Linnaeus and the poetics of evolution
|
|  Yüklə 207.5 Kb.
|
, Faber, 1995, P27.
45 Robert Boyle, Occasional Reflections upon several Subjects. Whereto is premis’d A Discourse About such kind of Thoughts, 1665. Quoted by J Paul Hunter, Before Novels: Cultural concepts of 18th C English Fiction WW Norton, 1990. The notion of the world as a book, a text has prospered. Now various media from paintings to film as ‘read as texts’ which I find problematic. Each medium has its own processes and structures. 46 Milton II, l57. Complete Poems and Major Prose, Ed., Merritt Y. Hughes, New York: Macmillan, 1957. "L'Allegro", begins with the birth of melancholy, which happens during the dark hours of the nights among horrid shapes and sights in the unholy dwelling of a wild beast, but is about a carefree lifestyle, "II Penseroso" its companion poem describes a more thoughtful person whose nights are filled with hours of study in the confides of a quiet place. 47 The Earl of Shaftesbury was a naturalist in supposing fundamental principles of ethics and aesthetics (taste) were established by attention to human nature; certain things naturally please us and are naturally conducive to our good. (Characteristiks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 1711). He was an associationist, a merging of ideas was fundamental to aesthetic experience and the crucial bridge from the sphere of contemplation to the sphere of action. [Link to David Hartley as Essay on Cog Science] 48 An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725). Hutcheson was also a naturalist and empiricist who thought aesthetic judgments were perceptual and take their authority from a sense common to those who make them. 49 In a series of influential essays, "The Pleasures of the Imagination" in The Spectator (1712), Addison defended the theory that imaginative association is the fundamental component in our experience of art, architecture, and nature, and thus the true explanation of their value to us. 50 Joseph Addison noted in The Spectator (1712), 'We find the Works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of Art.' 51 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Collected Writings, R Masters & C Kelly, Eds, UP New England, 1990-2004. Vol8, p43. 52 George Shaw and Frederick Nodder, The Naturalist's Miscellany: Or Coloured Figures of Natural Objects Drawn and Described Immediately from Nature, 24 vols. [London: Nodder & Co., 1789-1813], 10:384. 53 Poetic diction has been an issue since Aristophanes’ suggestion that Euripedes claimed to use ‘language man to man’. Aristophane’s The Frogs contains a debate on poetics between Aeschylus and Euripides. Euripedes boasted he did not rely on the fabulous, ‘I wrote about familiar things, things the audience know about.’ (from L959, l959). classics.mit.edu/Aristophanes/frogs.html. He didn’t use extravagant vocabulary or add obscure references. He spoke in human terms (phrazein anthropeis, language man to man) avoiding ornament. (1178) He writing was clear and accurate (saphes, leptos). The diction employed for this thesis is neither poetic, nor overly theoretical. I write merely to be understood. Paul Fry's A Defense of Poetry (1995) won the Bad Writing Contest, sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature 1996 , for, ’It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasise, in reading, the helplessness-rather than the will to power-of its fall into conceptuality.’ 54 Horace argued in Ars Poetica, ‘in weaving together your words you will have / great success if your exciting juxtapositions / make the common word suddenly new.’ (L46-48) Horace, The Odes, Epodes, Satires, and Epistles, London and New York: Frederick Warne and Co., 1892. Eliot claimed ‘What Dryden did in fact, was to reform the language, and devise a natural, conversational style of speech in verse in place of an artificial and decadent one. . . he restored English verse to the condition of speech.’ Dryden emphasises naturalness in his 1664 dedication to ‘The Rival Ladies’ where he asks for ‘the elegance of prose’ and in his ‘Essay on Dramatic Poetry’ (1665/6, pub 1668). 55 Parkes suggests that, ‘Locke’s views contributed to the formation of what became a prevalent attitude regarding the English language: that it ought to be subjected to a process of careful regulation with a view to achieving correctness and precision for the expression and communication of ideas . . .’ M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West, Scholar Press, 1992, p91. 56 ‘Historically, there was a standard of prose, and especially of expository prose, that the vernacular had to achieve. French Neo-classicism led the way here too; the strictures against figurative language in Sprat and the Royal Society imitated the French Academy and neo-classical ideals of diction.’ Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, Yale 1980, p135. It is this elegance and discipline that led the poet Malherbe to proclaim, ‘I will always defend the purity of the French tongue,’ and the poet, Mallarmé to attempt to ‘purify the language of the tribe.’ Purity ends up with music or even just sound. Hugo Ball, ‘In these phonetic poems we totally renounce the language that journalism has abused and corrupted. We must return to the innermost alchemy of the word, we must even give up the word too, to keep poetry for its last and holiest refuge.’ Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time, Tran Ann Raimes, Viking, 1974, p71. 57 John Carey, Faber book of Science, Faber and Faber 1995, p8-9, As Hartman puts it, ‘Historically, there was a standard of prose, and especially of expository prose, that the vernacular had to achieve. French Neo-classicism led the way here too; the strictures against figurative language in Sprat and the Royal Society imitated the French Academy and neo-classical ideals of diction.’ Hartman, ibid ,p135. 58 Jill Bradbury claims, ‘Their concern with semantics, referentiality, and rhetoric was perhaps the most important philosophical influence on the eighteenth-century understanding of literary kinds.’ Jill Marie Bradbury, ‘New Science and the "New Species of Writing": Eighteenth-Century Prose Genres’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 27:1, 2003, p30. 59 He was student of the secretary to the Royal Society, John Wilkins, The History was published in 1667 (the same year as Paradise Lost) and attacks poetry (despite being prefaced by an ‘Ode to the Royal Society’ by Abraham Cowley, Poet Laureate. The danger in Spratt’s opinion was ‘Obfuscation caused by the national fondness for metaphor, imagery, ambiguity and verbal embellishments of all kinds should be avoided as more proper to the childhood of the language and unsuited to the age of reason that it has now attained.’ Quoted Parry, ibid, p151. However Richard Dawkins thinks there is poetry in science but not in the writing, clarity will suffice because ‘The poetry is in the science.’ He is mistaken poetry is in the language. Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: science, delusion and the appetite for wonder, Houghon Mifflin, 1998. 60 Bacon’s New Organon anticipated a language in strict relation with nature, ‘And for all that concerns ornaments of speech, similitudes, treasury of eloquence, and such like emptiness, let it be utterly dismissed. Also let all those things which are admitted be themselves set down briefly and concisely, so that they may be nothing les than words.’ The Works, Eds., J Spedding et al; Riverside Press. 1863, V4, p254. 61 Thomas Sprat, a student of the secretary to the Royal Society, John Wilkins, began his History of the Royal Society in 1663. He attacks poetry despite a preface ‘Ode to the Royal Society’ by Abraham Cowley. The book’s major theme is the purification of language from poetic artifice given that language was a tool for learning. He complained, ‘The poets of old to make all things look more venerable than they were, devised a thousand false Chimeras; on every Field, River, Grove and Cave they bestowed a Fantasm of their own making: With these they amazed the world... we are beholden to experiments; which though they have not yet completed the discovery of the true world, yet they have already vanquished those wild inhabitants of the false world, that us’d to astonish the minds of men.’ quoted p 166-7. He warned of ‘the national fondness for metaphor, imagery, ambiguity and verbal embellishments.’ Walter Ong notes the roots of Spratt’s ideas, ‘The plain style, about which so much has been written lately, emerges as an ideal and actuality among their followers, particularly the Puritan or other ‘enthusiastic’ or ‘Methodist’ preachers whose formal education was controlled by a Ramist [16th century logician Petrus Ramus] dialectic evolved to the limit of its original implications.’ Ramus... (1958) Octagon Books, 1974, p283. 62 Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, Yale 1980, p149. 63 Joseph Glanvill, Plus Ultra, or the Progress and Advance of Knowledge Since the Days of Aristotle, ed. Jackson I. Cope (1668; Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Fascimiles and Reprints, 1958), Paula Findlen Between Carnival and Lent: The Scientific Revolution at the Margins of Culture Configurations 6.2 (1998, qu p264 64 Moody E. Prior, ‘Joseph Glanvill, Witchcraft, and Seventeenth-Century Science’, Modern Philology, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Nov., 1932), pp. 167-193. Stephen Metcalf believes Glanvill turned from Puritanism towards a Platonist rationalism influenced by Descartes. 65 Literary language, ‘lays on the stratification of meaning; it narrates one thing in order to tell something else; it delineates itself in a language from which it continually draws effects of meaning that cannot be circumscribed or checked.’ de Certeau, ibid, 1983, p128 66 Third version of Vanity published under the title, Against Confidence in Philosophy (1676), see H.F. Kearney, ‘Merton Revisited’, Science Studies, Vol 3:1, Review Issue Jan. 1973, 72-78. 67 Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatising: The Three Versions, with a critical introduction by Stephen Metcalf, Hove, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1970. 68 Galileo quoted in Edward Jones, Reading the Book of Nature, Ohio UP, 1989, p22. Quoted in Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, OUP, 1980, p 97. 69 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Cambridge UP, 1979, p71-88, 180-2, 186, 193-4. 70 Lennard J Davis, Factual Fictions: the origins of the English novel, Penn, 83, p140 71 He emphasises that texts at this time were not standardised, piracy and editorial meddling were widespread For example, Shakespeare's first folio, ‘boasted some six hundred different typefaces, along with non-uniform spelling and punctuation, erratic divisions and arrangement, mispaging and irregular proofing.’ Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book, U of Chicago P, 1998, p31. No two copies were identical and no one version is correct. 72 ‘Poetry... is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science.’ Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797-1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green, in The Cornell Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Parrish [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1992, P752-3. 73 In the "Appendix to the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads" (1802) and the "Essay Supplementary to the Preface" (1815) See F. Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit, New Haven & London, 1977, p6. 74 Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, delusion and the appetite for wonder, Houghon Mifflin, 1998. 