Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
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
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 metaphors, focussing 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.