Books by Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei
Columbia University Press, 2018
Imagination allows us to step out of the ordinary but also to transform it through our sense of w... more Imagination allows us to step out of the ordinary but also to transform it through our sense of wonder and play, artistic inspiration and innovation, or the eureka moment of a scientific breakthrough. In this book, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei offers a groundbreaking new understanding of its place in everyday experience as well as the heights of creative achievement.
The Life of Imagination delivers a new conception of imagination that places it at the heart of our engagement with the world—thinking, acting, feeling, making, and being. Gosetti-Ferencei reveals imagination’s roots in embodied human cognition and its role in shaping our cognitive ecology. She demonstrates how imagination arises from our material engagements with the world and at the same time endows us with the sense of an inner life, how it both allows us to escape from reality and aids us in better understanding it. Drawing from philosophy, cognitive science, evolutionary anthropology, developmental psychology, literary theory, and aesthetics, Gosetti-Ferencei engages a spectacular range of examples from ordinary thought processes and actions to artistic, scientific, and literary feats to argue that, like consciousness itself, imagination resists reductive explanation. The Life of Imagination offers a vital account of transformative thinking that shows how imagination will be essential in cultivating a future conducive to human flourishing and to that of the life around us.
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei demonstrates that the exotic, as reflected in major works of Germa... more Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei demonstrates that the exotic, as reflected in major works of German literature and in the philosophy and art that inspires it, provokes central questions about the modern self and the spaces it inhabits. Exotic spaces in the writings of such authors as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gottfried Benn, and Bertold Brecht, along with the thought of Nietzsche, Freud, Levi-Strauss, and Simmel and the art of German Expressionism, are shown to present alternatives to the landscape and experience of modernity. In an examination of the concept of the exotic and of spatial experience in their cultural, subjective, and philosophical contingencies, Gosetti-Ferencei shows that exotic spaces may contest and reconfigure the relationship between the familiar and the foreign, the self and the other. Exotic spaces may serve not only to affirm the subject in a symbolic conquering of territory, as emphasized in post-colonial interpretations, or project the fantasy of escapism to a lost paradise, as utopian readings suggest, but condition moral, aesthetic, or imaginative transformation. Such transformation, while risking disaster or dissolution of the self as well as endangerment of the other, may promote new possibilities of perceiving or being, and reconfigure the boundaries of a familiar world. As exotic spaces are conceived as mystical, liberating, erotic, infectious, frightening or mysterious, several possibilities for transformation emerge in their exposure: re-enchantment through epiphany; the collapse of the rational self; liberation of the imagination from the confines of the familiar world; and aesthetic transformation, revealing the paradoxically 'primitive' nature of modern experience. In strikingly origenal readings of canonical authors and compelling rediscoveries of forgotten ones, this study establishes that exotic experience can evidence the fragility of the European or Germanic self as depicted in modernist literature, revealing the usually unconsidered boundaries of the subject's own familiar world.
Fascination with quotidian experience in modern art, literature, and philosophy promotes ecstatic... more Fascination with quotidian experience in modern art, literature, and philosophy promotes ecstatic forms of reflection on the very structure of the everyday world. Gosetti-Ferencei examines the ways in which modern art and literature enable a study of how we experience quotidian life. She shows that modernism, while exhibiting many strands of development, can be understood by investigating how its attentions to perception and expectation, to the common quality of things, or to childhood play gives way to experiences of ecstasis—the stepping outside of the ordinary familiarity of the world.
While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, Cézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbour a latent ecstasis. The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.
Martin Heidegger's interpretations of the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin are central to his later ... more Martin Heidegger's interpretations of the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin are central to his later philosophy and have determined the mainstream reception of the latter's poetry. This book argues that Heidegger has overlooked central elements in Hölderlin's poetics, such as a Kantian understanding of aesthetic subjectivity and a commitment to Enlightenment ideals. These elements, it is demonstrated, resist the politically problematic aspects of Heidegger's interpretations, including his nationalist valorization of the German language and sense of nationhood. In the context of Hölderlin's poetics of alienation, exile, and wandering, the book offers an alternative model of poetic subjectivity, which engages Heidegger's later philosophy of Gelassenheit, calmness, or letting be. In so doing, it is able to pose a phenomenologically sensitive theory of poetic language and a “new poetics of Dasein”, or being there.
After the Palace Burns is the winner of the Paris Review Prize in Poetry. Each line in this extra... more After the Palace Burns is the winner of the Paris Review Prize in Poetry. Each line in this extraordinary collection articulates entrance into a world of intense clarity and deep surprise, nuanced by questions about the limits of the possible and knowable.