75 Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Black Swan, 2004, p437 76 Estimates of the possible number of existing species of different groups are staggering: 1.5 million species of fungi, 300,000 species of bacteria, 400,000 species of nematodes and 40,000 species of protozoa. 77 The Natural History of Selborne by Gilbert White - ‘In a series of letters addressed to THOMAS PENNANT, ESQ. and The Hon. DAINES BARRINGTON Advertisement. The Author of the following Letters takes the liberty, with all proper deference, of laying before the public his idea of parochial history, which, he thinks, ought to consist of natural productions and occurrences as well as antiquities. He is also of opinion that if stationary men would pay some attention to the districts on which they reside, and would publish their thoughts respecting the objects that surround them, from such materials might be drawn the most complete county-histories.’ http://www.ul.cs.cmu.edu/webRoot/Books/_Gutenberg_Etext_Books/etext98/tnhos10.txt 78 Journals of Gilbert White, Ed., Walter Johnson, Routlede & Kegan Paul, 1970. [Slightly edited]. 79 ‘The changeless stuff, and what from that may spring / Is fixed forevermore? Lastly we see How far the tilled surpass the fields untilled / And to the labour of our hands return / Their more abounding crops; there are indeed / Within the earth primordial germs of things, / Which, as the ploughshare turns the fruitful clods / And kneads the mould, we quicken into birth.’ from Proem BOOK I. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Ed. & Trans. Cyril Bailey, OUP, 1947. The form may have derived from Empedocles’ poem, ‘On Nature’ (which Aristotle argued was not a poem) Dalzell notes that Aristotle initiated the debate on the status of didactic poetry when he denied the status of poet to Empedocles, but ancient writers did not recognise the didactic as a separate genre. The debate has been sterile. Alexander Dalzell, The Criticism of Didactic Poetry: Essays on Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid, U of Toronto P, 1996. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Trans. William Ellery Leonard, http://classics.mit.edu//Carus/nature_things.html 80 Native 18th C Georgics include: John Phillip’s ‘Cyder’ (1708), Christopher Smart’s ‘Hop Garden’ (c1750) and Stephen Duck on the sweat of labour (c1725). 81 Warton wrote that Pope excelled in poetry ‘of the didactic, moral, and satyric kind; and, consequently, not of the most poetic species of poetry Quoted by Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England, Princeton UP, 1970, p366. 82 "Advertisement," The Botanic Garden, Part II. Containing The Loves of the Plants: A Poem. With Philosophical Notes (1789). See Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. See the section The Poetics of Labour; Chap. 4. The Georgic at Work; and Chap5. The Lyricisation of Labour. 83 The struggle for existence is present in Erasmus Darwin's description of plants striving for light and air: “All animals therefore, I contend, have a similar cause of their organization, originating from a single living filament.” Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, the laws of organic life, Volume 1 Boston, Thomas and Andrews 1803, p392 [Second American Edition, from the Third London Edition,. The term “filament” may seem vague; keep in mind that the cell theory of Schleiden and Schwann, that all living organisms are composed of cells and cells are the basic building blocks of tissues, dates from 1838-39. “The final course of this contest among males seems to be, that the strongest and most active animal should propagate the species which should thus be improved." 84 Between the time of his return from the Beagle voyage and the publication, more than 20 years later, of the Origin of Species. 85 The Romantic poets which was engraved by Blake, Fuseli and others. Darwin was particularly interested in mechanics (a key member of the Lunar Society) as well as botany and prefiguring his grandson’s theory of evolution. Joseph Priestley and Josiah Wedgwood and Matthew Boulton were key players. It ended around 1809. 86Wilfred Blunt suggests, "perhaps, however, it was just as well that he had these blind spots: a tenth part of the task he was to set himself would have been a lifetime's work for any ordinary man (as he frequently said). Wilfred Blunt, Linneaus, Collins 1971, p31. 87 Desmond King-Hele In the appendix of his biography of Erasmus. 88 “Many of these organisms are adaptive generalists—species that flourish in a variety of ecological settings, easily switch among food types, and breed prolifically. And some have their needs met more completely and efficiently by humans than by Mother Nature.” Stephen M. Meyer, The extinction crisis is over. We lost, April 12, 2005, The Boston Review 89 J Paul Hunter, ibid, p201-3. Hunter posits such thinking with the beginnings of the novel, ‘It is no accident that journalism and the novel - as well as the adventurous spirit and preoccupation with the epithanic moment of discovery that sponsored both - got their impetus primarily from Protestantism in general and Dissent in particular.’ P199. Hunter’s thesis is that the novel emerged from such an environment rather than being a bastard offspring of romances. 90 Rosamond W. Purcell, ‘The game of the name. (natural history collections)(The Problematics of Collecting and Display, part 2)’, The Art Bulletin, v77.n2, June 1995, p180. 91 Richard Sennett, Respect, Penguin 2004, p177. 92 James Putnam, Department of Egyptology, The British Museum (http://www.tumblong.uts.edu.au/about/putnam.cfm) 93 James Clifford, ‘Museums as Contact Zones’ in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Though in this essay it was the stories and songs of indigenous people not objects that were the focus of attention. |