Goldstein, Amanda Jo (Author)
Goldsmith, Steven
Butler, Judith
Largier, Niklaus
University of California, Berkeley
Butler, Judith
Francois, Anne-Lise
Largier, Niklaus
Goodman, Kevis
Francois, Anne-Lise
Publication date: 2011
Language: English
Edition Details: Advisor: Goldsmith, Steven, Goodman, Kevis; Committee Members: Butler, Judith, Francois, Anne-Lise, Largier, Niklaus.
Physical Details: 168 pp.
This dissertation on late Enlightenment poetics and the history of the biomedical sciences unfolds a lapsed possibility near the historical beginnings of the division of labor between literary and scientific representation. Against the pressure, then and now, to treat the culture of science as context or antithesis to literary production, I recover a countervailing epistemology that cast poetry as a privileged technique of empirical inquiry: a knowledgeable practice whose figurative work brought it closer to, not farther from, the physical nature of things. In his late life science, Morphology, Goethe mischievously re-signified "objectivity" to mean an observer's vulnerability to transformation by the objects under view: "every new object, well seen, opens up a new organ in us." Such a gesture at once opens the scene of experiment to the agency of objects, and shifts biology's question from the life force within beings, to the metamorphic relations between them. From Wordsworth's call for a "science of the feelings," to Blake's for a "sweet Science," and Goethe's for a "tender Empiricism," my project argues for a series of late Enlightenment attempts to re-invent empiricist methodology - and to do so with the resources of verse and figure. These revisionary poetic sciences, I argue, challenged early biological and aesthetic protocols to countenance the mutual, material influence between the subjects and objects of experiment; to represent `bare' sensation as itself vulnerable to social and rhetorical transformation; and to position vulnerability - to impression, influence, and decay - as central, not inimical, to life. I show that writers from James Thomson and Erasmus Darwin to Percy Shelley retrieved Lucretius's classical materialism as a model for describing bodies (textual and animal) as porous assemblages, shaped by losses and incorporations of what is not self, and not immediately present. In Lucretius's De Rerum Natura , all things, decaying in time, scatter fine atomic husks from their bodies: simulacra, figurae, imagines . Here 'figures' are fractions of the real estranged from their sources, and all bodies, not just poets or their language, produce them. Such an epistemology afforded poetry a strong claim upon the real, and proved particularly fit to connect the epochal interest in living bodies to the period's new sense of its own historicity. Poets deployed Lucretius's atomist imaginary in order to make historical experience palpable as what Wordsworth called an "atmosphere of sensation." The material tropes they mobilized to do so, I argue, have been unrecognizable through the symbol-allegory paradigm that controls most rhetorical readings of romanticism. Such a view of the period's philosophy of life differs from a more frequent argument, whereby romantic poetics and early biology converge in the ideal of organism or artwork as self-sufficient whole, "both cause and effect of itself" - and the ideal of life or imagination as the "power" productive of such wholes. This Kantian and Coleridgean ideal of "organic form," I argue, has overshadowed our critical understanding of what the late Enlightenment poetics of life might have sought to do. Working through the tense collaboration between the Poet and the Man of Science in Wordsworth's 1800 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads and in Blake's notion of "sweet Science" (The Four Zoas,1797), my introduction extracts two critical lenses - "matter figures back," and "atmospheres of sensation" - with which to discern the rival epistemology described in the dissertation's four body chapters. In chapters that center on, and move outward from, Goethe's poetic biology (1-2) and Shelley's "poetry of life" (3- 4) I show how a neglected strain of materialist natural curiosity sought to uncouple professionalizing biology and subject-centered aesthetics from their rhetoric of agency, autonomy, and power. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 75/07(E), Jan 2015. Proquest Document ID: 1525990942.
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