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LOGOS: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture

Title

Wanted: A Ground for the Imagination

Authors

Don J. Briel

Publication Date

Spring 1997

Document Type

Article

DOI

10.1353/log.1997.0024

First Page

137

Last Page

144

Excerpt

It has been increasingly common in the last twenty years to find expressions of agreement with the spirit of Jean Baptiste Rousseau's 171S observation that "the philosophy of Descartes has cut the throat of poetry"and that the loss of a broad poetic or imaginative view of life has brought with it certain dehumanizing consequences. In Poetic Justice:The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Martha Nussbaum has again argued the central importance of the literary imagination as a corrective to the increasingly analytical and adversarial character of much modern political, legal, and economic theory. Nussbaum praises the subversive character of literature and insists that the novel, which she inexplicably privileges over other literary forms, "expresses in its very shape and style, in its mode of interaction with its readers, a normative sense of life." It does so, she argues, because it directs the reader's attention to certain postures of the mind and heart rather than others.

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