The Imagination: Poetic Epistemologies in Early Modern Europe and Medieval Kashmir"

Speaker(s): Radhika Koul (Comparative Literature)

The Renaissance Worldmaking Geballe workshop will be hosting our first dissertation workshop of the quarter on Tuesday May 7.  Radhika Koul (Comparative Literature) will be presenting her dissertation chapter, "The Imagination: Poetic Epistemologies in Early Modern Europe and Medieval Kashmir." Prof. Nicholas Paige (French, UC Berkeley) has kindly agreed to act as respondent.
 
Radhika has provided the following summary of her project:
 
How does one know the world? And how does one create poetry, broadly understood? At surface level, the answers to these two questions may not intersect, except for the tired trope of mimesis—then and now, a concept that resists erasure in classical Western literary thought. Much of this dissertation assumes and demonstrates that both in European early modernity as well as in medieval Kashmir, the answers to these questions were intricately bound with each other. That thinking about one’s subjective creation and experience of the world had as much to do with literary creation and aesthetic experience in two cultures separated by time, space and influence. At the intersection of these issues of epistemology, metaphysics and poiesislies the imagination. This chapter explores how the imagination becomes the creative, poetic fundament of the experience of the world for philosophers and poets alike in these two periods. Authors include Ānandavardhana, Sidney, Descartes, Utpaladeva, Pascal and Abhinavagupta.