We live in a moment when imagination, understood primarily as a future-oriented faculty, dominates public discourse on technology. Whether in the form of AI boosterism, technopessimist doomsaying or something in between, imagination seems increasingly divorced from artistry, subsumed in the catch-all categories of technological creativity, “content creation” or Silicon Valley claims of tech genius. As both an omnipresent and a free-floating signifier, imagination may be one of the more ubiquitous concepts that is rarely examined in its own right—a concept in search of a theory.

When imagination is the subject of scholarly focus, it has been the purview of philosophers and social scientists rather than literary scholars. For all the books dilating on “the literary imagination,” there is little discussion of what, precisely, it is. Recent work on the imagination, like Ruha Benjamin’s and Martha Nussbaum’s however, draws attention to how entwined it is with narrative. Yet what we call the literary imagination is more than mere proxy for narrative invention. Whether in novels, poetry, film, or performance, it is a mode of engagement, a way of interpreting signs and structures that shape experience. It is also elusive, historically variable, protean—and thus ripe for rethinking. 

In this spirit, the seminar invites participants to reconsider the literary imagination by examining the conceptual vocabularies available for understanding it, with a view to developing more precise accounts of what imagination is, how it works, and how it has been understood across different contexts. We encourage contributions that advance innovative critical frameworks for engaging with the imagination’s evolving forms and functions. We aim to consider this pervasive concept in ways that include the complexity of narrative but go beyond it to encompass other dimensions of the literary: rhetorical, aesthetic, and formalist, among others.  

The imagination leverages literature’s inherent flexibility and rhetorical power to offer radical critiques of contemporary life, probing social structures, political possibilities, and even the very nature of creativity. What would it mean to examine how the imagination itself might be structurally, constitutively literary—and what is the literary imagination in the first instance? How can we recast literary and rhetorical analysis as building blocks of innovation across disciplines—that is, as the formal apparatus of extra-disciplinary academic inquiry? Ultimately, this seminar aims to ground the notion of the imagination in ways both capacious enough to range across diverse fields and precise enough to make it a meaningful object of analysis.

Topics might include:

• The Novel as a Technology of the Imagination
• The Imagination and Speculative Fiction
• Blackness, Afrofuturism and the Imagination 
• The Environmental Imagination
• Utopian Imaginaries
• Queering the Imagination
• Comedy and Imagining Otherwise