ENGL 265-01, Special Topics: Literature and Science in the Age of Enlightenment, Spring 2015

Abstract

"Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light." Alexander Pope, one of the premiere poets of the eighteenth century, intended this epitaph to grace the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton, one of history's most celebrated natural philosophers. This course will examine the relationship of literature and science--two areas of knowledge production and intellectual exploration now commonly thought of as separate and in opposition--from the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century to the end of the British Enlightenment some two hundred years later. We will see how changes in “modern” scientific and literary practice informed, championed, resisted, and shaped each other. Readings will be drawn from the work of poets, playwrights, natural philosophers, essayists and satirists such as Francis Bacon, Robert Hooke, Thomas Shadwell, Margaret Cavendish, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Ephraim Chambers, and William Wordsworth.