Imaginative Experience in the Arts: Promoting Liberal Education(Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy and Poetry)

In this significant contribution to aesthetic philosophy from one of the foremost writers on American poetry, Charles Altieri champions the neglected, non-cognitive aspects of our encounters with works of art. In contrast to literary critics and philosophers who subordinate the importance of aesthetic experience to knowledge and practical concerns, Altieri defends a view of subjective imaginative experience as important in itself, and already socially oriented. To do so, he proposes a distinction between “experience of” and “experience as,” discriminating between cognitive practices and no less valuable practices involving enhanced attention to particular qualities of experience. Throughout the book, Altieri tests his concepts about the nature of aesthetic experience against readings of canonical poems, novels, and paintings by Langston Hughes, Giorgione, Cézanne, Silvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, and Mina Loy, to name but a few. Carefully argued with exemplary readings of well-known artistic masterpieces, Imaginative Experience in the Arts outlines a new impetus for criticism and liberal education grounded in the way art stimulates our powers of imagination and enriches our experience of the world.

Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction: Imagination in Liberal Education 1. Three Modes of Imaginative Experience 2. Sympathy and Empathy in To The Lighthouse 3. Imagination’s Capacity for “Realization” 4. Mapping the Concept of Experience 5. Self-Consciousness in Aesthetic Experience: Why Heidegger’s Book on Hegel Can Matter for Literary Criticism References Appendices Index

About the Author :
Charles Altieri is Emeritus Stageberg Professor of English at UC Berkeley.

Review :
Within modern commercial-industrial economies with their demands to be technically productive and their massive inequalities, many people feel their creative powers to be blocked or stunted, as “getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” Charles Altieri has been long one of our best readers of paintings and works of literature as well as one of our most insightful theorists of their value. In this important new book he argues that imaginative involvement with paintings, poems, and novels can move us beyond consumption and forward into new orders of experience, meaning, and satisfaction that are vital for both democratic culture and genuinely humane life. God help us if we fail to take this powerful argument seriously. Charles Altieri has been for some time our most eloquent and impassioned advocate for the intrinsic value of education in literature and art. He has an extraordinary ability to give fine-grained descriptions of what it is like to actually experience poems or paintings in a way that opens new dimensions of knowledge of the world and other people. In this latest book, which he indicates might be his last, he proposes a new distinction between what he calls “experience of,” our everyday practical experience, and “experience as,” the modes of imaginative involvement that art develops. Readers new to Altieri might find their appetite whetted by starting out with the fascinating appendix in which he compares two AI-generated poems to the human-made models that they are competing with. Altieri always makes for challenging reading, but it is always worth the effort. An exhilarating book that demonstrates how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable are the uses of any world that scorns the powers of imagination. Altieri makes the intensities and sympathies the arts can generate spring to life on every page. An ambitious and insightful critique, The Imaginative Experience in the Arts offers a penetrating apology for the impact of the liberal arts education and of the crucial importance of the imagination to nurturing contemplation and thus cultivating the development of the personal skills and powers necessary for a civil society. The book brings great clarity to complex ideas Altieri has been exploring for decades. From a philosophical perspective, through the filter of Heidegger, Hegel and Kant, Charles Altieri, one of the few most brilliant readers of artistic expression in our time, demonstrates how art can ennoble us and enrich the world.