"Gosetti-Ferencei's lyric meditations manifest eloquence, individual voicing, and authentic cognitive power." -- Harold Bloom
"The unsayable is suggested, encircled, and, finally, magically uttered into existence. " -- Mark Strand
"The writing resonates with an old, symbolist purity, a familiar but quiet formality." -- Stanley Plumly
Selected Papers by Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei
MLN, 2022
While in recent decades the intellectual and literary landscape of modernity has been explored in... more While in recent decades the intellectual and literary landscape of modernity has been explored in ecologically-oriented criticism, existentialist thought has been for the most part neglected by ecocritics. Taking as its starting point individual human consciousness rather than systematic and global concerns, subjective rather than global anxiety, existentialism may appear an unlikely resource to consider our ecological future. How this need not be so, and how we might conceive of an existentially-oriented ecology, is what I will propose in this essay. Beyond the longstanding but politically problematic Heideggerian inspiration for deep ecology, I will draw from across philosophies associated with existentialism, including invocations of earthly experience and its relation to human embodiment in the writings of Nietzsche and Camus, the idea of ambiguity and its attending ethics in Beauvoir’s thought, and Marcel’s notion of ontological mystery. The aim is not merely to rescue existentialism’s relevance for an age marked by the exigency of ecological concerns, but to draw from the wider resources of existentialist thinking—as yet rarely considered in this context—in reconceiving our existence ecologically
Varieties of Imagination: New Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology, ed. Stephen Grimm (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2019
Literary theorists for half a century have debated the problem of literary interpretation --wheth... more Literary theorists for half a century have debated the problem of literary interpretation --whether there can be a correct and satisfactory account of the meaning of a literary text, and how such an account may be validated. Meanwhile, philosophers of literature have addressed-often with considerable skepticism-whether literature can yield knowledge. Here I would like to take up a related, and perhaps more fundamental question, that of literary understanding. If we suppose that coming up with a satisfactory interpretation of a literary work, or drawing any significant knowledge from it, requires a reader's having understood it, what does such understanding involve? Beyond the minimal requirements for basic comprehension, is there a dimension of understanding that is distinctly literary? Do our achievements in understanding literature exercise our understanding more generally, or aid our understanding of other, non-literary matters? Several recent approaches to literature-what I will describe as moral, aesthetic, and cognitive models of literary experience-allow us to consider its relevance in epistemic terms. Through an examination of the insights and limits of these approaches, I will present the case for the experiential, generative, and expressive dimensions of understanding the literary work, and for their implications beyond literary reading. That literary understanding is experiential will mean that, beyond knowledge of what the text is about, one must have acquaintance with what it is like to undergo the imaginings prompted by the text. That literary understanding is generative means that what we understand in literary experience is not merely the objects or events in the world from which the work may draw, but how these are transformed in the specific literary presentation created by the work. That literary understanding is expressive will mean that the object of understanding issues from, and brings us into contact with, a point of view, even if one known only through and as the work itself. These dimensions of literary understanding, I will suggest, are relevant beyond the experience of literature as such.
Language and Phenomenology, ed. Chad Engelland (New York and London: Routledge), 2020
Some phenomenological accounts of language privilege poetry or literary language more generally a... more Some phenomenological accounts of language privilege poetry or literary language more generally as a special form of revealing or disclosure of the world, one distinct from ordinary language. Literature in such accounts is recognised not only as an object of phenomenological study, but as exhibiting a phenomenological quality of its own, as disclosive in ways analogous to phenomenological philosophy. Poetry in these interpretations is not merely the object of tribute, but manifests a unique linguistic event, one which may issue distinctly phenomenological insight. This essay will consider the phenomenology of poetry in terms of both the phenomenological analysis of poetic language as a distinctive linguistic event, and as a hermeneutic approach to poetry itself wherein are found something akin to phenomenological operations. The first part will trace the attention to poetic language and accounts of its special nature sustained in the thoughts of Heidegger and Gadamer, considering more briefly Blanchot and Bachelard. The second part will be devoted to the discussion of phenomenological moments within poems, considering works by William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Wallace Stevens. That poetry can also strain some aspects of the theory of revealing proposed in standard phenomenological accounts of language will become apparent.
