Browsing by Subject "Donne"

Affects are not reducible to feelings or emotions. On the contrary, Affect Before

Spinoza investigates the extent to which affects exceed, reconfigure and reorganize

bodies and subjects. Affects are constitutive of and integral to dynamic economies of

activity and passivity. This dissertation traces the origins and histories of this definition

of affect, from the Latin affectus, discovering emergent affective approaches to faith,

devotional poetry and philosophy in early modernity. For early modern believers across

confessions, faith was neither reducible to a dry intellectual concern nor to a personal,

emotional appeal to God. Instead, faith was a transformative relation between humans

and God, realized in affective terms that, in turn, reconfigured theories of human agency

and activity. Beginning with John Calvin and continuing through the work of John

Donne, John Milton, and Baruch Spinoza, Affect Before Spinoza posits affectus as a basis

of faith in an emergent Reformed tradition as well as a term that informs disparate

developments in poetry and philosophy beyond Reformed Orthodoxy. Calvin's

configuration of affect turns existing languages of the passions and of rhetorical motives

towards an understanding of faith and certainty. In this sense, Calvin, Donne, Spinoza

and Milton use affectus to pose questions of agency, will, tendency, inclination, and

determinism.

My dissertation explores literature’s participation in these cross-disciplinary debates over nothingness; I argue that literary forms create the possibilities of scientific discourse later in the century. To fully understand the complex network of relationships that formed early modern science as well as, in consequence, our own experimental philosophy requires examining the challenges that literature issues to science. To demonstrate the mutually productive relationship between the literature and science of the period, my dissertation charts the seventeenth century's different literary conceptions of nothingness, and the contribution of writers such as John Donne, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish to these debates over both the nature of nothingness and, more broadly, how we come to know anything at all. Literary texts – in the form of sonnets, tragicomedies, and even proto-science fiction – produce knowledge in ways that anticipate and subtly revise scientific processes.

The first chapter, “Encompassing Nothingness in Donne’s Poetry” evaluates two of John Donne’s poems from Songs and Sonnets alongside the introduction of the symbol of zero into Western systems of calculation and the invention of the microscope. I argue for a re-reading of poems such as “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” and “The Flea” that accounts for their seemingly paradoxical representation of absence and presence by considering Donne’s thought in terms of mathematical developments as well as developing literary technologies. The culmination in the poem’s well-known image of the compass, drawing a circle centered on a point inscribes the Arabic symbol for zero; the poem thus participates in the broader project of transforming nothingness into an appropriate object for scientific inquiry. Donne’s poetry also anticipates scientific method by forming imagined communities of observers whom he addresses and leads through a process of witnessing nothingness, thus revealing its status as an object of scientific inquiry, and consequently, as something after all.

Chapter 2, “Playing at Nothing in The Winter’s Tale,” looks at the treatment of nothingness in this play as a model for literature’s production of experimental science in the seventeenth century. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes’s solipsistic assurance of his wife’s infidelity and the infallibility of his own senses gives way to knowledge formed collectively by a performance that reforms and reconciles the community. This performance suggests that the community, rather than the solitary individual, is the basis for building knowledge. Through analyzing Leontes’s method of knowledge production versus the communal models that close the play, I argue that The Winter’s Tale preemptively figures the shift from a patronage-based court philosophy to an experimental philosophy. In doing so, The Winter’s Tale helps to revise the dominant narrative about when the idea of communal witnessing begins by emphasizing the importance of literary contributions to conceptualizing the history of science.

Chapter 3, “Experience in Paradise Lost” pays particular attention to the shift from observation to experience as represented in Milton’s poetry. Engaging with critical debates over Milton’s materialism, I read Milton’s epic as it rejects the idea of creation ex nihilo and instead focuses on creation out of Chaos. Just as Boyle justified his explorations into atomistic philosophy and rejected the idea of a universe created by random atomic interactions, Milton’s universe, too, is established and ordered by a divine Creator. Unlike Boyle, however, Milton rejects the experiment, which he identifies with a fallen world, in favor of experience – described in Paradise Lost as wisely used, individually mediated reason.

