Unit name | World Processors: Scientific and Medical Poetry from Parmenides to Padel |
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Unit code | CLAS10031 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | C/4 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
Unit director | Professor. Haskell |
Open unit status | Open |
Pre-requisites |
None. |
Co-requisites |
None. |
School/department | Department of Classics & Ancient History |
Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
Science, medicine and poetry may seem strange bedfellows today, but the project of natural philosophical and/or medical poetry, already challenged by Aristotle, has been an unusually tenacious one in the Classical Tradition. The Presocratics Parmenides and Empedocles committed their natural philosophies to verse; the Roman cosmological poet, Lucretius, was rediscovered and widely imitated in and since the Renaissance, influencing modern writers from James Clark Maxwell to Marx. In the early modern period, poets of the Roman Catholic Jesuit order produced reams of Latin verse on subjects from the medicinal benefits of chocolate to electricity, and Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather, was only one of many scientific poets writing in English in the eighteenth century. Why was the genre so popular and why has it declined? Is it due for a revival..? This unit explores both scientific and/or medical poems in the Classical Tradition and perennial debates over the literary status of a ‘poetry of things’, the relationship of scientific didactic poetry to descriptive poetry and science fiction – always with a focus on how and where the reception of ancient literature has been critical.
Aims:
On successful completion of this unit, students will:
1 x 2hr lecture and 1 x 2hr workshop
1) One literary-historical commentary exercise of 750 words (20%);
2) One creative exercise of 300 words, accompanied by a short reflective essay of 750 words (30%).
3) One exam of 90 minutes (50%)
All elements will assess ILOs 1-4.
Aristotle, Poetics
P. Hardie and S. Gillespie (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (Cambridge, 2011)
D. Norbrook, S. Harrison, and P. Hardie (eds), Lucretius and the Early Modern, ed. David Norbrook, Stephen Harrison (Oxford, 2015)
Y. Haskell, Loyola’s Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry (Oxford, 2003)
A. Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Harvard, 2010)
G. Passanante, The Lucretian Renaissance (Chicago, 2011)
D. Brown, The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (Cambridge, 2013)
W.R. Johnson, Lucretius in the Modern World (London, 2000)
M. Serres, The Birth of Physics ([Paris, 1977], 2000)
D. Kennedy, Rethinking Reality (Michigan, 2002)