From the automation of feelings to a poetic counterchecking The discourses of imagination in Nerval’s work

Nerval dialogues with the mechanistic representations of imagination that dominate nineteenth century psychology, namely an automatic and spontaneous reproduction of sensory impressions in mental life. In a critical fidelity to this paradigm of reference, his work, in different forms, challenges, diverts and overthrow it, in order to promote a poetic, tragic or parodic imagination, metaphor of a world that is itself mechanized.