
5. First Way: Radiant Ignition 77
6. Second Way: Rarity 89
7. Third Way: Addition and Subtraction 100
8. Fourth Way: Streching, Folding, and Tilting 111
9. Fifth Way: Floral Supposition 158
PART THREE: Repicturing
10. Circling Back 195
11. Skating 206
12. Quickening with Flowers 221
Conclusion: Teaching Made-up Birds to Fly 239
Notes 249
Acknowledgments 275
Index 281