Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology

How do people make sense of their experiences? How do they understand possibility? How do they limit possibility? These questions are central to all the human sciences. Here, Vincent Crapanzano offers a powerfully creative new way to think about human experience: the notion of imaginative horizons. For Crapanzano, imaginative horizons are the blurry boundaries that separate the here and now from what lies beyond, in time and space. These horizons, he argues, deeply influence both how we experience our lives and how we interpret those experiences, and here sets himself the task of exploring the roles that creativity and imagination play in our experience of the world.

Vincent Crapanzano is a distinguished professor of comparative literature and anthropology at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. He is the author of, among others, Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench and Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.