In Defence of the Imagination

In Defence of the Imagination
Author: Helen Gardner
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1982
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780674445406

Helen Gardner is a vigorous and eloquent champion of traditional literary values. These values have been subverted, she feels, by some of the ablest of modern academics and by prevalent tendencies in criticism and teaching today. She discusses the new schools of criticism which exalt the sometimes unintelligible theorist above the creator of the work of art, the imaginative interpreter of life, or which replace the authority of the author with that of the reader. She regrets the tendency of teachers to emphasize contemporary literature to the neglect of the great writings of the past and to teach past literature only if it can somehow be made "relevant." She reproves theater directors who distort Shakespeare's plays and who convert serious drama into happenings. And she finds that biographers of writers are so preoccupied with the inner lives of their subjects that the writings become psychological documents rather than works of the imagination. In a closing chapter, partly autobiographical, she affirms the values she has found in a life devoted to the study of literature. Even the most polemical sections of the book are courteous and good-humored. Her own lucidity, range of reference, and passionate concern for literature are in themselves powerful affirmations of her argument.

Falling Upwards

Falling Upwards
Author: Lee Siegel
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2009-04-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0786735511

Sex and the City, Saul Bellow, Eyes Wide Shut, Dante and the American self, Barbara Kingsolver, acting in Hollywood, Soviet painting in Soho, Angels in America, Jane Austen in the present, J.K. Rowling -- nothing escapes Lee Siegel's incandescent eye. Siegel possesses an intellectual range and independent perspective unmatched by his peers, and Falling Upwards brings together the best of his essays, all of them rich with the trades mark wit and intelligence that have won him many friends and a few enemies. In these essential writings, Siegel deftly uses the occasion of a book, film, painting, or television show not merely to appraise it, but to make sense of life in a way that is more defiant of impoverished cultural "norms" than most contemporary artistic expression. Guided by the belief that a calculating self-interest in art-making diminishes the prospects for the imagination in life, Siegel celebrates authentic sensibilities and lambasts manufactured sentiments. With uncanny insight, yet also with incomparable logic and analytical rigor, he has invented a new idiom in which the language of criticism embodies the playful, creative, synthesizing power that has been largely abdicated by the arts in our time. In writing about works of culture, Siegel has created a standard by which to judge them.

Living Forms of the Imagination

Living Forms of the Imagination
Author: Douglas Hedley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2008-02-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 056755127X

"This book is essential reading for those interested in the imagination, epistemology, naturalism, and the philosophy of religion." - Charles Taliaferro, Professor of Philosophy, St. Olaf College, Minnesota The role of imagination in psychology, ethics and aesthetics provides a good analogy for thinking about the imagination in religious belief. in dealing with the inner lives of other human beings, moral values or aesthetic qualities we need to employ the imagination: to suppose, form hypotheses, empathize or imaginatively engage with alien people or worlds in order to understand. Just as we use the imagination to relate to other minds, appreciate beauty and understand goodness, we need imagination to engage with God's action in the world.

Pretentiousness

Pretentiousness
Author: Dan Fox
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2016-04-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 156689428X

Pretentiousness is the engine oil of culture; the essential lubricant in the development of all arts, high, low, or middle.

Creativity, Inc. (The Expanded Edition)

Creativity, Inc. (The Expanded Edition)
Author: Ed Catmull
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2014-04-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0679644504

The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles that built Pixar’s singularly successful culture, and on all he learned during the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve. “Might be the most thoughtful management book ever.”—Fast Company For nearly thirty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner eighteen Academy Awards. The joyous storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable. As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the twenty-five movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as: • Give a good idea to a mediocre team and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. Creativity, Inc. has been significantly expanded to illuminate the continuing development of the unique culture at Pixar. It features a new introduction, two entirely new chapters, four new chapter postscripts, and changes and updates throughout. Pursuing excellence isn’t a one-off assignment but an ongoing, day-in, day-out, full-time job. And Creativity, Inc. explores how it is done.

The Republic of Imagination

The Republic of Imagination
Author: Azar Nafisi
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2014-10-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0698170334

A New York Times bestseller The author of the beloved #1 New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with the next chapter of her life in books—a passionate and deeply moving hymn to America Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her multimillion-copy bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics of English and American literature to her eager students in Iran. In this electrifying follow-up, she argues that fiction is just as threatened—and just as invaluable—in America today. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination. Nafisi invites committed readers everywhere to join her as citizens of what she calls the Republic of Imagination, a country with no borders and few restrictions, where the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.

Only Imagine

Only Imagine
Author: Kathleen Stock
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2017
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198798342

Only Imagine offers a theory of fictional content or, as it is sometimes known, 'fictional truth'. The theory of fictional content Kathleen Stock argues for is known as 'extreme intentionalism'; the idea that the fictional content of a particular work is equivalent to exactly what the author of the work intended the reader to imagine. Historically, this sort of view has been highly unpopular. Literary theorists and philosophers alike have poured scorn upon it. The first half of this book attempts to argue that it should in fact be taken very seriously as an adequate account of fictional truth: better, in fact, than many of its more popular rivals. The second half explores various explanatory benefits of extreme intentionalism for other issues in the philosophy of fiction and imagination. Namely, can fiction give us reliable knowledge? Why do we 'resist' imagining certain fictions? What, in fact, is a fiction? And, how should the imagination be characterised?

St John Damascene

St John Damascene
Author: Andrew Louth
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2004
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0199275270

This text presents an overall account of the life and work of St John Damascene, a one-time senior civil servant in the Umayyad Arab Empire who became a monk near Jerusalem in the early years of the eighth century.

Nature's Imagination

Nature's Imagination
Author: John Cornwell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1995
Genre: Science
ISBN:

This collection from a 1992 symposium explores how and why mathematicians, astronomers, neuroscientists, and philosophers are moving beyond classic reductionism toward a new paradigm that accounts for the whole and emphasizes events and relationships. Essays examine the irreducibility of mathematics, the incompleteness theorem, consciousness and the mind-body problem, and the social implications of artificial intelligence. For scientists, philosophers, students, and adventurous readers. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Imagining and Knowing

Imagining and Knowing
Author: Gregory Currie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2020-02-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0192636782

Works of fiction are works of the imagination and for the imagination. Gregory Currie energetically defends the familiar idea that fictions are guides to the imagination, a view which has come under attack in recent years. Responding to a number of challenges to this standpoint, he argues that within the domain of the imagination there lies a number of distinct and not well-recognized capacities which make the connection between fiction and imagination work. Currie then considers the question of whether in guiding the imagination fictions may also guide our beliefs, our outlook, and our habits in directions of learning. It is widely held that fictions very often provide opportunities for the acquisition of knowledge and of skills. Without denying that this sometimes happens, this book explores the difficulties and dangers of too optimistic a picture of learning from fiction. It is easy to exaggerate the connection between fiction and learning, to ignore countervailing tendencies in fiction to create error and ignorance, and to suppose that claims about learning from fiction require no serious empirical support. Currie makes a case for modesty about learning from fiction -- reasoning that a lot of what we take to be learning in this area is itself a kind of pretence, that we are too optimistic about the psychological and moral insights of authors, that the case for fiction as a Darwinian adaptation is weak, and that empathy is both hard to acquire and not always morally advantageous.