Chapter 4, “‘To Make Your World of Nothing’: Nothingness in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World” examines Cavendish’s 1666 utopian proto-science fiction romance in conjunction with Robert Hooke’s 1665 Micrographia, a text that explores the minute worlds opened to human observation with the microscope’s invention. Cavendish’s text envisions a world-building that is entirely the result of individual human invention – in her words, one made of “Nothing but Wit.” Cavendish focuses on the imaginative possibilities opened by a creation focused on seeming nothingness; her text fantasizes about a world in which this act of creation forces multiple boundaries to break down (human / animal, scientist / experiment). The Blazing World challenges the rules for scientific practice enshrined by the Royal Society by imagining experiments that create hybrids that challenge the seemingly objective stance of the scientific observer as well as the facts produced in the laboratory itself.

“Works of Mercy: Literature, Compassion, and Devotion in Early Modern England,” argues for the crucial role of literature in shaping, expanding, and contesting the limits of compassion in early seventeenth century England. Reading Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Herbert’s The Temple—texts which hold affliction at their very core—alongside contemporary prayer books, sermons, and devotional manuals, I show how compassion occupies a vital and under-explored space at the nexus of early modern understandings of body, religion, and community. Saturated in the visceral vocabulary of roiling bowels and melting hearts, early modern compassion—literally “to suffer with”—is the means through which literary and devotional writers work through questions of how to respond to human suffering, and to whose suffering one should respond. Literary explorations of compassion, I argue, are thus uniquely situated as spaces in which vital questions of belonging and relationship can be articulated outside of the emerging discourse of nationhood and across the fraught divides of confessional identity. Taking seriously both the bodily and spiritual rhetoric of compassion, I show how shared practices and communal rituals surrounding the experience of human suffering are reimagined through literary texts that work to both theorize compassion, and to arouse compassion within their readers. In so doing, these early modern attempts to write compassion are always attempts to work compassion: to reduce the self to make room for the suffering of the other, to acknowledge affliction as the common tissue of humanity.

Each chapter takes up a different author, genre, and work of mercy to demonstrate how these writers approach the ethical work their texts can do, in the reader and in the world. The introduction, “Writing Compassion in Early Modern England,” explores the vocabulary of early modern compassion, which relies on vividly visceral terms of roiling bowels and melting hearts, and which connects implicitly with the topos of the Christian community imagined as the mystical body of Christ. Chapter 1, “Executing Mercy: Measure for Measure and the Impossibility of Compassion,” focuses on the most critically ignored characters in the play—Mistress Overdone, Pompey, Kate Keepdown—and on the play’s little-discussed obsession with the traditional merciful work of visiting prisoners, to argue that Shakespeare appropriates familiar cultural touchstones of compassionate action to explore how compassionate identification is both stirred and stymied through dramatic form. Chapter 2, “Curing Mercy: John Donne’s Pedagogy of Compassion,” takes up questions of the edificatory value of suffering by reading Donne’s paradoxical treatment of affliction as compassion in his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) and in two closely contemporary sermons. Suffused with the language of the Book of Common Prayer’s “Order for the Visitation of the Sick,” I argue that Donne’s text implicitly argues against a theology of suffering (articulated in the early modern ars moriendi tradition) which attempts to convert worldly pain into spiritual joy, and to understand the suffering of others as beneficial to the self. Chapter 3, “Consuming Mercy: George Herbert and the Poetics of Compassion” reads devotional lyrics from The Temple (1633) alongside the pastoral manual A Priest to the Temple (pub. 1652) to argue that Herbert’s poetry—and specifically his frequent deployment of clusters of related images surrounding food, hunger, and thinness—becomes a site of compassionate engagement which demands that we understand these bodily references as always both literal (referring to the corporeal body) and metaphorical (referring to the corporate and mystical Body of Christ). The Coda, “Considering Compassion,” reflects on the nature of compassion as shared suffering, and as worthy work.