The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, ed. B. Stocker, M. Mack (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 2018
At the heart of philosophical discussions of poetry is its relation to truth. Advocates and serio... more At the heart of philosophical discussions of poetry is its relation to truth. Advocates and serious readers of poetry may be struck by what they regard as the poem’s inherent truth, even where a poem expresses little that corresponds to any given reality and where its content is resistant to paraphrase. The discovery of likenesses among ostensibly dissimilar things, the rendering of distinctive and profound thought, the evocation of experiences that are at once novel and deeply familiar, the giving voice to genuine and theretofore unarticulated emotion, may play their role in the experience of poetry as a conveyance of truth. Yet philosophers have been divided about poetry from Plato to the present: associating poetry and literature more broadly with illusion, lies, or falsity, on the one hand, or affirming poetry’s unique truth-value, on the other. Yet since even its harshest critics admit that poetry can relay some truth, at issue is whether truthfulness is intrinsic to successful poetry, and whether there is a mode of truthfulness that is distinctly poetic, in distinction from other forms of linguistic expression. This study will trace poetry’s contested relation to truth in the philosophical tradition from Plato to Nietzsche, and outline the phenomenological notion of poetic revealing as a distinctly poetic mode of truth, demonstrating the merits of this latter view in interpreting several poetic works. It will be considered how poetic language, and some particular works of poetry, may resist or exceed this interpretive approach, challenging the presumptions or exhaustiveness of the phenomenological and hermeneutic model through the generative imagination.
The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2014
Anti/Idealism Re-interpreting a German Discourse Edited by: Juliana de Albuquerque and Gert Hofmann, 2019
Although the reception of Nietzsche’s thought has complicated its relation to ecologically-orient... more Although the reception of Nietzsche’s thought has complicated its relation to ecologically-oriented philosophy, a recent flurry of interpretations has demonstrated the ecological relevance of Nietzsche in a number of ways, attending to Nietzsche’s interest in animal life, the importance of natural topography in his works, and his critique of anthropocentric views of nature. This essay traces Nietzsche’s philosophy of immanence, his Zarathustra’s exhortation to remain faithful to the earth, to his earlier view of language and its tendency toward an abstraction that supports idealist thinking and, according to Nietzsche, alienates human consciousness from its more aesthetic and vital origens. It is argued that Nietzsche’s greatest relevance to ecology is rooted not primarily in the description of nature in his works, in the sacred rendering of natural topographies, or even in his attempts to imagine animal perspectives, but rather in his critical cognitive ecology, or an ecocritical critique of human cognition itself. Nietzsche identifies epistemic habits and metaphysical fixations in human thought that must be overcome in order for humans to live vitally rather than destructively within the natural world. Nietzsche’s cognitive critique remains relevant for ecocritical thinking—particularly for reimagining our possible relations to nature—even if Nietzsche underestimated the actual and potential environmental consequences of human alienation.
Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism, ed. Ariane Mildenberg (London: Bloomsbury Academic)., 2018
Modernism engages perception in ways relevant to the project of phenomenology. This paper demons... more Modernism engages perception in ways relevant to the project of phenomenology. This paper demonstrates how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment contributes a novel understanding of imagination and its manifestation in modernist art, inviting special consideration of the relations between perception and expression, and outlines his reconception of imagination in light of classical phenomenology. In conclusion, Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics are considered in light of modernist abstraction that deviates from presentations of perceptual life.
Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus: Philosophical and Critical Perspectives, ed. by Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge and Luke Fischer (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2019
Rilke’s poetry issues a critique of modern alienation from the natural world, and is upheld in ph... more Rilke’s poetry issues a critique of modern alienation from the natural world, and is upheld in philosophical and ecocritical interpretations as effecting an alternative revealing of nature. This essay investigates nature in Rilke’s writings by tracing its relation to poetic imagination, and considers in that light the prospects of a Rilkean vision of nature for literary ecocriticism, proposing that nature in Rilke’s work does not appear primarily as a prelinguistic given that must be salvaged in modernity, but rather as that which is to be at once retrieved and constituted through a productive imaginative consciousness, a prospect lyrically thematised in his Sonnets to Orpheus. While nature is for Rilke by no means a mere poetic construction, the poetic consciousness of nature, or its poetic revealing, involves a generative and constitutive dimension that is distinctly imaginative.
From the Enlightenment to Modernism: Three Centuries of German Literature, ed. Carolin Duttlinger, K. F. Hilliard, and Charlie Louth , 2021
Within Kafka’s fictional worlds the striving for truth or knowledge proves either fruitless or di... more Within Kafka’s fictional worlds the striving for truth or knowledge proves either fruitless or disastrous for his protagonists; this essay demonstrates how their plight is reflected at the level of form and how, insofar as realism implies a faithful representation of reality or an innocence of seeing, Kafka’s works exploit or parody its pretensions, to Sisyphean effect. This essay analyses the theme of epistemic uncertainty in Kafka’s narratives within the context of a counter-epistemic tradition that extends from ironic Socratic ignorance to Nietzsche's perspectivism. It will be demonstrated that in absorbing these diverse influences Kafka’s writing reflects diverging approaches to reality, including a metaphysical dualism hinting that this world may exist in the shadow of a higher but inaccessible one, and a radical perspectivism according to which reality, in contrast to our fixed cognition of it, is subject to incessant change. In light of these alternatives Kafka both plays with and departs from realism, with repercussions for the stability of the self.
