ENG395I

This course investigates two separate disciplines, inquiring how they speak and think about literary imagination, and asks students to consider what interdisciplinary overlap might exist between the two. The course frames imagination and the Lockean language about mind that accompanies it in the writings of Addison, Burke, Johnson, and Young. It then queries whether romantic writing (Schlegel, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats) advances radically different ideas than these earlier efforts. Finally it jumps to our contemporary moment and ponders how terms of explanation may once again have changed. The course asks whether or not the neurobiological picture of imagination - the cross-neural nature of cerebral processes, cognitive historicism, and imaging techniques - is at a great distance from what the eighteenth century once thought.