SOURCE: Grimsley, Ronald. “Two Philosophical Views of the Literary Imagination: Sartre and Bachelard.” Comparative Literature Studies 8, no. 1 (March 1971): 42-57.

In the following essay, Grimsley compares the role of the imagination in the philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre and Bachelard.

Whereas any attempt to clarify the relationship between philosophy and literature has to reckon with the fundamental and obvious difference between literary creation and reflective analysis, the bearing of philosophy on literary criticism seems at first sight easier to understand and justify. On the one hand, the writer derives his initial inspiration from within his own consciousness and begins by identifying himself with the imaginative impulse to which he seeks to give formal objective embodiment through the use of language. The critic, on the other hand, like any other reader, has to start with what is for the author the end product of all his efforts—with the literary...