Science and/as Literature in Early Modern England
ENGL 253
Spring 2025
| Section:
01
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| Crosslisting:
STS 253 |
Seventeenth- and 18th-century Britain saw the development and popularization of the "new science." Microscopes, telescopes, air pumps, automata, and experiments captured the popular imagination. The first important scientific societies and journals were founded, and the public learned about new discoveries through sermons and coffeehouse lectures. British science was brought to its colonies across the globe, and it was shaped, in turn, by the different natural products and the brutal realities of slavery there. This course will trace the literary reaction to these cultural changes. A woman natural philosopher wrote utopian science fiction, and satirists skewered mathematicians and experimenters. While the best of early 18th-century nature poetry takes Newton quite seriously as it depicts the way light glimmers off objects, by the century's end William Blake villainized Newtonian thought as reductive and deadening. We will try to understand what writers found exhilarating, scary, confusing, hilarious, or important about science at this key moment of its development. At the same time, we will read this science as literature--considering, say, Francis Bacon's symbolically fraught "idols" and Robert Boyle's "literary technology," the role of poetry in spreading scientific ideas and the importance of analogy and metaphor to the very logics that structured scientific thought. The disciplines of science and literature were not as cleanly separated in this period as they are now, and we can better understand both by exploring their intersections. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA ENGL |
| Course Format: Lecture / Discussion | Grading Mode: Student Option |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (ENGL)(ENGL-Literature)(STS) |
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Past Enrollment Probability: Not Available |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
Robert Hooke, MICROGRAPHIA
John Locke, ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING
Margaret Cavendish, BLAZING WORLD
Thomas Shadwell, THE VIRTUOSO
Susanna Centlivre, THE BASSET TABLE
Jonathan Swift, BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
James Thomson, THE SEASONS
Mary Shelley, FRANKENSTEIN
Poetry and prose by Robert Boyle, John Wilmot, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Isaac Newton, James Thomson, James Graingar, and William Blake.
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Examinations and Assignments:
Regular response papers; a presentation; a final exam |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
Contributes to the following English major requirements:
British Literature Literary History 2.
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| Instructor(s): Smith,Courtney Weiss Times: ..T.R.. 02:50PM-04:10PM; Location: TBA |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 19 | | SR major: 4 | JR major: 5 | | |
| Seats Available: 19 | GRAD: X | SR non-major: 0 | JR non-major: 0 | SO: 5 | FR: 5 |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
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