Overview

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.

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9781350526655

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Reviews

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. * Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Swarthmore College, USA *

Author Information

Charles Altieri is Emeritus Stageberg Professor of English at UC Berkeley.

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