Imaginative Experience in the Arts: Promoting Liberal Education

In this significant contribution to aesthetic philosophy from one of the foremost writers on American poetry, Charles Altieri champions the neglected, non-cognitive aspects of our encounters with works of art.

In contrast to literary critics and philosophers who subordinate the importance of aesthetic experience to knowledge and practical concerns, Altieri defends a view of subjective imaginative experience as important in itself, and already socially oriented. To do so, he proposes a disti...