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32 - Science and literary criticism

from LITERATURE AND OTHER DISCIPLINES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Michel Baridon
Edited by
H. B. Nisbet  and
Claude Rawson
H. B. Nisbet
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Claude Rawson
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
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Summary

Science and literary criticism are generally considered to stand so far apart that one cannot analyse their mutual relations without clear definitions of both.

If we assume, as did Ezra Pound, that ‘literature is news that stays news’, we can consider writers as agents in the transformation of the world-picture of their age. They therefore have something in common with scientists, who keep modifying received ideas by the testing of new paradigms. But their quest for modernity does not always elicit an immediate response on the part of the critics: Thomson's Seasons popularized a form of natural sublimity which received its critical status in Burke's Enquiry almost thirty years later. Thus, if we wish to consider literary criticism in both its incipient and developed forms, we must include in our corpus the stray remarks, sometimes off the cuff, made by the authors themselves.

The same applies to science. The term must be used in a broad sense, i.e., science as understood by the interested layman. Innovations, whether a writer rejects or favours them, will attract his attention and develop his creative powers, but science, as he apprehends it, is often mediated by philosophy. To use the example of Thomson again, he and Swift held different views about the Royal Society, but the ‘new science’ was central to their preoccupations. Neither of them had done any work in a laboratory, but both knew about the Boyle Lectures and about the controversies caused by the Essay concerning Human Understanding, which relies on the corpuscular theory of matter.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 778 - 797
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

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