Creative Cognition and the Cultural Panorama of Twentieth-Century Spain

Poets and artists create works that astound and move us, but what is the nature of their creative process? How do thought and reality, the physical and the psychological, interact in their work? How do they use body and mind, emotions and cognition, the objective and the subjective, to reconcile the self and the world, art and reality? What means do they use to convey their vision? Creative Cognition and the Cultural Panorama of Twentieth Century-Spain is a multidisciplinary study of poets, plastic artists, and philosophers mainly from twentieth-century Spain. It focuses on the creative state as the nucleus of the artist's work as it brings forth cognitive experiences that are out of the ordinary realm of knowledge about the self, art, and the world. Not a strictly neurobiological approach, it takes cognitive science as a point of departure to explore the mental processes and structures that underline creative thinking.

Candelas Gala is Charles E. Taylor Professor of Romance Languages at Wake Forest University, USA. She has authored books and essays on Federico Garcia Lorca and on twentieth-century Spanish poetry in general. Her most recent book, Poetry, Physics, and Painting in Twentieth-Century Spain (2011) is forthcoming in Spanish translation from Anthropos, Spain.