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Cultural Writing. From one of our most esteemed contemporary poets, a collection of essays about reading and poetics, written over many decades, and touching on many centuries. "We expect poets to give a first-hand account of what poetry is. But some poets, when they write criticism, produce a kind of prose that is itself on the verge of being poetry. Valery, Stevens and Marianne Moore belong to this "visionary company." And so does Barbara Guest, whose writings on poetry, collected here, are among the most inspiring works of their kind. It is a deep pleasure to know that such writing can still exist" --John Ashbery.
How did the idea of the imagination impact Romantic literature and science? 2018 Winner, Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize, The International Conference on Romanticism Richard C. Sha argues that scientific understandings of the imagination indelibly shaped literary Romanticism. Challenging the idea that the imagination found a home only on the side of the literary, as a mental vehicle for transcending the worldly materials of the sciences, Sha shows how imagination helped to operationalize both scientific and literary discovery. Essentially, the imagination forced writers to consider the difference between what was possible and impossible while thinking about how that difference could be known. Sha examines how the imagination functioned within physics and chemistry in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, neurology in Blake's Vala, or The Four Zoas, physiology in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, and obstetrics and embryology in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He also demonstrates how the imagination was called upon to do aesthetic and scientific work using primary examples taken from the work of scientists and philosophers Davy, Dalton, Faraday, Priestley, Kant, Mary Somerville, Oersted, Marcet, Smellie, Swedenborg, Blumenbach, Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Von Baer, among others. Sha concludes that both fields benefited from thinking about how imagination could cooperate with reason—but that this partnership was impossible unless imagination's penchant for fantasy could be contained.
"This remarkable book enhances Ariella Azoulay’s position as the most compelling theorist of photography writing today." –Jonathan Crary, author of Scorched Earth A groundbreaking work on the power of photography as a vehicle for civil protest Understanding photography is more than a matter of assessing photographs, writes Ariella Azoulay. The photograph is merely one event in a sequence that constitutes photography and which always involves an actual or potential spectator in the relationship between the photographer and the individual portrayed. The shift in focus from product to practice, outlined in Civil Imagination, brings to light the way images can both reinforce and resist the oppressive reality foisted upon the people depicted. Through photography, Civil Imagination seeks out relations of partnership, solidarity, and sharing that come into being at the expense of sovereign powers that threaten to destroy them. Azoulay argues that the “civil” must be distinguished from the “political” as the interest that citizens have in themselves, in others, in their shared forms of coexistence, as well as in the world they create and transform. Azoulay’s book sketches out a new horizon of civil living for citizens as well as subjects denied citizenship—inevitable partners in a reality they are invited to imagine anew and to reconstruct. Beautifully produced with many illustrations, Civil Imagination is a provocative argument for photography as a civic practice capable of reclaiming civil power.
Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman investigate an array of instruments from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century that seem at first to be marginal to science--magnetic clocks that were said to operate by the movements of sunflower seeds, magic lanterns, ocular harpsichords (machines that played different colored lights in harmonious mixtures), Aeolian harps (a form of wind chime), and other instruments of "natural magic" designed to produce wondrous effects. By looking at these and the first recording instruments, the stereoscope, and speaking machines, the authors show that "scientific instruments" first made their appearance as devices used to evoke wonder in the beholder, as in works of magic and the theater. The authors also demonstrate that these instruments, even though they were often "tricks," were seen by their inventors as more than trickery. In the view of Athanasius Kircher, for instance, the sunflower clock was not merely a hoax, but an effort to demonstrate, however fraudulently, his truly held belief that the ability of a flower to follow the sun was due to the same cosmic magnetic influence as that which moved the planets and caused the rotation of the earth. The marvels revealed in this work raise and answer questions about the connections between natural science and natural magic, the meaning of demonstration, the role of language and the senses in science, and the connections among art, music, literature, and natural science. Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Imagination in the Western Psyche: From Ancient Greece to Modern Neuroscience offers a comprehensive treatment of the human imagination by integrating the rich discourse on imagination in the humanities with modern neuroscientific research. This book is the first to offer an integrated understanding of imagination from both a humanistic (i.e., historical, philosophical, cultural, depth psychological) and scientific perspective. The book presents neurobiological accounts that align with prominent theories in Jungian and archetypal psychology and offers a window into the many ways imagination can be understood. It elaborates on the discourse on imagination in Western civilization that goes back thousands of years. Chapters analyze how imagination has been considered throughout history and contrasts a modern neuroscientific approach that looks at imagination by studying its component parts without addressing the phenomenon in all its experiential richness and complexity. By bringing these two approaches together an account of the human imagination emerges that is grounded in scientific rigor without diminishing the fullness of human experience. This book will appeal to academics, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of analytical psychology, depth psychology, Jungian studies, and psychotherapy
"A work of major importance for the interpretation of Descartes's development and for the understanding of the function of the imagination in Descartes's early works. Descartes's Imagination will be a must in Descartes and imagination studies. It is long overdue."--Eva T. H. Brann, author of The World of Imagination: Sum and Substance "A significant contribution to our understanding of the development of Descartes's philosophy."--William R. Shea, author of The Magic of Numbers and Motion: The Scientific Career of Rene Descartes
This volume examines and critiques several of the classical theoretical foundations of domestic and international organization, concentrating on the contestable conceptions of community, order, justice, freedom, responsibility and wealth developed by the major political theorists of the modern epoch. Nelson argues that the accepted discourses of world politics are constructed by way of particular interpretive negotiations of what sovereign power is and what it must be made to accomplish in domestic and world politics. Providing a Foucaultian analysis of modern power and the liberal subject, the work traces the history of modern inquiries into sovereignty to a time when the state was being severed from a Christian eschatology, a time when political theorists sought ways of lending meaning and purpose to emerging conceptions of ‘the political.’ Modern theories of sovereignty, Nelson argues, embody the remainders of a deep worry over the precarious nature of legitimacy, the contingency of power, and the frailty of any political form. The theoretical traditions of liberalism and the Enlightenment dispense with anxiety over the politics of legitimacy by repressing the historical, constricting the political, and fashioning political rationalities suited to increasingly intimate and ever-expansive forms of liberal governance. This book aims to explore how modern theories of sovereignty elicit and effect governable subjects and forms of political community that have proven crucial to intensifying and expansive powers of the liberal state. An inquiry into modern theories of sovereignty and statecraft and a critical interrogation of how political theories are invoked by the traditions of international relations across the modern era, this volume will be of interest to all scholars of political theory, political philosophy and international relations.
This book is a study of the emergence of the geographic paradigm in modern Western thought around 1800.