By reconfiguring reality, narrative imagination can propose new ways of acting. Ricoeur calls this the “poetic moment” of practical reason: before we decide, we must imagine what a good life could be. The poetics of imagination thus underwrites moral innovation. 5. The Aesthetic-Pragmatic Horizon: Iser and Walton Wolfgang Iser extends poetics into reader-response theory. In The Act of Reading (1976), he argues that literary texts are structured with gaps (Leerstellen) that the reader’s imagination must fill. These indeterminacies are not defects but engines: each reader produces a different “virtual” object. The poetics of imagination becomes a performance —a game of perspective-taking and anticipation.
Both Iser and Walton demystify imagination: it is not a mysterious inner flame but a structured, shared capacity to treat representations as invitations to construct worlds. 6. Toward a Systematic Poetics of Imagination Drawing on these traditions, we can outline four operative principles of a poetics of imagination: poetics of imagination
For Bachelard, the poetic image is not a metaphor for something else; it is a direct eruption of consciousness that “resonates” before it is interpreted. The imagination here is material : it dwells in the elemental (earth, air, fire, water) and in the contours of inhabited space. A cellar is not just a room; it is the irrational darkness of the psyche. An attic is rational clarity. These indeterminacies are not defects but engines: each
For Ricoeur, a live metaphor does not simply replace a literal term; it creates a semantic impertinence that forces us to restructure semantic fields. “Time is a beggar” (Rilke) is not a substitution but a new predication. Imagination is the operation of grasping this new resemblance in the absence of literal similarity. By reconfiguring reality