The Fancy and Imagination of Perception (2012)

Undergraduate: Connie Tran

Faculty Advisor: Inger Brodey
Department: Comparative Literature

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s theories on the Fancy and Imagination parallel seminal ideas present in modern theories of Cognitive Science. This project seeks to understand the connections that fall between these two systems of thought. In particular, I examine how Coleridge’s Fancy relates to Alan Baddeley’s influential model of working memory. That is, Coleridge’s Fancy is the process by which information is brought from long-term memory into working memory. I also explore how Coleridge’s primary and secondary Imagination reflect the human ability to create simply by perceiving the external environment. Thus, we ask the question, “How do we humans understand our world? How do we understand the physical stimuli from our external world and translate this stimuli into something we understand?” We find that what is generally regarded as the passive process of perceiving physical stimuli is also an innate ability for creation.