Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 13 Number 2, August 2012

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Jenkins, Alice. Space and the  ‘March of  Mind.’Literature and the Physical Sciences in  Britain. 1815-1850.  New York, Oxofrd: Oxford  University Press, 2007. pp257.

 

Reviewed by

 

Krishna Barua

Indian Institute Of Technology Guwahati

 

Space is very much in the agenda these days”  Dorian Massey’s  epigraph is  explicatory  of the increasing importance of space in critical enquiry over recent decades. Space and the  ‘March of  Mind.’Literature and the Physical Sciences in  Britain is an interdiscliplinary study of British literary  and scientific culture in the first half of the nineteenth century, with its emphasis on the spatial imagination. It spans over  poetry,essays and fiction as well as scientific papers  and journals to give a new rediscovery of the politics of space in representation of early nineteenth century literature’s relationship with the physical sciences.  Its central concern reflects  how  literary studies  from the mid  1980’s  have started taking the geographic turn,with its specificity and spatiality,territoriality and locality. Geography has been  one of the  explicit conditions shaping the production & reception of texts.The aim of the book is to develop and  a more accurate understanding and  rediscovery of the politics of space in representation in the early nineteenth century with the  possibilities  of  a new understanding of its own culture. The argument is addressed into two phases. Part  1 is  titled Thinking  with   Spaces  which has the first chapter on   “Culture as Nature:Landscape Metaphors and Access to the world of Learning.” discusses the landscape metaphors that very frequently used to regulate and describe access to knowledge,where it is imagined as a series of outside spaces, as an immense tract of country of gardens,wilderness and picturestue landscapes,beginning the tussle between nature and culture.It is  critical investigation of the politics of space. The next two chapters explore new knowledge in the use of spatial metaphorsfocussing on construction of boundaries between scientific disciplines with its objection to specialization. Chapter II deals with “Organising the space of knowledge also explores the political implications of the particular forms of spatial metaphor used in arguments about individualism,conquest and exploration.  It discusses some contemporary attempts to construct a model for laying out knowledge in comprehensible patterns, referencing from Middlemarch to   Wordsworth’s  and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria  and  present knowledge in a visual  spatial pattern.  In this context as in Chapter III: “Disciplinary boundaries and Border Disputes,” there is no polarization such  as identity politics since  it focuses on spatial metaphors,tropes,and models used in early 19th century writing  and  about new knowledges and new conditions of knowledge .  Chapter  IV “ Space and the Language of Science.” develops the analysis of the rhetorics of the nations in science and  its concern with rhetorics which bound new scientific ideas into cultural referrants. Part II titled  Thinking  about    Space which addresses pure space in geometry,new ideas about the nature of space in physics,and epic poetry dealing with cosmic space. This  part of the book focuses on writing directly about space,where geometry  and physics carries profound cultural significance in representing space in its purest form in three  chapters : “Aspiring to the Abstract:Pure Space and Geometry”;“Bodies in  Space: Ether, Light and  the  Beginnings of the  Field”; and finally “Chaos, the  Void and Poetry.” Field theory,as propounded by Michael Faraday undermines all previous  conceptions of space and paves the way for energy physics.The final chapter takes up the themes of spatial organizations and systematization from  Part 1 of the book and combines them with chapter VI’s emphasis on dematerializing space. Mention may be made of the biblical  epics and the renderings of creation  and chaos which gave an extraordinary view into the relations of literature and science in the period.

 

Alice Jenkins steps back from lived spaces of social geography to view that abstract space with which knowledge was organized with and within which early nineteenth century organized knowledge and how they affected literature and literary imagination.  Jenkins shows how  contemporary writers  try to solve the problem by rethinking the nature of space by  dismantling boundaries, critically investigating not the described space of  geography(nations, continents,maps) but “the immaterial conceptual space” that contains and informs those other kinds of space of distances ,sizes and locations. This  allows a novel way to think  and organize about arrangement of “things”.  Michel Foucalt’s work  Space, Knowledge and  Power has shown literary studies how space and place provide models for exploring the effects of power within systems,textual or other.In clear analysis, It is certainly true that the kind of mental,or conceptual abstract space focused in the book exists in dynamic relationship with the lived geography of everyday life and is subject to change and variation as material conditions differ and alter.  The author has used the interrelations of scientific and literary cultures in the period as the main filter.  The debate naturally negotiates exchanges between  science and material culture address the following question. Does  the burgeoning mass access to print culture combined with rapid scientific development in the first half of the 19th century  create a crisis in the dialectics  of  managing knowledge  and ideas  of space ? It  explores  the ways in which literary and scientific writers struggled with the same central intellectual, and poltical concerns in organizing knowledge.

 

Space and the  ‘March of  Mind.’Literature and the Physical Sciences in  Britain. 1815-1850  makes valuable contributions to our understanding of space environmental philosophy and the cultural landscape.  The ideas were rooted in all genres and disciplines, from philosophy and the physical sciences to novels, poems, journals and  treatises. This book is bound to be of interest both to the casual reader and the academic scholar in both area-centered and comparative cross-cultural frameworks.