Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei

Rilke’s poetry issues a critique of modern alienation from the natural world and is held in philosophical and ecocritical interpretations to effect an alternative revealing of nature. This essay investigates nature in Rilke’s writings by tracing its relation to poetic imagination and considers in that light the prospects of a Rilkean vision of nature for literary ecocriticism. Nature in Rilke’s work, it is argued, does not appear primarily as a prelinguistic given to be salvaged, but must be both retrieved and constituted through a productive imaginative consciousness, a prospect lyrically thematized in _The Sonnets to Orpheus_. The play between revelation of nature and its imaginative generation underlies the ecological import of Rilke’s poetry, despite the risk it poses to the idea of privileged poetical access to nature itself and its celebration in both phenomenological accounts of poetic revealing and traditional literary ecocriticism.

Several recent approaches to literature—what the chapter describes as moral, aesthetic, and cognitive models of literary experience—allow us to consider its relevance in epistemic terms. Through an examination of the insights and limits of these approaches, the chapter presents the case for the experiential, generative, and expressive dimensions of understanding the literary work, and for their implications beyond literary reading. That literary understanding is experiential will mean that, beyond knowledge of what the text is about, one must have acquaintance with what it is like to undergo the imaginings prompted by the text. That literary understanding is generative means that what we understand in literary experience is not merely the objects or events in the world from which the work may draw, but how these are transformed in the specific literary presentation created by the work. That literary understanding is expressive will mean that the object of understanding issues from, and brings us into contact with, a point of view, even if one known only through and as the work itself. These dimensions of literary understanding, I suggest, enable understanding beyond the experience of literature as such.

On Being and Becoming offers a new approach to existentialist philosophy and literature, as responding to competing demands for universal truth and the defense of the irreducible singularity of the individual. On Being and Becoming traces the heterogeneity of existentialist thinking beyond the popular wartime philosophers of the Parisian Left Bank, demonstrating their critical dependence on sources from the nineteenth century and their complements in modernist works across the European continent and beyond. While quintessentially modern, existentialism inherits ideas of the past and anticipates challenges of the present. Despite its individualism, existentialist attention to the human self is related to conceptions of world, others, the earth, and the more encompassing concept of being. The predominance of ideas of authenticity, individuality, and self-determination makes any existentialist manifesto self-contradictory, while existentialist thinkers above all wanted to make their philosophy relevant to concrete human existence as it is lived. Prevailing models of existential authenticity life tend to overlook the rich diversity of its prospects, which, as this volume shows, involve not only anxiety, absurdity, awareness of death and of the loss of religious reassurances, but also hope, the striving for happiness, and a sense of the transcendent—all of these grounded our human capacity to create meaning. In spite of the diversity of existentialism, all of its thinkers recognize the self as becoming, and recognize the courage and creativity human individuality demands. On Being and Becoming elaborates pragmatic and philosophical relevance of existentialism for being human in the contemporary world.

Imagination allows us to step out of the ordinary but also to transform it through our sense of wonder and play, artistic inspiration and innovation, or the eureka moment of a scientific breakthrough. In this book, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei offers a groundbreaking new understanding of its place in everyday experience as well as the heights of creative achievement. The Life of Imagination delivers a new conception of imagination that places it at the heart of our engagement with the world—thinking, acting, feeling, making, and being. Gosetti-Ferencei reveals imagination’s roots in embodied human cognition and its role in shaping our cognitive ecology. She demonstrates how imagination arises from our material engagements with the world and at the same time endows us with the sense of an inner life, how it both allows us to escape from reality and aids us in better understanding it. Drawing from philosophy, cognitive science, evolutionary anthropology, developmental psychology, literary theory, and aesthetics, Gosetti-Ferencei engages a spectacular range of examples from ordinary thought processes and actions to artistic, scientific, and literary feats to argue that, like consciousness itself, imagination resists reductive explanation. The Life of Imagination offers a vital account of transformative thinking that shows how imagination will be essential in cultivating a future conducive to human flourishing and to that of the life around us.