| Synopsis: |
Ranging from politics and philosophy to literature, Imagining the Real is Palgrave's second selection of Robert Grant's essays. Like its predecessor, The Politics of Sex and Other Essays, only in more formal, academic style, it contrasts our abstract theoretical imaginings about the human world with the real imaginative insights provided by art and everyday experience. It questions, variously, the relevance of game theory and sociobiology to politics; the supposed intrinsic values of liberal freedom, cultural change, and democratic action; both Kantian and instrumental defences of honesty; and the claims of Marxism, deconstruction and 'Theory' generally to be non-ideological. More positively, it celebrates three imaginative writers, all highly intellectual, yet for whom practice and its fictional equivalents are still the ultimate test of theory: Shakespeare, Beckett, and the 1930s novelist L.H. Myers. Imagining the Real also contains hitherto undocumented observations by F.R. Leavis and L.P.Hartley; a new interpretation of homo economicus; a sociological explanation of the vogue for 'Theory'; and an anti-voguish theory of fiction as being a quite literal speech act, namely an open-ended invitation to imagine. |