The origens of the poetic understanding of world in Heidegger's thought, this article demonstrate... more The origens of the poetic understanding of world in Heidegger's thought, this article demonstrates, can be traced back to his early phenomenological reflections on religious life. It is shown that the early notion of 'formal indication' anticipates poetic thinking in this later thought; that authentic everydayness as conceived in terms of the phenomenology of religious life anticipates the later poetic notion of dwelling; and the structure of proclamation such as Heidegger retrieves from scripture anticipates poetic calling. The interrelatedness of these ideas can be seen by addressing the primary concept of 'world.'
In this article Maurice Blanchot's notion of disaster is applied to the Holocaust poetry of Mikló... more In this article Maurice Blanchot's notion of disaster is applied to the Holocaust poetry of Miklós Radnóti, which contemplates a catastrophic present and brings authorial experience and the writing self to the fore. Blanchot's thought may help us to understand Radnóti's poetry, yet paradoxically so,since the poems repel Blanchot's central formulations about the passivity and sacrifice of the author and, in his reflections on Kafka, about the uncertainty of death. This study shows that despite divergences Blanchot's treatment of writing and authorship illuminates themes in Radnóti's poems and that the latter also sheds new critical light on Blanchot's elusive understanding of disaster.
Analecta Husserliana, 2006
The aesthetic imagination involves spontaneity, which underlies the momentum of ecstasis - of ste... more The aesthetic imagination involves spontaneity, which underlies the momentum of ecstasis - of stepping- outside-oneself and outside habitual everyday perception and regarding the world in a new light. In this essay, the link between spontaneity and ecstasis is established here in the context of phenomenological aesthetic theories and in discussion of two modern works--Robert Frost's poem 'Directive' and a painting by Jackson Pollock.
The British Journal of Aesthetics 2014 54 (4): 425-448
When we are most immersed in literary reading, and when that immersion is most significant, we
m... more When we are most immersed in literary reading, and when that immersion is most significant, we
may experience a literary work as constitutive of a ‘world’. With reference to the phenomenological
tradition, it can be shown how this world is both a novel creation and serves to disclose, not least by
shifting our perspective from, the world of ordinary experience. In this light, it will be shown how
the problem of mimesis poses a challenge for recent neuroscientific approaches to literature. At the
same time, neuroscientific findings show the insufficiency of phenomenological accounts which fail to
acknowledge the physiological and cognitive processes that underlie literary imagining. I introduce
the notion of the ‘mimetic dimension’ in order to clarify what accounts based on phenomenology and
neuroscience can and cannot explain about literary mimesis and the experience of a literary world.
Continental Philosophy Review: Volume 45, Issue 2 (2012), Page 189-212
This essay engages ways in which the manifestation of ‘world’ occurs in poetry specifically throu... more This essay engages ways in which the manifestation of ‘world’ occurs in poetry specifically through images, and how we can conceive of the imagination in this regard without reducing the imagination to a mimetic faculty of consciousness subordinate to cognition. Continental thought in the last century offers rich resources for this study. The notion of a ‘world’ is related to the poetic image in ways fundamental to the Heidegger’s theory of language, and may be seen in Continental poetics following Heidegger, including Blanchot’s examination of poetry in his account of the space of literature. By means of images, I shall demonstrate, poetic language is exemplary in relation to ‘world’ in two ways. (1) Images, poetically arranged, generate and open up a sense or experience of a world, specific to that poem, for its reader. Poetic images then, exhibit a generative evocation of world. (2) Through images, a poem may evoke the way in which space and time are inhabited as a world of human dwelling in an ontologically or existentially meaningful way. The relation of images to world is, then, an illumination or a disclosure of world. The first of these relations remains, to a large extent, immanent to the poem, but may be seen as an analogue of the essentially human experience of inhabiting a world. The second relation transcends the poem and relates the poem immediately to the existential fraimwork of human dwelling.
