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Before imagination: Literary reveri...

Casdin, Adam B.

Before imagination: Literary reverie's opening to the present (James Boswell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, England).

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Before imagination: Literary reverie's opening to the present (James Boswell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, England).
Author:	Casdin, Adam B.
Description:	267 p.
Notes:	Advisers: John Bender; Robert Kaufman.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-09, Section: A, page: 3395.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International65-09A.
Subject:	Literature, English.
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3145484
ISBN:	0496043897

Before imagination: Literary reverie's opening to the present (James Boswell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, England).
Casdin, Adam B.

Before imagination: Literary reverie's opening to the present (James Boswell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, England). - 267 p.

Advisers: John Bender; Robert Kaufman.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2004.

In this dissertation I demonstrate that attention to proto-Romantic and Romantic literary reverie should radically revise our long-standing literary-historical accounts of the romantic-modern imagination, that imagination so familiar to us from eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, where it assumed the canonical form it would bequeath to modernism. In a departure from traditional uses of the term, I define reverie as a literary-aesthetic state frequently characterized by blankness and quite distinct from the typically more narrative, color-filled and at least fictively "purposive" or future-oriented imagination. Reverie is in fact a decidedly pre-imaginative, distended moment that---unlike the hard-working imagination---creates an apparently blank and contentless, nonnarrative space of sheer dilating presentness out of which the materials for what may eventually become new thought-experiences can emerge (and can, after the fact, move toward imagination proper and then, finally, toward post-imaginative conceptualization, agency, and action). I trace the central but little recognized role of this reverie---first delineated by Rousseau---in the works of James Boswell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. The consequences of my readings are great, because traditional liberal intellectual claims for the literary imagination---that it allows artists and audiences creatively to image not-yet-realized socio-historical or scientific progress---would now have to be pushed back towards dependence on what I call reverie. This strange, radically "blank" and formal experience makes the imagination, by comparison, look like a diligent good citizen. Critics and scholars of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature (often following the artists themselves) have generally collapsed these vague and almost incommunicable reverie-states into descriptions of full-blown productive imagination. But I show that reverie-states are best understood as markedly different from imagination itself. In ways that literary critics and historians have hardly accounted for, this proto-Romantic and Romantic literary reverie contributes crucially to modern attempts to conceptualize socio-historically and even scientifically the experience of a present that has not yet been adequately understood using only traditional intellectual tools and conventions.

ISBN: 0496043897Subjects--Topical Terms:

212435
Literature, English.

Before imagination: Literary reverie's opening to the present (James Boswell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, England).
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245 1 0 $a Before imagination: Literary reverie's opening to the present (James Boswell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, England).
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502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2004.
520 # $a In this dissertation I demonstrate that attention to proto-Romantic and Romantic literary reverie should radically revise our long-standing literary-historical accounts of the romantic-modern imagination, that imagination so familiar to us from eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, where it assumed the canonical form it would bequeath to modernism. In a departure from traditional uses of the term, I define reverie as a literary-aesthetic state frequently characterized by blankness and quite distinct from the typically more narrative, color-filled and at least fictively "purposive" or future-oriented imagination. Reverie is in fact a decidedly pre-imaginative, distended moment that---unlike the hard-working imagination---creates an apparently blank and contentless, nonnarrative space of sheer dilating presentness out of which the materials for what may eventually become new thought-experiences can emerge (and can, after the fact, move toward imagination proper and then, finally, toward post-imaginative conceptualization, agency, and action). I trace the central but little recognized role of this reverie---first delineated by Rousseau---in the works of James Boswell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. The consequences of my readings are great, because traditional liberal intellectual claims for the literary imagination---that it allows artists and audiences creatively to image not-yet-realized socio-historical or scientific progress---would now have to be pushed back towards dependence on what I call reverie. This strange, radically "blank" and formal experience makes the imagination, by comparison, look like a diligent good citizen. Critics and scholars of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature (often following the artists themselves) have generally collapsed these vague and almost incommunicable reverie-states into descriptions of full-blown productive imagination. But I show that reverie-states are best understood as markedly different from imagination itself. In ways that literary critics and historians have hardly accounted for, this proto-Romantic and Romantic literary reverie contributes crucially to modern attempts to conceptualize socio-historically and even scientifically the experience of a present that has not yet been adequately understood using only traditional intellectual tools and conventions.
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