Dreaming by the Book
Elaine Scarry

Co-winner of the 2000 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism

Paper | 2001 | $26.95
304 pp. | 5 x 8

Shopping Cart | Reviews | Table of Contents

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.

Reviews:

"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

Endorsements:

"Part reverie, part rhapsody, and lucid analysis throughout."--Robert Fagles, translator of Homer's Iliad

"I finished Dreaming by the Book feeling that fundamental aspects of the nature of consciousness had been peeled open and exposed to view."--Stephen M. Kosslyn, author of Image and Brain

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

Another Princeton book by Elaine Scarry:

• On Beauty and Being Just.

Subject Areas:

• American Language and Literature
• Comparative Literature
• Philosophy

Hardcover published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Paper: Not for sale in the Commonwealth (except Canada)

Shopping Cart:

For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Paper: $26.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-07076-6

Prices subject to change without notice

File created: 11/4/2009

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