Dreaming with a Book

Imagining with a Book makes a brilliant synthesis of literary criticism, philosophy and cognitive psychology, opening up an area that has not been studied much before: How we, as readers, can visualize the people, scenes and details depicted in literary works, how we can imagine with books and how we can create these images with implicit instructions. It examines why dreams can often be much more vivid and lasting than the dreams we dream of ourselves in real life. It shows how poets and writers teach us to dream with the techniques they sometimes use consciously and often unconsciously. Scarry identifies five such techniques: Lighting, Dilution, Addition and Subtraction, Stretch, Fold and Bend, and finally Floral Assumption. He exemplifies these techniques, especially with quotes from the works of novelists such as Flaubert, Emily Bronte, Thomas Hardy, Tolstoy, Huysmans and Woolf, and poets such as Homer, Wordsworth, Whitman, Rilke, Heaney and Ashbery. Throughout the book, Scarry frequently invites the reader to experiment with visualizing and moving certain images in his mind. Thus, when we reach the last chapter, we can easily fly the finch, which we were invited to imagine motionless on its branch at the beginning of the book.
This is an extremely original and "beautiful" book that will radically transform and enrich our way of relating to literature and our understanding of reading, and in which the author's sincere excitement in approaching his subject immediately spreads to the reader. Moreover, many butterflies and birds fly on its pages full of flowers.



Number of Pages: 248

Year of Printing: 2006


Language: Turkish
Publisher: Metis Publishing

First Print Year: 2006

Number of Pages: 248

Language Turkish