Dic: 몇 가지 용례/ works of imagination, the work of imagination

─ Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are, the more necessary it is to be plain.


─ Article 8: On Works of the Imagination

This is a series to further explain the articles of “A Conservative Christian Declaration.”

We affirm that ordinate affections are often expressed and evoked through works of imagination, which function through simile and metaphor. Among these are music, poetry, literature, and other arts. The Word of God itself is a work of imagination. At least two works of imagination are commanded for worship: poetry and music.

We hold that works of the imagination (the arts) are more than enjoyable distractions. Nevertheless, many Christians assume that only their cognitive beliefs about God are important, while musical or poetic expressions about God have little purpose beyond making truth about God interesting, enjoyable, or exciting.


─ "Julian Dobson on imagination and 'places of possibility'" (Rob Hopkins.Net, Jul 2017)

( ... ... ) When I read his book, I was struck by the thought that the city centres around us reflect a system that is run out of ideas, and run out of imagination. So the first thing I asked him was "does that resonate with you, and if so, what do you put that down to?"

"Maybe it's not so much a lack of imagination as a lack of imagination about how imagination is applied, if that makes sense. There's lots of creativity being applied within quite a narrow focus. So it's being applied in order to market stuff, in order to make retail more interesting. And there's a huge amount of creativity that goes into that. If you talk to people who are running retail businesses, they're actually hugely creative.

But if you look at how town centres work, if you look at what's going on in our town centres, as a whole, actually there's a complete dearth of imagination about what are those places for, who should use them, how should they use them, what can you do in those places, how can you use those spaces. It's almost as if the creativity is there but it's only being channelled in order to serve particular purposes and particular logics.

( ... ) I've been thinking quite a lot about ideas of utopia recently. Particularly from around the 16th, 17th century, through to the Victorian era, you had these visions of utopia that kept being expressed by people like the Levellers, like the Diggers with Gerrard Winstanley. People like William Morris. These were works of imagination. They were works of fiction. Utopia is 'no place'. But the purpose of utopia is to enable us to think more imaginatively about the place that we do live. Utopia presents a challenge to what is. To what we see around us.

What we see in our town centres is that utopian thinking is out of bounds, almost. You can only have this very, very pragmatic approach which is about the market, which is about the market economy, and the success of the market economy. And the values that lie beyond that almost are taken out of the equation. So ideas of a successful town centre are ideas about a successful retail centre, a successful commercial centre and success is measured in very, very limited ways. About the profitability of development, about the amount of money that is being spent, and about possibly the amount of jobs that are being created.

Imagination to me is about expanding our range of values and saying, "What really matters? Why does it matter? What kind of people can we be? And how can we start to translate that into the spaces that we live in, and not just keep it in the private sphere, which is about beliefs or our hobbies, or our campaigns?"


─ The Millennial Republic of Imagination (Teresa Palmieri, Fictional Journal, ...)


( ... ... ) As philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis stressed in his radical view of imagination, without imagination there could not be any reality. Even when a reality is defined, imagination remains always functional to question its objects and to disclose possible alternatives.

In times of real or envisioned crisis, imagination becomes a powerful tool for criticism and action. When used as a form of escapism on a journey to a happy 'never-never land' or as a tool for speculating solutions to existing problems, snarp imaginative knowledge allows people to provide divergent answers to the frighening and uncertain situations they are confronted with. Travelling in our own imaginatin allows us to come back to reality and look at it from unusual perspectives, and to conceive our lives not just for what they are, but what they can be. The more we are able to use our imagination in the moments of crisis in which sudden discontinuity forces us to re-adapt, the more we will be able to envision a joyful future to our present. As beautifully expressed by Azar Nafisi in her book The Republic of Imagination, "the works of imagination are the songbirds in coal mine: the unit of measure to evaluate the health state of society." ( ... ... )


─ "The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling" (Paul Ricoeur, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 5, No. 1, Autumn, 1978)


( ... ... ) Such being the problem in what direction are we to look for a correct assessment of the semantic role of imagination and eventually of feeling? It seems that it is in the work of resemblance that a pictorial or iconic moment is implied, as Aristotle suggests when he says that to make good metaphors is to contemplate similarities or (according to some other translations) to have an insight into likeness.

( ... ... ) In a sense, all epoché is the work of the imagination. Imagination is epoché. As Sartre emphasized, to imagine is to address oneself to what is not. More radically, to imagine is to make oneself absent to the whole of things. ( ... )

( ... ... ) To feel, in the emotional sense of the word, is to make ours what has been put at a distance by thought in its objectifying phase. Feelings, therefore, have a very complex kind of intentionality. They are not merely inner states but interiorized thoughts. It is as such that they accompany and complete the work of imagination as schematizing a synthetic operation: they make the schematized thought ours. Feeling, then, is a case of ^Selbst-Affektion^, in the sense that Kant used it in the second edition of the ^Critique^.  ( ... ... )


─ "The Writer's Field: Patrols of the Imagination" John McGahern's Short Stories" (Liliane Louvel, Journal of the Short Stories, Spring 2000)


Making up "fictitious patrols," writing as if staying inside the house of fiction, seeing it as a protection and only imaginatively venturing forth into the world, through the work of imagination and memory, this is also what is done in fiction-writing and reading. As expressed in a shizoid way in ^The Leavetaking^: there are "two worlds: the world of the schoolroom in this day, the world of memory becoming imagination"

( ... ... ) Short story writing is akin to the work of dreams ( ... )