The Imaginary

About: The Imaginary is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4807 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87663 citations.

Shyness, group dependence and self-concept: attributes of the imaginary audience.

Abstract: The imaginary audience of 328 early and late adolescents was studied from the viewpoint of providing educators and clinicians with insight into its attributes--those which both facilitate and hinder youths' development. Early adolescents (about 14 or 15 years of age) displayed a greater awareness of an imaginary audience which probably contributed to their observed, elevated group dependence. Unexpectedly, the shyness of adolescents highly sensitive to an imaginary audience increased with age, possibly because they are unwilling to provide themselves with the social experiences necessary for decentering. Likewise, those highly sensitive to an imaginary audience projected low self-concepts and thus imply that their audience is relatively critical; thus, they probably validate a self-fulfilling prophecy, oblivious to a possible contradictory external reality. The anticipated fact that females appeared to be less socially bold and more group dependent than males might account, in part, for females' greater responsiveness to an imaginary audience. It is suggested that educators and clinicians encourage youth to validate social hypotheses in order to promote the dissolution of the imaginary audience, especially of those who are shy and display self-deprecatory tendencies.

American Victorian Poetry: The Transatlantic Poetic

Abstract: IN A SPEECH GIVEN AT A FORMAL DINNER IN 1868 FOR SAMUEL BREESE MORSE (THE American portrait painter who invented the electric telegraph), William Cullen Bryant began by speaking "in behalf of the press" as a New York City newspaper editor and ended by giving a bravura performance of the transatlantic imaginary he had become famous for as a poet. "My imagination goes down to the chambers of the middle sea," Bryant mused, to those vast depths where repose the mystic wire on beds of coral, among forests of tangle, or on the bottom of the dim blue gulfs strewn with the bones of whales and sharks, skeletons of drowned men, and ribs and masts of foundered barks, laden with wedges of gold never to be coined, and pipes of the choicest vintages of earth never to be tasted. Through these watery solitudes, among the fountains of the great deep, the abode of perpetual silence, never visited by living human presence and beyond the sight of human eye, there are gliding to and fro, by night and by day, in light and in darkness, in calm and in tempest, currents of human thought borne by the electric pulse which obeys the bidding of man. That slender wire thrills with the hopes and fears of nations; it vibrates to every emotion that can be awakened by any event affecting the welfare of the human race. (1) As a member of the press, Bryant stressed the telegraph's speed of transmission; as a poet, Bryant transfigured electric cable into a lyric impulse, a "mystic wire" that "vibrates to every emotion" on both sides of the Atlantic, a fantasy of "living human presence" where there is none, "currents of human thought" circulating around the detritus of culture and nature alike. This poetic notion is the real communicator: an idea of expression much more capacious than expression itself, however transmitted; not the news itself but the vibrating cords that will unite nations, that will affectively perform "the welfare of the human race" that (alas) over-water politics may have failed to sustain. (2) As the essays in this special issue amply demonstrate, Bryant's fantastic elaboration of this transatlantic poetic was symptomatic of what we now call "Victorian Poetry"--a phrase coined in New York rather than in London, and one which now finds itself strung not only between continents, but between notions of "poetry" that themselves seem whimsical responses to the technology of modernity: colorful, humanistic, and (already, in 1868) somewhat pathetically out of date. In recent issues of this journal both parts of the journal's title have come up for discussion: What was or is it to be "Victorian"? What does and does not count as "Poetry"? Last year, in "Whether Victorian Poetry: A Genre and its Period," Joseph Bristow responded to Linda K. Hughes's introduction to a previous issue on the future of Victorian poetry studies ("Whither Victorian Poetry?") by suggesting that "if the poetic genres produced in the period known as 'Victorian' have a future, then their future resides in a present moment that is increasingly motivated by the belief that the forecast for this area of study remains exceptionally promising because the field itself belonged to a technological age whose fascination with material progress nonetheless anticipated our own interest in virtual technologies." (3) For Bristow, as for Bryant, the question of technology is really the question of transmission: how do old poetic genres travel across an ocean and a century to become living poetry (or live-feed poetry), how is our current sense of what that poetry was determined by our current sense of what poetry is, and what connects those senses to one another? For contemporary scholars of Victorian poetry, as for Bryant, the idea of "poetry" does a lot of cultural work: it transcends particular genres (ballads, say, or elegies or odes), and it even represents technological progress, the "electric pulse" that might connect literature and literary study, one century to another and now to another. …

Sherlock holmes, crime, and the anxieties of globalization

Abstract: Before the establishment in the early 1800s of France's Surete Nationale and England's Scotland Yard, the detection of crimes was generally regarded as supernatural work, but the rise of modern science allowed mere mortals to systematize and categorize events—and thus to solve crimes. Reducing the amount of crime, however, did not reduce the fear of crime, which actually grew in the late-nineteenth century as the result of globalization and media sensationalism. Literary detectives offered an imaginary cure for an imaginary disease. Sherlock Holmes, the most famous literary detective, retained many of the characteristics that earlier ages had attributed to superhuman “detectives”; a wondrous and a social being, he nonetheless was able to reassure an anxious public that even the most heinous crimes could be solved. His ability to calm the fears of the globalizing Victorian era was an early version of what later became a proliferation of imaginary characters serving similar public functions.

The Empire of fear: the American political psyche and the culture of paranoia

Abstract: Paradoxically, the more powerful the USA has become the more that paranoia seems to mark its relation to itself and to others. In this article we argue that there is a connection between its denial of its own destructiveness, self-idealization expressed in the belief that America represents the end point of the civilizing process towards which all other societies are drawn, and the paranoid conviction that an enemy Other (communism, Islam) aims to corrupt or destroy ‘God's chosen people’. First Vietnam and now September 11th inflicted grievous injuries upon this narcissism and we suggest that the invasion of Iraq can be considered as an indication that the USA has failed to ‘work through’ this trauma, instead it has sought to reassert an imaginary omniscience. Just as the destruction of the Twin Towers was the breaking through of the Real upon the Imaginary, so the ‘Real’ war in Iraq has begun after the ‘Imaginary’ war was declared ‘over’ by Bush.