Springtime is here and the school year is winding down, but there’s still time for one more gathering of…
Humanities in the Village
We’ll be joined by Professor Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei (JHU) to celebrate her recent book, Imagination: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2023)! Come ready to hear more about imagination – what it is, what it does, and how it shapes reality – with Jennifer, in conversation with Prof. Jane Bennett. Then ask your questions and join the conversation in our audience Q&A.
All are welcome.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Imagination: A Very Short Introduction explores imagination as a cognitive power and an essential dimension of human flourishing, demonstrating how imagination plays multiple roles in human cognition and shapes humanity in profound ways. Examining philosophical, evolutionary, and literary perspectives on imagination, the author shows how this facility, while potentially distorting, both frees us from immediate reality and enriches our sense of it, making possible our experience of a meaningful world. Long regarded by philosophers as an elusive and mysterious capacity of the human mind, imagination has been the subject of extraordinary ambivalence, described as both dangerous and divine, as merely peripheral to rationality and as essential to all thinking. Drawing on philosophy, aesthetics, literary and cognitive theory as well as the human sciences, this book engages the dramatic conceptual history of imagination together with contemporary explanations of its role in cognition to explain its importance in everyday life as well as the exquisite creativity of the arts, scientific discovery, and invention. Engaging examples from cave paintings to modern painting, performance art to pop art, physics to phenomenology, technological inventions to literary worlds, the Nazca geoglyphs to dramatic theatre, poetry, and jazz improvisation, the author illuminates with clarity and vision the philosophy of imagination and the stakes of its involvement in human thinking. (OUP)
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei is Professor and Kurrelmeyer Chair in German and Professor in Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. She is author of On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life (Oxford University Press); The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World; Exotic Spaces in German Modernism (Oxford University Press); The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature ; Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language; and a book of poetry, After the Palace Burns, which won The Paris Review Prize. (faculty bio)
Jane Bennett is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and she specializes in the environmental humanities, political philosophy, nature-writing, American romanticism, political rhetorics and affects, and contemporary social thought. She has a double appointment in the Departments of Political Science (political theory) and Comparative Thought and Literature. Bennett is the author of Influx & Efflux: Writing up with Walt Whitman (2020); Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010, translated into 13 languages); The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001); Thoreau’s Nature (1994), and Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment (1987).
