Imaginative Experience in the Arts

Promoting Liberal Education

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.

Carefully argued with exemplary readings of poems, paintings and fiction, 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.

In contrast to literary critics and philosophers who argue for the importance of aesthetic experience by subordinating it 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; in turn, he provides a model for criticism of the kinds of description and responsiveness appropriate for aesthetic experience understood as such. Chapters test Altieri’s 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. Two appendices cover the limitations of AI poetry, and review other important arguments for the powers of imagination.

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