Word: readers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...much-pondered methodology. It may be ultimately impossible to recreate someone's life in words, and therefore perhaps one might as well add a bit of fiction to a biography. But a much more compelling reason for creativity in biography stems from the problem of entertaining the reader. If the reader wants to relive the life of John Glenn, why not let the reader relive an embellished life of Reagan, in a sense more complete and enticing than the real thing. Does it really matter what Balthus was really like? At least we can relive the life of some character...
Hazy, smooth, pastel and pretty, the book jacket of Dreaming by the Book was clearly designed to make the potential reader reflect upon the pleasant possibilities of imagination. The author, Elaine Scarry, is our own Cabot professor of aesthetics; her impressive list of honors and credentials attest to the feasibility of the academic study of beauty, which might seem too slippery and subjective to bear such scrutiny. Perhaps we should instead see the seeming incomprehensibility of beauty as an invitation to further study; Scarry has a slim volume on this subject out right now, entitled On Beauty and Being Just...
...that the "ordinary enfeeblement of images has a striking exception in the verbal arts, where images somehow do acquire the vivacity of perceptual objects, and it is the purpose of this book to trace some of the ways this comes about." Literature contains structures and formats that allow the reader to envision brilliantly...
...discuss these structures, Scarry describes "the deep structure of perception" with the tools of philosophy and cognitive psychology, as well as literary criticism. The mechanisms of imagination are the focus of the book. Scarry classifies the actions of literature within the imagination of the individual reader, identifying five main devices: radiant ignition, rarity, dyadic addition and subtraction, stretching and floral supposition. Scarry adds to this already esoteric and complex classification three chapters on aspects of repicturing, addressing circles, skating and "quickening with flowers...
...world of literary criticism, as long as one can cite examples, one's ideas will have validity. Scarry quotes liberally from some authors (like Homer and Flaubert) and occasionally from other poets or novelists to support her airy-sounding ideas. But the skeptical reader's sensibilities will hesitate to accept these categories, mechanisms, formats, processes or other structures imposed upon the activity of imagination guided by words. Dreaming by the Book is a rather formulaic approach to an extremely free-flowing activity...