Description
- Abstract:
- Troubled by the uncertain status of language as an instrument of knowledge, early modern writers sought new means to discover, communicate, and even produce knowledge. The move toward empirical observation and the clarity of mathematics was one strategy for addressing the need for improved knowledge. But this strategy only addressed the need for knowledge of what was, not what could be. Consequently, a second strategy emerged in early modern writing that allowed writers to produce and communicate knowledge about possibility. Early modern writers developed imaginative mathematics and poetries that functioned in non-mimetic, or intensional modes, in order to write the possible. This dissertation details that theorization and production of poetic and mathematic possibility. Conscious of the need to not subordinate math to poetry or vice versa, this study individually develops the articulations of math and poetry as technologies of the possible in the work of Sir Philip Sidney, John Dee, René Descartes, and Margaret Cavendish. At the same time, I trace the intellectual and social relationships that impacted these individual articulations. In the coda, I turn to John Milton's Paradise Lost to consider a different model of early modern poetic creation than that traced in the project. While recent scholarship has paid little attention to math and poetry as technologies of the possible, this project demonstrates that math and poetry could write the possible and demonstrates that a complete history of early modern poetry must also include a history of mathematics.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Brown University (2009)
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- Collection is open for research.
Citation
Wernimont, Jacqueline D.,
"Writing Possibility: Early Modern Poetry and Mathematics"
(2009).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0T43RC2
