Download The Dynamic Relationship of Art and Nature in Philosophy and

The Dynamic Relationship of Art and Nature in Philosophy and Literary Theory
Madison Wolfert, 2017
This project began as an exploration of the history of thought surrounding the concepts of
“art” and “nature” that informed Margaret Cavendish’s criticism of mechanical philosophy. I had
written a research paper analyzing this criticism in two of Cavendish’s works, The Blazing World and
Observations Upon Natural Philosophy, in Professor Kitch’s senior seminar in the Spring 2016
semester. After speaking with Professor Kitch, we came to the conclusion that an in-depth
investigation of the terms “art” and “nature” would allow me to situate Cavendish’s argument within
a broader discourse encompassing multiple disciplines. I anticipated that this research would enable
me to better understand the significance of gender in the field of natural philosophy—what we today
might see as proto-science—during the early modern period in England.
I began my work by reading classical Greek and Renaissance texts that would have informed
conceptions of “art” and “nature” during Cavendish’s time. After studying sections of Plato’s
Republic and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Poetics, and Physics, I read essays from 16th century
English theorists Philip Sidney, George Puttenham, and Thomas Hobbes and wrote a paper tracing
the lineage of ideas from the Greek to the English writers. In this paper, I considered the changing
valuation of poetry as an art, from Plato’s condemnation of poetry for its ability to impair reason to
Puttenham’s comparison of the poet’s skill to Nature’s creative ability. This first stage of my
research left me with several key terms (e.g.: mimesis, artifice) to be examined further, as well as a
choice of possible discourses (e.g.: literature, science, politics, ecology) to which I might later refine
my study. Professor Kitch and I spoke again about the direction of my project. We determined that in
order to understand “art” and “nature” in the 16th and 17th centuries fully and perhaps to analyze these
ideas from a new angle, I ought to read current theory as well. Approaching “art” and “nature” from
both antiquity and modern day would provide me with a perspective broad enough to trace the
progression of ideas across centuries.
In the next stage of my research, I jumped forward in time to examine contemporary literary
criticism associated with modern conceptions of “art” and “nature.” I read sections from the work of
Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Slavoj Žižek, Jonathan Sawday, Leonard Barkan, and Timothy Morton.
This reading gave me a taste of the discussions surrounding “art” and “nature” within
psychoanalysis, linguistics, feminism, post-structuralism, cultural studies, Renaissance studies, and
ecological criticism. Of everything I read in this stage, I found an essay written by the prominent
feminist scholar Donna Haraway most thought provoking. I wrote a short paper analyzing this essay,
“A Cyborg Manifesto,” informed by the texts I had studied earlier in the summer. Upon completion
of this writing, I decided to take a feminist approach in my analysis of “art” and “nature.”
Before the beginning of the Fall 2016 semester, I will read Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale
and, with the knowledge I have attained during my eight weeks at Bowdoin, write a mid-length paper
about “art” and “nature” in the play—particularly as these concepts apply to the women characters.
This writing will later become the first chapter of my Honors Project. In the second chapter, I will
analyze Shakespeare’s sonnets concerning gender and the Dark Lady figure. In the third chapter I
will return to Margaret Cavendish and consider her work afresh. I hope to develop a unique approach
to the study of “art” and “nature” in literature by and about women in the Renaissance and early
modern periods.
Faculty Mentor: Aaron Kitch
Funded by the Stahl Summer Research Fellowship
Selected Bibliography
Adams, Hazard. Critical Theory since Plato. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Print.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. W. D. Ross. N.p.: Batoche, 1999. Print.
Aristotle. Physics, Volume I: Books 1-4. Translated by P. H. Wicksteed, F. M. Cornford. Loeb
Classical Library 228. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957.
Aristotle, Longinus, Demetrius. Poetics. Longinus: On the Sublime. Demetrius: On Style. Translated
by Stephen Halliwell, W. Hamilton Fyfe, Doreen C. Innes, W. Rhys Roberts. Revised
by Donald A. Russell. Loeb Classical Library 199. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1995.
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1953. Print.
Barkan, Leonard. Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World. New Haven: Yale
UP, 1975. Print.
Evans, Robert John Weston., and Alexander Marr, eds. Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance
to the Enlightenment. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006. Print.
Hobbes, Thomas, and J. C. A. Gaskin. Leviathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. eBook
Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 12 June. 2016.
Irigaray, Luce. The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell,
1991. Print.
Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Print.
Lambropoulos, Vassilis, and David Neal Miller, eds. Twentieth Century Literary Theory: An
Introductory Anthology. N.p.: SUNY, 1987. Print.
Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 2007. Print.
Puttenham, George. Cornell Paperbacks: Art of English Poesy, A Critical Edition. Ithaca, US:
Cornell University Press, 2007. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 12 June 2016.
Sawday, Jonathan. Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine.
London: Routledge, 2007. Print.
Tayler, Edward W. Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature. New York: Columbia University Print,
1964. Print.
Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture.
Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991. Print.