Tita Chico

The Experimental Imagination (eBook, ePUB)

Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Challenging the "two cultures" debate, The Experimental Imagination tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds in the British Enlightenment. Tita Chico shows that early science relied on what she calls literary knowledge to present its experimental findings. More radically, she contends that science was made intellectually possible because its main discoveries and technologies could be articulated in literary terms. While early scientists deployed metaphor to describe the phenomena they defined and imagination to cast themselves as experimentalists, literary writers used scientific metaphors to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge. Drawing on literature as well as literary language, tropes, and interpretive methods, literary knowledge challenges our dominant narrative of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non of epistemological innovation in the British Enlightenment. With its recourse to imagination as a more reliable source of truth than any empirical account, literary knowledge facilitates a redefinition of authority and evidence, as well as of the self and society, implicitly articulating the difference that would come to distinguish the arts and sciences.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: 5. Juni 2018
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781503606456
• Artikelnr.: 52381203

Autorenporträt

Tita Chico is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland and the author of Designing Women (2005).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
This introduction challenges the "two cultures" debate about
disciplinarity. Critical studies of literature and science have not
presented a satisfactory understanding of the two domains' comingling and
reciprocity. Early science formulated itself through literary knowledge:
natural philosophers relied on literariness not only to present
experimental findings but also to imagine the practice of science. The
multiplicity and diversity of allusions to science in the long
eighteenth-century literary archive reflect an understanding of literary
knowledge as epistemologically superior. Natural philosophical practice
requires yet obscures the imaginative practice; literary knowledge embraces
this impulse as a way of understanding the world at large. The experimental
imagination encapsulates the process and effects of literary knowledge as
an epistemology. The keywords literary knowledge, science, trope, and
gender reveal core concepts that enable myriad writers to posit alternative
models of experience, authority, and evidence.
1"Literary Knowledge"
chapter abstract
Natural philosophy in the long eighteenth century connoted a sense of
modernity and enlightenment, attributes that bound science to meanings in
excess of its practice and consumption. The pliancy of science as a trope
finds support in reflections on language as a scientific tool by Robert
Boyle, Robert Hooke, and other natural philosophers. The two dominant
technologies of the experimental imagination are the observed particular
and the modest witness. Observed particulars of empirical study are those
nuggets of data that disclose themselves and, in their revelation, produce
knowledge. The modest witness is the individual who is objective by virtue
of erasing himself through his privilege. Tropes are literary tools that
not only enable practitioners to describe scientific findings, but also
enable an even more fundamental component of experimentalism: literariness
makes possible the conceptualization of scientific findings and the
individual who produces them.
2"Immodest Witnesses"
chapter abstract
The character of the immodest witness embodies the self-interest, sexual
desire, and circulation of wealth implicitly bound up with the practice of
experimental philosophy. The characterization of Gimcracks in Thomas
Shadwell's The Virtuoso, James Miller's The Humours of Oxford, and Susannah
Centlivre's The Basset-Table and coquettes in Joseph Addison and Richard
Steele's The Spectator and Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator all
represent self-interest. In plays and periodicals, characterization,
metaphor, and plot together reveal the logic of self-interest undergirding
claims to scientific objectivity. If the ideal natural philosopher removed
himself to achieve objectivity, then the Gimcrack and coquette were defined
by an inability to overcome prejudice and desires, speaking for themselves
rather than for the object. For some, this form of bias leads to
self-delusion, eroticism, and social obstruction, but for others, it allows
a new form of self-directed agency and social, even moral, improvement.
3"Scientific Seduction"
chapter abstract
Beginning with Bacon, natural philosophy texts frequently present
scientific practice as an erotic quest, establishing a correspondence
between sexual seduction and natural philosophical inquiry. Bernard de
Fontenelle's and Francesco Algarotti's scientific dialogues, translated by
Aphra Behn and Elizabeth Carter, respectively, adopt the literary plot of
seduction to explain and promote Cartesianism, Copernicanism, and
Newtonianism. Both Behn and Carter embrace the suitability of natural
philosophical education for women. For Fontenelle and Algarotti,
understanding science necessitates new ways of thinking that are possible
only with one's imagination and requires that characters undergo a process
of seduction. Learning science is a conversion process, simultaneously
rational and affective. Mathematicians, like lovers, are persuasive and
persistent, ultimately demanding submission. These scientific dialogues
reframe erotic plots to promote intellectual and moral self-improvement,
qualities posited as uniquely modern and widely available to the texts'
readers.
4"Political Science"
chapter abstract
Late seventeenth-century natural philosophers inherited the conjunction of
politics and science at the core of Francis Bacon's experimental project.
Thomas Sprat's The History of the Royal Society, Margaret Cavendish's The
Blazing World, and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels use the conventions
of literary knowledge to express their scientific-political visions,
insisting that natural philosophy cannot be understood apart from the
political institutions enabling and enabled by its practice and
promulgation. These writers use the experimental imagination to envisage,
in turn, civil government, absolutist monarchy, and imperialism. Sprat
advances scientific triumphalism and a model for schooling gentlemen into
civil society.
5"When Science Becomes Literature"
chapter abstract
The eighteenth-century aesthetic theories of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third
earl of Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson use scientific tropes,
consequently revealing the reciprocity of scientific and literary
epistemologies. Poets use an expressly aesthetic mode to imagine beyond the
limits of experimental knowledge, even though eighteenth-century aesthetics
takes shape through unacknowledged appropriation of scientific structures
and processes. With this reciprocity obscured, natural philosophy may well
disclose sights unseen, but poetry does more. In Alexander Pope's The Rape
of the Lock, poems inspired by Queen Caroline's homage to British
theological and scientific accomplishments in her Richmond Hermitage, and
James Thomson's The Seasons, science becomes literature: aesthetic
mediations of natural philosophy draw on but also challenge the
intellectual work of science, and mount a case for the epistemological
superiority of the literary.