Description
Book SynopsisCharles Altieri argues for a reconsideration of the Kantian tradition of Idealist ethics, which he believes can restore much of the power of the arguments for the role of aesthetics in art.
Trade Review"Charles Altieri has long been our most philosophical, and yet most impassioned, critic and theorist of poetry, for whom lyric poems are heroic 'acts of mind' that criticize illusion and empower the reader 'to will what the intellect sees,' while yet marrying this activity to 'lively affective intensities.' In this new book, he shows, with the assistance of Wittgenstein, how notions like imagination, feeling, attunement, and appreciation can be given a viable, post-Romantic sense adequate to the fullness of the experience of poetry." -- Henry Staten, University of Washington
"Charles Altieri has written a book about the social uses of literature that doesn't foreclose the power of aesthetic engagements to transfigure particular lives, especially with respect to possibilities of self-understanding that mere sociality cannot confer and, even more importantly, with respect to the sensuous intensities that society cannot harness. Altieri restores to our investments in the aesthetic a power of appreciation for human worldliness that has long been absent from literary criticism—to the detriment of literature and life." -- Alan Singer, author of
The Self-Deceiving Muse: Notice and Knowledge in the Work of Art"Charles Altieri is one of our foremost literary/philosophical theorists and critics of poetry, and anything he writes commands attention. He is a master of these realms and a fine-tuned reader in the disciplines he knows so well. Reckoning with the Imagination is a rigorous and impressive book." -- David Mikics, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English, University of Houston, author of
Slow Reading in a Hurried AgeTable of Contents1. Why Wittgenstein Matters for Literary Theory
2. The Work Texts Do: Toward a Phenomenology of Imagining Imaginatively
3. Where Doubt Has No Purchase: The Roles of Display
4. The Concept of Expression in the Arts
5. Expression and Exemplification
6. What Literary Theory Can Learn from Wittgenstein's Silence about Ethics
7. Appreciating AppreciationNotes
Bibliography
Index
