Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Post-modern

by Richard Kearney

What is Imagination? What is the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in a contemporary civilization dominated by the image? How can we reconcile the right to imagine with the right to justice? Are the claims of artistic creativity and moral responsibility compatible?

With an extended foreword and an afterword chapter, and fascinating new material on the narrative imagination, Poetics of Modern to Post-modern provides a critically developed and accessible account of the major theories of imagination in modern European thought. It analyses and assesses the decisive contributions made to our understanding of the imaginary life by phenomenology (Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard), hermeneutics (Heidegger, Ricoeur), and post-modernism (Vattima, Kristeva, Lyotard). Richard Kearney achieves this with a coherent and committed approach, which displays his own passionate concern for the claims of imagination in our post-modern world of fragmentation and fracture.

This is essential reading for those interested in current leading debates on the role of imagining in continental philosophy, ethics, psychoanalysis, art theory and literary criticism.

Genres: Philosophy

260 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Richard Kearney is the Charles Seelig professor of philosophy at Boston College and has taught at many universities including University College Dublin, the Sorbonne, and the University of Nice.

He studied at Glenstal Abbey under the Benedictines until 1972, and was a 1st Class Honours graduate in Philosophy in the Bachelor of Arts graduate class of 1975 in UCD. He completed an M.A. at McGill University with Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, and a PhD with Paul Ricœur at University of Paris X: Nanterre. He corresponded with Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida and other French philosophers of the era. He was also active in the Irish, British, and French media as a host for various television and radio programs on literary and philosophical themes. His work focuses on the philosophy of the narrative imagination, hermeneutics and phenomenology.

Reviews

[Neil White · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard Kearney's final two chapters are worth the cost of the book where he examines the future of imagination in the wake of post-modernity. This is a pretty deep read into one of the more difficult concepts of philosophy, how imagination can be understood. He engages Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and then brings several post-modern voices into the conversation. Very thought provoking and it was insightful to see the evolution of the way the imagination has been looked at over the past century.

[Roy Kenagy]

RK COGNITION

CITED IN GOSETTI-FERENCEI ON BEING AND BECOMING

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