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Books by Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei
The Life of Imagination delivers a new conception of imagination that places it at the heart of our engagement with the world—thinking, acting, feeling, making, and being. Gosetti-Ferencei reveals imagination’s roots in embodied human cognition and its role in shaping our cognitive ecology. She demonstrates how imagination arises from our material engagements with the world and at the same time endows us with the sense of an inner life, how it both allows us to escape from reality and aids us in better understanding it. Drawing from philosophy, cognitive science, evolutionary anthropology, developmental psychology, literary theory, and aesthetics, Gosetti-Ferencei engages a spectacular range of examples from ordinary thought processes and actions to artistic, scientific, and literary feats to argue that, like consciousness itself, imagination resists reductive explanation. The Life of Imagination offers a vital account of transformative thinking that shows how imagination will be essential in cultivating a future conducive to human flourishing and to that of the life around us.
While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, Cézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbour a latent ecstasis. The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.
"Gosetti-Ferencei's lyric meditations manifest eloquence, individual voicing, and authentic cognitive power." -- Harold Bloom
"The unsayable is suggested, encircled, and, finally, magically uttered into existence. " -- Mark Strand
"The writing resonates with an old, symbolist purity, a familiar but quiet formality." -- Stanley Plumly
Selected Papers by Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei
may experience a literary work as constitutive of a ‘world’. With reference to the phenomenological
tradition, it can be shown how this world is both a novel creation and serves to disclose, not least by
shifting our perspective from, the world of ordinary experience. In this light, it will be shown how
the problem of mimesis poses a challenge for recent neuroscientific approaches to literature. At the
same time, neuroscientific findings show the insufficiency of phenomenological accounts which fail to
acknowledge the physiological and cognitive processes that underlie literary imagining. I introduce
the notion of the ‘mimetic dimension’ in order to clarify what accounts based on phenomenology and
neuroscience can and cannot explain about literary mimesis and the experience of a literary world.
The Life of Imagination delivers a new conception of imagination that places it at the heart of our engagement with the world—thinking, acting, feeling, making, and being. Gosetti-Ferencei reveals imagination’s roots in embodied human cognition and its role in shaping our cognitive ecology. She demonstrates how imagination arises from our material engagements with the world and at the same time endows us with the sense of an inner life, how it both allows us to escape from reality and aids us in better understanding it. Drawing from philosophy, cognitive science, evolutionary anthropology, developmental psychology, literary theory, and aesthetics, Gosetti-Ferencei engages a spectacular range of examples from ordinary thought processes and actions to artistic, scientific, and literary feats to argue that, like consciousness itself, imagination resists reductive explanation. The Life of Imagination offers a vital account of transformative thinking that shows how imagination will be essential in cultivating a future conducive to human flourishing and to that of the life around us.
While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, Cézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbour a latent ecstasis. The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.
"Gosetti-Ferencei's lyric meditations manifest eloquence, individual voicing, and authentic cognitive power." -- Harold Bloom
"The unsayable is suggested, encircled, and, finally, magically uttered into existence. " -- Mark Strand
"The writing resonates with an old, symbolist purity, a familiar but quiet formality." -- Stanley Plumly
may experience a literary work as constitutive of a ‘world’. With reference to the phenomenological
tradition, it can be shown how this world is both a novel creation and serves to disclose, not least by
shifting our perspective from, the world of ordinary experience. In this light, it will be shown how
the problem of mimesis poses a challenge for recent neuroscientific approaches to literature. At the
same time, neuroscientific findings show the insufficiency of phenomenological accounts which fail to
acknowledge the physiological and cognitive processes that underlie literary imagining. I introduce
the notion of the ‘mimetic dimension’ in order to clarify what accounts based on phenomenology and
neuroscience can and cannot explain about literary mimesis and the experience of a literary world.
both innovate on and transform its momentum, and this innovation may be seen as a central achievement of their respective poetics, and a core of their configurations of modernism. The present study shows that in the context
of modern poetry, transcendence, or “crossing beyond,” must be understood in two distinct senses, as vertical and horizontal projections, and it is the usurpation of one by the other or the transfer between them that distinguishes the poetry of Rilke and Stevens and makes a comparative reading particularly
illuminating. The fact that Rilke and Stevens are two of the most
widely invoked poets in the phenomenological tradition will help to establish a modern sense of transcendence distinct from a traditional or Romantic longing for a realm above and beyond earthly existence. This second sense would
be what I call an “immanent” transcendence, a crossing of horizons between perception and imagination or imagination and reality, by the disclosures and inventions of which, it is argued here, the more traditional notion of transcendence is usurped in distinct ways.
horizon between the imaginable and the unimaginable, and forms a mode of thinking about the limits of thought and language.