Literature After Euclid: The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment (Haney Foundation Series) PDF
Preview Literature After Euclid: The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment (Haney Foundation Series)
Literature After Euclid HANEYFOUNDATIONSERIES AvolumeintheHaneyFoundationSeries, establishedin1961withthegeneroussupport ofDr.JohnLouisHaney Literature After Euclid The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment Matthew Wickman university of pennsylvania press philadelphia Copyright(cid:2)2016UniversityofPennsylvaniaPress Allrightsreserved.Exceptforbriefquotationsusedfor purposesofrevieworscholarlycitation,noneofthisbook maybereproducedinanyformbyanymeanswithout writtenpermissionfromthepublisher. Publishedby UniversityofPennsylvaniaPress Philadelphia,Pennsylvania19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmericaonacid-freepaper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData Wickman,Matthew,author. LiteratureafterEuclid:thegeometricimaginationinthe longScottishEnlightenment/MatthewWickman. pagescm.—(HaneyFoundationseries) Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex. ISBN978-0-8122-4795-4(alk.paper) 1.Scottishliterature—18thcentury—Historyandcriticism. 2.Englishliterature—Scottishauthors—Historyand criticism.3.Geometryinliterature.4.Enlightenment— Scotland.5.Scotland—Intellectuallife—18thcentury.I.Title. II.Series:HaneyFoundationseries. PR8547.W532016 820.9’9411—dc23 2015022963 ForKerry,Hadley,andElena:adventurersonallmytangents This page intentionally left blank contents Introduction 1 PART I. THEOREM: SHAPES OF TIME Chapter1.Scotland’sAgeofUnion:TowardanElongated EighteenthCentury 21 Chapter2.Scott’sShapes 53 PART II. SCHOLIUM: SCENES OF WRITING Chapter3.‘‘WildGeometry’’andthePicturesque 95 Chapter4.BurnsAfterReading,or,OnthePoeticFold BetweenShapeandNumber 130 PART III. LOCUS: MEASURING THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT ACROSS HISTORY Chapter5.TheNewtonianTurn/Turning fromNewton:JamesThomson’sPoeticCalculus 163 Chapter6.ALongandShapelyEighteenthCentury 194 viii Contents Notes 223 Bibliography 255 Index 275 Acknowledgments 291 Introduction Alwaysvisualize!Increasingly,thisrevisionofFredricJameson’sfamousopen- ingsalvoinhis1981studyThePoliticalUnconscious—‘‘Alwayshistoricize!’’— seemstobeacquiringthestatusofanimperativeinanageofbigdata,when traditional distinctions of canon and period seem ever less satisfying, ever more the product of historiographical accident.1 Visualization, the graphical displayofinformation,accompaniesanewmethodofhistoricistengagement: distantreading.AsFrancoMorettiputsitinhiscollectionbearingthattitle, ‘‘The trouble with close reading,’’ the method of much of the ‘‘new’’—that is, old—historicism, ‘‘is that it necessarily depends on an extremely small canon. . . . [Y]ou invest so much in individual texts only if you think that very few of them really matter. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense.’’2 And in anerawhendigitalarchivesmakevastcorpusesavailableonline,adiminish- ing number of scholars, it seems, find close reading sensible. ‘‘Close reading isnotonlyimpracticalasameansofgatheringevidenceinthedigitallibrary,’’ Matthew Jockers argues, ‘‘but big data render it totally inappropriate as a methodofstudyingliteraryhistory.’’3Inpart,thisisbecausetheexponential increase in the amount of information at our disposal and the capacity to scalethatinformationtosizesrangingfromthevirtuallyinfinitetotheinfin- itesimalwillinexorablyexertaninfluenceonthekindsofhistoricalquestions we are able to pose. These are stories we must show as much as tell. And so, digital humanists make the case that scholars of literary history ‘‘have increasingly become involved in what is often referred to as the ‘visual turn’ ...sometimescorrelatedwiththe‘spatialturn’thathasfavoredmapping.’’4 If we ask the question, as digital humanists often do, of how our tools forengagingthepastreflectthetoolsofthatpast,thenwemayfindourselves considering‘‘modelsofstatisticalexpression,suchasbarandpiecharts,[that] came from the world of 18th century ‘political arithmetic’ and provided a richandmuchdevelopedlegacythatextendedthevocabularyofmucholder visual forms of diagrams, grids, and trees.’’5 Or, we may undertake a more
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