SOURCE: Christofides, C. G. “Gaston Bachelard's Phenomenology of the Imagination.” Romanic Review 52, no. 1 (February 1961): 36-47.

In the following essay, Christofides attempts to define Bachelard's esthetic, calling it “a fruitful theoretical statement that has affinities with Symbolist, Surrealist and Existentialist work evoking insights which are partly contingent on the theories of contemporary psychology.”

Gaston Bachelard's lifelong fecund and original investigations into the realm of the imaginary and the stuff of dreams reached a triumphal apogee in 1957 with the publication of a volume on the “poetics of space.”¹ In a year that watched with exhilarating awe the penetration of space by a humanly-made satellite this was no science-fiction gimmick. It was the natural culmination of a work which for the last two decades had been leading the Sorbonne's philosopher of science not so much away from science as into the mystery of the creative act, the imagination which brings life...