The Life of Imagination PDF Download

Author: Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231548168
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
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.

Author: Jennifer Boothroyd
Publisher: Lerner Publications
ISBN: 0761340327
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
What did Roald Dahl do at school every week? Which story did he first make up to tell his children? What tool did Roald help invent? Read this book to discover the answers!

Author: Eva T. H. Brann
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 144227364X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 843

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Book Description
In this book, Eva Brann sets out no less a task than to assess the meaning of imagination in its multifarious expressions throughout western history. The result is one of those rare achievements that will make The World of the Imagination a standard reference.

Author: Molly Andrews
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019981239X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Looks at how stories & imagination come together in our daily lives, influencing not only our thoughts about what we see and do, but also our contemplation of what is possible and what our limitations are.

Author: Azar Nafisi
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698170334
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A New York Times bestseller The author of the beloved #1 New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with the next chapter of her life in books—a passionate and deeply moving hymn to America Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her multimillion-copy bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics of English and American literature to her eager students in Iran. In this electrifying follow-up, she argues that fiction is just as threatened—and just as invaluable—in America today. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination. Nafisi invites committed readers everywhere to join her as citizens of what she calls the Republic of Imagination, a country with no borders and few restrictions, where the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.

Author: Doreen Rappaport
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 1368022499
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description
Walt Disney's name is synonymous with family entertainment. Mickey Mouse, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, Disneyland, and numerous other creations have inspired generations of children the world over. From his childhood in rural Missouri to his legendary stature as a film and television icon, Walt governed his life with imagination, ingenuity, and scrupulous attention to detail. Faced with both public failures and massive success, he revolutionized the art form of animation, always seeking innovative solutions, cutting edge technology, and new ways of storytelling. Devoted to perfection, Walt was not always easy to work with, but no one can deny his profound talent and impact. Charting Walt's progression from farm boy to actor to artist, animator, director, and entertainment celebrity, Walt's own words are presented and contextualized within Doreen Rappaport's signature compelling prose. Illustrated with vivid authenticity by animator/painter John Pomeroy, this stunning entry in the award-winning Big Words series reveals a man of deep and varied passions with a constantly evolving vision, and a storyteller above all.

Author: Kerry Kirkwood
Publisher: Destiny Image Publishers
ISBN: 0768488125
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Just imagine! Does God want you to use your imagination? Are Christians to turn off their imaginative, creative side when they become mature believers? The answers may surprise you! The Power of Imagination reveals the part of spiritual life that is often shunned or closeted away because it may seem New Age or too unconventional. On the contrary, when believers use their imaginations to see beyond current circumstances into the realm where God paints pictures in their minds, healings are commonplace, goals are accomplished, dreams come true, and victories are celebrated! But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:14-18). You can develop the ability to see as God sees. You can see the future that He planned for you before you were born. Through the power of your God-given imagination, nothing is impossible—no problem too big, no relationship too broken. This exciting new way of living is thoughtfully and biblically presented in a refreshing and empowering way that will keep you imagining for years to come. Topics include: How to Develop a Godly Imagination Supernatural Vision Living from the Inside Out Discerning Vain Imaginations Seeing the Unseen Deep Calls Unto Deep A special chapter is devoted to healing the orphan spirit that can keep people from becoming all God intended for them—walls are identified and torn down, replaced with a beacon of beauty and light shining throughout the spirit, body, and soul. Just imagine!

Author: Willie James Jennings
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300163088
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 582

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Book Description
Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions? In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew, to reveal how Christianity's highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies. A probing study of the cultural fragmentation-social, spatial, and racial-that took root in the Western mind, this book shows how Christianity has consistently forged Christian nations rather than encouraging genuine communion between disparate groups and individuals. Weaving together the stories of Zurara, the royal chronicler of Prince Henry, the Jesuit theologian Jose de Acosta, the famed Anglican Bishop John William Colenso, and the former slave writer Olaudah Equiano, Jennings narrates a tale of loss, forgetfulness, and missed opportunities for the transformation of Christian communities. Touching on issues of slavery, geography, Native American history, Jewish-Christian relations, literacy, and translation, he brilliantly exposes how the loss of land and the supersessionist ideas behind the Christian missionary movement are both deeply implicated in the invention of race. Using his bold, creative, and courageous critique to imagine a truly cosmopolitan citizenship that transcends geopolitical, nationalist, ethnic, and racial boundaries, Jennings charts, with great vision, new ways of imagining ourselves, our communities, and the landscapes we inhabit.

Author: Andrew Piper
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226669726
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Examining novels, critical editions, gift books, translations, and illustrated books, as well as the communities who made them, Dreaming in Books tells a wide-ranging story of the book's identity at the turn of the nineteenth century. In so doing, it shows how many of the most pressing modern communicative concerns are not unique to the digital age but emerged with a particular sense of urgency during the bookish upheavals of the romantic era. In revisiting the book's rise through the prism of romantic literature, Piper aims to revise our assumptions about romanticism, the medium of the printed book, and, ultimately, the future of the book in our so-called digital age."--Pub. desc.

Author: Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190913673
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
While existentialism has long been associated with Parisian Left Bank philosophers sipping cocktails in smoke-filled cafés, or with a brooding, angst-filled outlook on life, Gosetti-Ferencei shows how vital and heterogeneous the movement really was. In this concise, accessible book, Gosetti-Ferencei offers a new vision of existentialism. As she lucidly demonstrates, existentialism is a rich and diverse philosophy that encourages meaningful engagement with the world around us, offering a host of fascinating concepts that pertain to life as we experience it. The movement was as heterogeneous as it is now misunderstood, influenced by jazz music, involving diverse thinkers from around the world, challenging received ideas about the meaning of human existence. Part of the difficulty in defining existentialism is that it was never a unified philosophy, but came to identify a set of shared concerns about the meaning and possibility of human freedom, as it may be expressed in authentic choices, actions, and projects. Existentialists all explored how, in the absence of traditional reassurances about the meaning of life, we may transcend our present circumstances, and give our situation new meaning. With existentialism, concrete, lived experience of the single individual emerged from the shadow of abstract systems and long-defended traditions, and became subject-matter in its own right for philosophical inquiry. Far from solipsistic, Gosetti-Ferencei shows that existentialist attention to the human self can be intertwined with ways of conceiving the world, our being with others, the earth, and the encompassing concept of being. Fully appreciating what existentialism has to offer requires recognizing the rich diversity of its prospects, which involve not only anxiety, absurdity, awareness of death and the loss of religious meaning, but also hope, the striving for happiness, and a sense of the transcendent. On Being and Becoming unpacks this philosophical movement's insights, and reveals how its core ideas promote creative responses to the question of life's meaning.