Author : Roch C. Smith
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 206 pages
File Size : 29,27 MB
Release : 2016-06-03
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1438461917
Comprehensive overview of the entire spectrum of works by one of twentieth-century Frances most original thinkers. Gaston Bachelard, one of twentieth-century Frances most original thinkers, is known by English-language readers primarily as the author of The Poetics of Space and several other books on the imagination, but he made significant contributions to the philosophy and history of science. In this book, Roch C. Smith provides a comprehensive introduction to Bachelards work, demonstrating how his writings on the literary imagination can be better understood in the context of his exploration of how knowledge works in science. After an overview of Bachelards writings on the scientific mind as it was transformed by relativity, quantum physics, and modern chemistry, Smith examines Bachelards works on the imagination in light of particular intellectual values Bachelard derived from science. His trajectory from science to a specifically literary imagination is traced by recognizing his concern with what science teaches about how we know, and his increasing preoccupation with questions of being when dealing with poetic imagery. Smith also explores the material and dynamic imagination associated with the four elementsfire, water, air, and earthand the phenomenology of creative imagination in Bachelards Poetics of Space, his Poetics of Reverie, and in the fragments of Poetics of Fire.