Dreaming by the Book

San Francisco Chronicle

A startling inquiry . . . a truly revealing phenomenology of imagination. . . . Dreaming by the Book will affect how one reads fiction and poetry as few critical works have done before.
— Kenneth Baker, art critic

New Republic

[Scarry] is extremely ambitious, seeking nothing less than a theory of literary cognition. . . . Her interest, which is really in aesthetic success, makes her an original.
— James Wood

Virginia Quarterly Review

[Scarry] has written an appendix to Aristotle, perhaps best entitled De Imaginatione, though I wonder whether it fits better to the end of his De Anima, 'On the Soul,' or his Poetics.

San Francisco Chronicle - Kenneth Baker

A startling inquiry . . . a truly revealing phenomenology of imagination. . . . Dreaming by the Book will affect how one reads fiction and poetry as few critical works have done before.

New Republic - James Wood

[Scarry] is extremely ambitious, seeking nothing less than a theory of literary cognition. . . . Her interest, which is really in aesthetic success, makes her an original.

San Francisco Chronicle

A startling inquiry . . . a truly revealing phenomenology of imagination. . . . Dreaming by the Book will affect how one reads fiction and poetry as few critical works have done before.
— Kenneth Baker, art critic

James Wood

[Scarry] is extremely ambitious, seeking nothing less than a theory of literary cognition....Her interest, which is really in aesthetic success, makes her an original.
— New Republic

Virginia Quarterly Review

[Scarry] has written an appendix to Aristotle, perhaps best entitled De Imaginatione, though I wonder whether it fits better to the endof his De Anima, "On the Soul," or his Poetics.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Best known for her 1985 study of torture and physical pain, The Body in Pain, and for her much-publicized contention, first expressed in the New York Review of Books, that electromagnetic interference caused the crash of TWA Flight 800, Harvard English professor Scarry turns her critical lights on the question of how we transform literature into compelling mental imagery. Given that imagination is, by definition, less vivid than actual perception, she asks, why should a poem by Wordsworth, say, or a novel by Charlotte Bront , bring the material world to life so palpably? Although Scarry bases her argument largely on close literary readings, her approach often recalls that of such Enlightenment philosophers as Descartes and Hume as she attempts to solve the riddle of how the mind works. Scarry is an original, interdisciplinary thinker. She writes like someone enraptured by both the natural world--especially flowers--and by language. Unfortunately, Scarry takes for granted that her reader is as obsessive a gardener as she. Is it really universally the case that "people seem to have long languorous conversations describing to each other the flower they most love that morning?" And is this observation a useful basis for a universal theory of the mind? In the long sections of the book devoted to the habits of a certain sparrow in Scarry's garden, or to charting every reference to vegetation in the works of Homer, Flaubert and Wordsworth, Scarry appears lost in her own lush imaginative world. Oct.. FYI: In September, Princeton Univ. will publish Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just $15.95 134p ISBN 0-691-04875-4, a pair of lectures intended to rescue the idea of beauty from academic neglect. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Scarry (English, Harvard Univ.), the author of the powerful and important The Body in Pain, has long been interested in ideas about creativity, imagination, and justice. In her groundbreaking earlier work, those themes were tied to the human experiences of pain and embodiment in strikingly original ways. In these two new works, she continues her explorations, using her formidable analytic talents to understand the function of the imagination in reading literature and to investigate the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, especially in contemporary academic discourse. In Dreaming by the Book, Scarry wonders how the best writing enables us to produce images and scenes in our minds that carry something of the force of reality. She deftly unfolds an answer by identifying and explicating several general principles and five formal practices by which authors invisibly command us to manipulate the objects of our imagination. While not everyone will be convinced by all of her conclusions, her analyses are always original and illuminating. The book is valuable not only for its insights but also for the pleasure of simply following Scarry through her explorations. Part 1 of the shorter On Beauty and Being Just is similarly engaging. Here, Scarry examines the experience of apprehending or misapprehending beauty in art, literature, or the world around us. But in the second half of the book, which builds to a claim about the relationship between beauty and justice, she casts her argument against an ill-defined set of "opponents of beauty" who are so generalized and obscure as to be straw men. Also, because of the reflective nature of her text (some of which was apparently presented in public lectures), she offers no citations or specific references to the individuals or philosophies she means to critique. The result is tiresome, misleading, and unfortunate, since the ideas she is exploring are important and provocative ones.--Julia Burch, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Grab your crystals and prepare for the literary critical incarnation of a John Tesh concert. This is a New Age journey into dreamworld parading as literary criticism, inviting the reader to participate in visualizing exercises in order to understand the relationship between literature and the imagination. Any book which attempts to uncover continuities within thousands of years of literature should either be brilliant (e.g., Erich Auerbach's Mimesis) or unwritten; this offering belongs in the latter category. Scarry (English and American Literature/Harvard) argues both that writers use their imaginations to create and that readers use their imaginations to visualize the depicted worlds of fiction; this twin proposal hardly makes a stunning thesis. Analyzing the creative process in terms of five variations— radiant ignition, rarity, dyadic addition and subtraction, stretching, and floral supposition—Scarry delineates the methods authors employ to bring their works to life, to create a vivid and vibrant picture in the reader's mind. Alas, the ultimate in stultifying pedantry results when Scarry directs the reader in the visualizing process, guiding her readers, for example, through a passage of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles with instructions interspersed on how we are to visualize what Hardy depicts. Not to depreciate the value of creative visualization, but we hardly need Scarry to point out to us the fact that authors use their imagination in the process of writing and spur ours as we read. The book ends with Scarry's very own depiction of a bird flying; putting the power of fantasy to work, she shows the reader that, yes, in our imaginations, birds really can fly.If you are looking for a journey into the creative process, you would do better to write, draw, or sing for yourself than to enter Scarry's literary-visual world.