Imagining Color

Acclaimed theorist and scholar Elaine Scarry uncovers profound connections between color and our intuitions about mind, spirit, and the immortal through readings of works by Proust, Woolf, and Murasaki, offering fresh insights into the interplay between language and the mysterious image-making power of the mind.

How do writers summon color into being—not only in the worlds they depict, but in the minds of their readers? Unlike the visual arts, literature has no physical medium; its images instead emerge on the reader’s mental retina. In this new commission from David Zwirner Books, Elaine Scarry blends literary analysis with contemporary neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy to investigate this phenomenon of imagining color.

Through close readings of texts by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Lady Murasaki, and the medieval Pearl poet, Scarry explores how the brain conjures hues and sensations without the eye encountering actual pigment or light. Drawing from classic experiments on imagination, Scarry reveals the surprising ways literature triggers quasi-physical responses, as words transform into vivid, sensorial experiences.

This project extends the ekphrasis series’ exploration of how language gives form to visual experience, showing that literary description can summon colors and images in the mind’s eye.