Water and Dreams: On the Imagination of Matter (Angle 11)

Author: Barthes (USA), translated by Gu Jiachen
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2005-10-01
Features: This is an important theoretical work on Barthes' poetics, novel and engaging, with significant influence in Europe and the United States. Based on the four elemental substances—fire, water, earth, and air—he employs imagination and theories of new cognition, combining his extensive knowledge of natural sciences, to establish a poetics of dreams. He points out that the philosophical theory of imagination should first study the relationship between material causality and formal causality. Poetic imagery is also a material. Water is not only dispersed but also a series of images recognized in the fleeting moments of imagination, and it is both a carrier of images and the origin of their formation. Any poetics should accept the various compositions of material essence, and it is precisely through the arrangement of these fundamental material elements that the soul of poetry should be strongly revealed.