Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry

by Walpert; Bryan

• ISBN13: 9780415893343
• ISBN10: 0415893348
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-09-26
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This book examines types of resistance to the authority of scientific knowledge, tracing the source of these resistances to both their literary precedents and the scientific zeitgeists that helped to produce them. Walpert argues that contemporary poetry offers a palimpsest of resistance, using as case studies the poets Alison Hawthorne Deming, Pattiann Rogers, Albert Goldbarth, and Joan Retallack to trace the recapitulation of romantic arguments (inherited from Keats, Shelly, and Coleridge, which in turn were produced in part in response to Newtonian physics), modernist arguments (inherited from Eliot and Pound, arguments influenced in part by relativity and quantum theory), and postmodernist arguments (arguments informed by post-structuralist theory, e.g. Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, with affinities to arguments for the limitations of science in the philosophy, sociology, and rhetoric of science). These poems reveal the discursive ideologies of scientific language'”reveal, in other words, the performativity of scientific language, and in doing so, these poems themselves can also be read as performative acts based on the notion of intervention.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 3
Popularization, Praise, and the Aesthetic Pleasures of Science	p. 15
Poetry, Science, and Claims on Knowledge	p. 29
The Ghost of Romanticism: Perception and Imagination	p. 61
The Ghost of Modernism: Relativity of Knowledge	p. 92
The Ghost of Language: The Postmodern Subject and the Poiesis of Science	p. 116
The Ghost of Science: Knowledge as Intervention	p. 145
Epilogue	p. 180
Notes	p. 189
Works Cited	p. 197
Index	p. 213
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