Gaston Bachelard, one among twentieth-century France’s most unusual thinkers, is understood by means of English-language readers essentially because the writer of The Poetics of Space and a number of other books at the mind's eye, yet he made major contributions to the philosophy and historical past of technology. during this ebook, Roch C. Smith presents a entire creation to Bachelard’s paintings, demonstrating how his writings at the literary mind's eye might be higher understood within the context of his exploration of the way wisdom works in technology. After an summary of Bachelard’s writings at the medical brain because it used to be reworked through relativity, quantum physics, and glossy chemistry, Smith examines Bachelard’s works at the mind's eye in mild of specific highbrow values Bachelard derived from technology. His trajectory from technological know-how to a in particular literary mind's eye is traced by way of spotting his hindrance with what technology teaches approximately how we all know, and his expanding preoccupation with questions of being while facing poetic imagery. Smith additionally explores the fabric and dynamic mind's eye linked to the 4 elements—fire, water, air, and earth—and the phenomenology of inventive mind's eye in Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, his Poetics of Reverie, and within the fragments of Poetics of Fire.

Roch C. Smith is Professor Emeritus of French on the college of North Carolina at Greensboro and the writer of Understanding Alain Robbe-Grillet.