Description
Book SynopsisJust 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. This book explores the almost miraculous processes by which poets and writers teach us the work of imaginative creation.
Trade ReviewCo-Winner of the 2000 Truman Capote Award, Literary Criticism "A startling inquiry ... a truly revealing phenomenology of imagination... Dreaming by the Book will affect how one reads fiction and poetry as few critical works have done before."--Kenneth Baker, art critic, San Francisco Chronicle "[Scarry] is extremely ambitious, seeking nothing less than a theory of literary cognition... Her interest, which is really in aesthetic success, makes her an original."--James Wood, New Republic "Her approach often recalls that of ... Descartes and Hume as she attempts to solve the riddle of how the mind works. Scarry is an original, interdisciplinary thinker. She writes like someone enraptured by both the natural world ... and by language."--Publishers Weekly "[Scarry] has written an appendix to Aristotle, perhaps best entitled De Imaginatione, though I wonder whether it fits better to the end of his De Anima, 'On the Soul,' or his Poetics."--Virginia Quarterly Review
Table of ContentsPART 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
