The Intuitions of Analogy in Erasmus Darwin’s Poetics

Griffiths, Devin

doi:10.1353/sel.2011.0031

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…I agree, and would push the point further: since so many “figures of speech” in Darwin's poetic oeuvre perform empirical, realist functions at the “interface between sensation and natural knowledge” (Griffiths, , pp. 651, 646), we may have less to do with a non‐tropological and non‐rhetorical understanding of analogy (Griffiths, , pp. 660, 646) than with a wholesale figural realism on neurophysiological grounds.…”

mentioning

confidence: 93%

“…In a brilliant essay on Darwin's most frequently invoked and explicitly theorized rhetorical and logical device, analogy —whose subsequent permutations Griffiths has traced into the 19th‐century co‐operation between historical fiction and Charles Darwinian evolutionary theory (Griffiths, 2016a)—Griffiths argues that Darwin is an “analogical realist,” for whom analogy was no mere trope or heuristic, but a physiologically‐grounded component of sensory experience, expressive of patterns actually existing in nature (Griffiths, , p. 654). I agree, and would push the point further: since so many “figures of speech” in Darwin's poetic oeuvre perform empirical, realist functions at the “interface between sensation and natural knowledge” (Griffiths, , pp. 651, 646), we may have less to do with a non‐tropological and non‐rhetorical understanding of analogy (Griffiths, , pp.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Nerve poetry and fiber art: Biosemiosis and plasticity in Erasmus Darwin

Goldstein

2020

Literature Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This essay explores the philosophy and poetry of the nervous system in Erasmus Darwin's late 18th-century science of life, arguing that Darwin's theory of animation constitutes an unrecognized chapter in the history of what is now called "biosemiotics." I show how Darwin's earlier modern approach to epigenesis and plasticity-concepts resurgent not only in present day developmental biology and neuroscience, but also in continental theory and philosophychallenges these present discourses to grasp mimesis, poiesis, and rhetoric as intrinsic to the logic of life and to any possible science of the biological sign. Uncovering this possibility means displacing Catherine Malabou's influential neo-Kantian approach to plasticity, which, like that of Kant himself, works to suppress the natural histories of meaning that epigenesis opened in the late 18th, as well as the late 20th, centuries. From the alternative, materialist perspective opened in Erasmus Darwin's work, rhetoric and poetics are implicated in the historical and actual conceptualization of epigenetic plasticity and biosemiosis not because biology is a fictive discourse, but because neural formation and communication actually comprise processes of transposition, association, double-meaning, part-for-whole substitution, and species-specific distortion for which metaphor, metonymy, allegory, synecdoche, and (anthropo-)morphism are technically correct and illuminating names. From this perspective, the most baffling and notorious feature of Erasmus Darwin's own use of words can also be conceived anew. His

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 93%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Nerve poetry and fiber art: Biosemiosis and plasticity in Erasmus Darwin

Goldstein

2020

Literature Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Griffiths observes, “This passage has been taken as a succinct presentation of the basic project of Darwin's various scientific and poetic pursuits” (647), but cautions against this in light of Darwin's practice in his works, arguing for his intention to rehabilitate the figure of analogy against contemporary objections. Kelley goes further and argues, at least in The Botanic Garden , “Darwin's attitude toward analogy is amazingly carefree, or to put it more frankly, careless, about what an analogy might carry along”, so much so that it “undermines the stasis of Linnaean categories” Loves attempts to represent (81).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Flowery Porn: Form and Desire in Erasmus Darwin's The Loves of the Plants

Connolly

2016

Literature Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

When Erasmus Darwin announces that “the general design” of The Loves of the Plants “is to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science” (ii), an echo of the Song of Solomon (itself a touchstone for eroticized botanical imagery) reveals how charged the relationship is: “his banner over me was love” (2:4). This essay argues that taking The Loves of the Plants seriously as an erotic work reveals the essential importance of desire to the evolving diversity of vibrant life it envisions and to the interdisciplinarity it achieves. Not only does the poem popularize the Linnaean sexual system of taxonomy by infusing it with sensibility, creating a landscape driven by desire. The form of the poem makes a mixed marriage of art and science, verse and footnotes, in a tantalizingly episodic (non‐)structure which could be called pornographic. The relationships between the male and female parts of an overwhelming variety of flora are much more varied than the conventional gender roles later critics have often ascribed to the poem. Yet, while each vignette offers another sexual permutation, the cumulative effect blurs variety into sameness, an effect earlier recognized by John Cleland in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Cleland extends the boredom to style, citing the flatness, in inevitable repetition, of the vocabulary of pleasure. The descent of Darwin's poetry into unfashionability under Wordsworthian aesthetics is also the demise of an erotic interdisciplinarity. In addition to the stylistic simultaneity of variety and sameness, Darwin's footnotes, epic similes and tangents are driven from topic to topic by a kind of unchaste curiosity which flattens borders demarcating species, subject headings, legitimate attractions. “The Loves”, both desire and the poem itself, “laugh at all, but Nature's laws” (IV:486). Even Nature's laws play loose with categories, as pollinating insects are seduced by flowers. This article examines how The Loves of the Plants envisions a continuum of life forms and of disciplines by portraying and performing cross‐species erotic interaction. Personification of vegetable reproduction invites readers to conceive of their own desire in botanic terms (as, indeed, readers and parodists did). Fascination with hybridization epitomizes both Darwin's poetry and his science, from the remarkable love affair between nightingale and rose which produces the bird‐flower offspring fantastically described in Loves, to the painstaking study of cross‐breeding in the evolutionarily crucial chapter “Of Generation” in Zoonomia.

show abstract

The Distribution of Romantic Life in Erasmus Darwin’s Later Works

Griffiths

2018

European Romantic Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Intuitions of Analogy in Erasmus Darwin’s Poetics

Cited by 5 publications

References 20 publications

Nerve poetry and fiber art: Biosemiosis and plasticity in Erasmus Darwin

Nerve poetry and fiber art: Biosemiosis and plasticity in Erasmus Darwin

Flowery Porn: Form and Desire in Erasmus Darwin's The Loves of the Plants

The Distribution of Romantic Life in Erasmus Darwin’s Later Works

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About