Gaston Bachelard An Elemental Reverie Of The World's Stuff [Hardcover]

Gaston Bachelard: An Elemental Reverie on the World's Stuff We are renewed when we follow Bachelard's instruction on how to read the world or how to read a poem. For all his inspiriting of matter, his enlivening of the world, there always remains a down-to-earth cast to his thoughts. Bachelard's contribution to the understanding of the imagination, indeed to the whole of consciousness, is measureless. - Joanne H. Stroud Joanne Stroud Bilby's book on Bachelard is, you can bet on it, written by an enthusiast of the first order, and--in my view--enthusiasm is, along with his curiosity and illuminating intelligence, exactly the quality we most value in the work of the wonderful philosopher of surrealism. This is what imagination is about. - Mary Ann Caws Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature, Graduate School, CUNY, and author of The Surrealist Look: an Erotics of Encounter (MIT) and editor of Surrealism (Phaidon), Surrealist Love Poems (Tate Publishing), and Surrealist Painters and Poets (MIT). THE BACHELARD TRANSLATIONS are the inspiration of Joanne H. Stroud, Director of Publications for The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, who in 1981 contracted with Jos? Corti to publish in English the untranslated works of Bachelard on the imagination. Quite directly said, Dr. Stroud presents Gaston Bachelard in an exquisitely Bachelardian fashion, through images, in images, and through what we might think of as the great reversal -being more objective about our inner life while at the same time becoming more subjective in our presence with the world. We discover that it is quite possible to carefully and with care track the inner world through deepest engagement, and at the same time feel everything around us as a Who, as Presences. The imaginal world discovered by Gaston Bachlard, lover of poetic images, that great alchemical union of knowing and presence, can heal the world, can heal the soul, can heal our relationl.