Poetics Of Imagination -

Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990) offers a complementary analytic framework: fictions are props in games of make-believe. When we read “the monster lurks,” we imagine that a proposition is true in the fictional world. Imagination here is rule-governed, social, and quasi-perceptual. Walton dissolves the classic binary of real vs. unreal, replacing it with degrees of participation in generated worlds.

Reverie as a distinct imaginative mode—neither dream (unconscious) nor calculation (conscious). Reverie allows the self to become “transparent to its own imagination.” The poetics of imagination is therefore a practice of receptivity : the poet lends words to the image’s own force. poetics of imagination

| Principle | Description | Example | |-----------|-------------|---------| | | Imagination operates via tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche) that transfer properties across domains. | “The sun kissed the sea” – personification. | | Configurational synthesis | Imagination integrates disparate elements into coherent wholes (images, plots, schemas). | The four seasons as a narrative of birth–death–rebirth. | | Negativity | Imagination works through absence: to imagine X is to hold X as non-present yet present-as-if. | Mental imagery of a deceased loved one. | | World-disclosure | Poetic imagination opens alternative modes of being-in-the-world, often by defamiliarizing the habitual. | Kafka’s Metamorphosis disclosing alienated labor. | Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990) offers a

If perception itself is already imaginative, then realism is a specific stylistic effect, not a ground. The poetics of imagination thus undermines any naive copy-theory of art. 3. The Phenomenological Extension: Bachelard and the Material Image Gaston Bachelard shifts the focus from cognitive synthesis to affective , spatial images. In The Poetics of Space (1958), he asks: how does a house, a drawer, a nest generate reverie? His method is topoanalysis —the systematic study of intimate spaces as they appear in poetry. Walton dissolves the classic binary of real vs