Scientific Poetry and Poetics in Britain and Germany, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment

英国和德国的科学诗歌和诗学，从文艺复兴到启蒙运动

• 批准号: 528050326
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Florian Klaeger
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Lehrstuhl für Englische Literaturwissenschaft
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 资助国家: 德国
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/528050326?language=en
• 关键词: Scientific; Poetry; Poetics; Britain; Germany

This project explores a mass of largely-unknown scientific poetry, ranging across geology and sea-science, botany and physico-theology, and a corresponding poetics of science that reveals a vibrant facet of Renaissance, Restoration, and Enlightenment culture: the production not only of ideas, but of new, technical vocabularies and fast-paced neologizing, all forged in the particular demands of poetic form. This writing did not serve as an equivalent of prose, but positively understood its practice to address nuances of the world, physical and metaphysical, that prose could not plumb. Poetry, the era believed, did not function as mere ornament, but to reveal deep structures in the created world. This potential was theorized by the period’s emerging literary criticism, a practice that developed in, the research will show, demonstrable parallel with modern ‘science’. The project will unearth and analyze a body of work by women, much of it still in manuscript, that deploys its theo-scientific ideas to dazzling effect, as well as a mass of Neo-Latin verse on topics ranging from blood transfusion to flight theory. It will also show the diffusion of this phenomenal body of scientific literature and its agile poetics, whose influence can be seen in a set of networks operating across Northern Europe - in Latin and German as well as English, and it will trace how a long history of didactic scientific verse morphs and mutates with particularly dramatic effects in the late 17th and early 18th century. The research addresses lacunae in both English and German scholarship. Much recent work has addressed the poetics of early modern science, but it has focused almost exclusively on prose writing, often of a later period, by male writers, in the vernaculars. The discipline is only beginning to explore the 17th and 18th centuries’ specific affordances of poetic form for communicating natural philosophical knowledge, and indeed the shared imaginative processes that were thought to inform both domains. One consequence of this blind spot has been a thoroughgoing neglect of a significant English-German poeto-scientific transfer in the early European Enlightenment. The project's reformulation of the era’s poetic ideas - its cosmopoetics, its theopoetics and its physico-theology - bears on how we understand emergent aesthetics in this most tumultuous period for the vernaculars of both England and Germany. It will also reveal a good deal about the compositional and referential density of both scientific knowledge and poetic forms, writing that came to be valued precisely because of its discursive volatility and its kaleidoscopic capacity. The project opens up Anglo-German perspectives on the European res publica litteraria that have not been studied, and via its exploration of respective textual corpora and archival finds, the cooperation promises to reveal connections and otherwise hidden parallels and differences in formal traditions and their historical trajectories.

该项目探讨了大量未知的科学诗歌，涵盖地质学和海洋科学，植物学和物理神学，以及相应的科学诗学，揭示了文艺复兴，恢复和启蒙文化的一个充满活力的方面：不仅是思想的生产，而且是新的，技术词汇和快节奏的新词，所有这些都是在诗歌形式的特殊要求中锻造的。这种写作并不等同于散文，而是积极地理解它的做法，以解决世界的细微差别，物理和形而上学，散文不能探测。这个时代相信诗歌不仅仅是装饰品，而是揭示了创造世界的深层结构。这一潜力被这一时期新兴的文学批评理论化，研究将表明，这一实践是在与现代“科学”平行的情况下发展起来的。该项目将挖掘和分析一系列女性作品，其中大部分仍处于手稿状态，这些作品将其神学科学思想发挥到令人眼花缭乱的效果，以及大量新拉丁诗歌，主题从输血到飞行理论。它还将展示科学文学及其敏捷的诗学的惊人的身体的传播，其影响力可以在一系列网络中看到，这些网络在北方-拉丁语和德语以及英语中运作，它将追溯教学科学诗歌的悠久历史是如何在17世纪末和18世纪世纪初以特别戏剧性的效果变形和变异的。这项研究解决了英语和德语学术界的空白。最近的许多著作都涉及早期现代科学的诗学，但几乎完全集中在散文写作上，通常是后期男性作家的白话文。这门学科只是开始探索17和18世纪诗歌形式的具体启示，以传达自然哲学知识，实际上，被认为是告知这两个领域的共同想象过程。这一盲点的后果之一是彻底忽视了欧洲启蒙运动早期英德诗歌科学的重大转移。该项目对那个时代的诗学观念--宇宙诗学、神诗学和物理神学--的重新表述，关系到我们如何理解在这个最动荡的时期，英国和德国本土的新兴美学。它还将揭示大量关于科学知识和诗歌形式的组成和参考密度，写作之所以受到重视，正是因为它的话语波动性和万花筒般的能力。该项目开辟了盎格鲁-德国对尚未研究过的欧洲文献的视角，通过对各自文本语料库和档案发现的探索，合作有望揭示正式传统及其历史轨迹中的联系以及隐藏的相似之处和差异。