ENGL 240 Literature and Science

"Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light."Alexander Pope, one of the premiere poets of the eighteenth century, intended this epitaph tograce the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton, one of history's most celebrated natural philosophers.This course will examine the relationship of literature and science--two areas of knowledgeproduction and intellectual exploration now commonly thought of as separate and inopposition--from the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century to theend of the British Enlightenment some two hundred years later. We will see how changes in“modern” scientific and literary practice informed, championed, resisted, and shaped eachother. Readings will be drawn from the work of poets, playwrights, natural philosophers,essayists and satirists such as Francis Bacon, Robert Hooke, Thomas Shadwell, MargaretCavendish, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Ephraim Chambers, and WilliamWordsworth.