Charles Altieri is Emeritus Stageberg Professor of English at UC Berkeley.

• PrefaceIntroduction: Imagination in Liberal Education1. Three Modes of Imaginative Experience2. Sympathy and Empathy in To The Lighthouse 3. Imagination’s Capacity for “Realization” 4. Mapping the Concept of Experience5. Self-Consciousness in Aesthetic Experience: Why Heidegger’s Book on Hegel Can Matter for Literary CriticismReferencesAppendices Index

Within modern commercial-industrial economies with their demands to be technically productive and their massive inequalities, many people feel their creative powers to be blocked or stunted, as “getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” Charles Altieri has been long one of our best readers of paintings and works of literature as well as one of our most insightful theorists of their value. In this important new book he argues that imaginative involvement with paintings, poems, and novels can move us beyond consumption and forward into new orders of experience, meaning, and satisfaction that are vital for both democratic culture and genuinely humane life. God help us if we fail to take this powerful argument seriously.

Charles Altieri is Emeritus Stageberg Professor of English at UC Berkeley.

• PrefaceIntroduction: Imagination in Liberal Education1. Three Modes of Imaginative Experience2. Sympathy and Empathy in To The Lighthouse 3. Imagination’s Capacity for “Realization” 4. Mapping the Concept of Experience5. Self-Consciousness in Aesthetic Experience: Why Heidegger’s Book on Hegel Can Matter for Literary CriticismReferencesAppendices Index

Within modern commercial-industrial economies with their demands to be technically productive and their massive inequalities, many people feel their creative powers to be blocked or stunted, as “getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” Charles Altieri has been long one of our best readers of paintings and works of literature as well as one of our most insightful theorists of their value. In this important new book he argues that imaginative involvement with paintings, poems, and novels can move us beyond consumption and forward into new orders of experience, meaning, and satisfaction that are vital for both democratic culture and genuinely humane life. God help us if we fail to take this powerful argument seriously.

Charles Altieri is Emeritus Stageberg Professor of English at UC Berkeley.

• PrefaceIntroduction: Imagination in Liberal Education1. Three Modes of Imaginative Experience2. Sympathy and Empathy in To The Lighthouse 3. Imagination’s Capacity for “Realization” 4. Mapping the Concept of Experience5. Self-Consciousness in Aesthetic Experience: Why Heidegger’s Book on Hegel Can Matter for Literary CriticismReferencesAppendices Index

Within modern commercial-industrial economies with their demands to be technically productive and their massive inequalities, many people feel their creative powers to be blocked or stunted, as “getting and spending we lay waste our powers.” Charles Altieri has been long one of our best readers of paintings and works of literature as well as one of our most insightful theorists of their value. In this important new book he argues that imaginative involvement with paintings, poems, and novels can move us beyond consumption and forward into new orders of experience, meaning, and satisfaction that are vital for both democratic culture and genuinely humane life. God help us if we fail to take this powerful argument seriously.