ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that aesthetic encounters serve to release the imagination, which enables "the capacity to look through the windows of the actual, to bring as-ifs into being in experience". The hopefulness in Maxine Greene's argument for the imagination lies in her belief that it is through learning to engage with art forms, including the literary arts, that one develops an aesthetic practice where an ethical sensibility can be nurtured. A deeper understanding of that process was emerging through the work of literary theorists who had turned to research findings in neuroscience and consciousness. Greene had a clear vision that change can only occur when individuals can understand another's point of view deeply enough that they feel empathy, and they can imagine other possibilities of being. It is lighting this long slow fuse that can fire a pathway to the "gradual instant".
