Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In "Sweet Science", Amanda Jo Goldstein returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Romantic life writing for which poetry was a privileged technique of empirical inquiry. Goldstein puts apparently literary projects, such as William Blake's poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe's journals "On Morphology", and Percy Shelley's "poetry of life," back into conversation with the openly poetic life sciences of Erasmus Darwin, J. G. Herder, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Such poetic sciences, Goldstein argues, share in reviving Lucretius's "De rerum natura" to advance a view of biological life as neither self-organized nor autonomous, but rather dependent on the collaborative and symbolic processes that give it viable and recognizable form. They summon "De rerum natura" for a logic of life resistant to the vitalist stress on self-authorizing power and to make a monumental case for poetry's role in the perception and communication of empirical realities. The first dedicated study of this mortal and materialist dimension of Romantic biopoetics, "Sweet Science" opens a through-line between Enlightenment materialisms of nature and Marx's coming historical materialism.
About the Author
Amanda Jo Goldstein is assistant professor of English at Cornell University.
Reviews
"Amanda Jo Goldstein's 'Sweet Science' fuses her own generation's ethos of reparative reading – its readiness to be summoned into strangeness by language and letters – with both a level of erudition (across disciplines, languages, and genres), and a practice of argumentation (clear, consistent, and self-accounting) that are associated with earlier practices of scholarship and of critical reading. In other words, this study is itself a work of sweet science. Just as its arguments trouble the truism that the natural sciences are always progressive (here, Lucretius joins with post-classical physics, Goethe with twenty-first-century ontogeny), so its own extraordinary conduct and achievement challenge the other half of that truism, showing that the human sciences can indeed progress".-Marjorie Levinson, University of Michigan
"'Sweet Science' is a singular contribution. It decisively rethinks the history and critical grasp of the life sciences as they converge in literature and science in Romanticism, and its implications for critical theory and the rise of ecosemiotics are equally compelling" – Theresa M. Kelley, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Goldstein's 'Sweet Science' has been anticipated with a keenness unusual for a first book. It does not disappoint. More than a valuable rereading of Blake, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, and Percy Shelley, this book offers a new chapter in the recent recovery of Lucretianism as a powerful shaping force in European literature and thought. It challenges longstanding assumptions about nature and culture, materialism and figuration, some that derive from the Romantic period itself. In the neo-Lucretian alternative excavated by Goldstein, the work of poetry is not inimical to, or even quite distinct from, the work of empirical science. Instead, empiricism and poetics emerge as interanimating one another, fully cooperative in the work of making a world. It is a bold thesis, deftly argued, with implications spelled out for the young Marx and, indeed, for ourselves" – James Chandler, Uniersity of Chicago
