The Crisis of Infinity: Mathematics, Philosophy, and Nineteenth-Century Poetry
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The Crisis of Infinity: Mathematics, Philosophy, and Nineteenth-Century Poetry by Rachel Elizabeth Feder A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in The University of Michigan 2012 Doctoral Committee: Professor Marjorie Levinson, Chair Professor Adela N. Pinch Professor Yopie Prins Assistant Professor Gillian C. White ! ! ! Acknowledgements This work is dedicated to Marjorie Levinson with infinite thanks. Ever since this project began to take shape in Marjorie’s 2007 seminar on Romantic poetry and philosophy, she has worked to bring out the best in both the scholar and the project. I am thankful to Marjorie for her tireless mentorship, keen insight, honest critique, and endless encouragement. I am lucky to have an advisor who is such a constant source of inspiration and support. Neither this dissertation nor I would be the same without her. Yopie Prins has shared her critical interventions and intellectual communities with me and encouraged the development of my own, expanding my sense of what is possible. Time and again, she has illuminated my scholarly endeavors, showing me how seemingly superfluous points of interest and obsession were actually crucial to my argument. Yopie encouraged experiments, organized ideas, and always saw the good. If my ideas have achieved elegance, they have done so under her watch. I am grateful to Adela Pinch for the constancy and clarity of her counsel. Adela provided an encouraging word when needed and an honest word always. She fostered critical openness, and her generous feedback and painstaking attention to detail fortified my writing process. Adela was always available to discuss my work, and these conversations resulted in a cleared head and an organized mind. I am grateful to her for helping me keep calm and carry on. Many thanks to Gillian White for reminding me that I am still in many ways a student of twentieth-century poetry, and for encouraging in me perspective and grace. Gillian helped me nurture all the concerns intrinsic to my methodology, and reminded me to honor my own intellectual history. Her insight and friendship go far beyond the scope of these pages. ! ii! ! ! ! The Crisis of Infinity has benefitted from conversations with a number of scholars. Frances Ferguson at ELH provided encouragement and useful feedback at a crucial moment. Anne- Lise François, Alice Jenkins, Marilyn Gaull, John Whittier-Ferguson, Kerry Larson, Lucy Hartley, Susan Levin, and David Mason have been generous with their time and advice. Jeff Cowton and Rebecca Turner at the Wordsworth Trust have facilitated periods of productive research. Molly Rothenberg provided a place for my work at Tulane, and Re Evitt and Jane Hilberry did the same at Colorado College. This work bears the fingerprints of the School of Criticism and Theory as well as the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Meredith McGill and William Galperin have placed a vote of confidence in future incarnations of this project, and for this I am grateful. Thanks to Rebecca Porte, Sarah Ehlers, and Nan Z. Da, my fellow travelers. Rebecca has lived with me in my project for so long that I am sometimes surprised to meet her in the margins. Sarah constantly reminds me to take my calamities in miniature. Nan remembers when we had no audience but each other. Thanks and love to Rob, Andrea, and Jed Feder, who are always behind me, and to Moshe Kornfeld, who is always by my side. ! iii! ! ! ! Table of Contents Acknowledgements...............................................................................................................................ii List of Figures.......................................................................................................................................vi Introduction...........................................................................................................................................1 PART ONE: THE AESTHETICS OF INFINITY Prelude: infinite immensity........................................................................................................................9 Chapter One: The Calculus & The Sublime I. Rates of Change.................................................................................................................20 II. Infinity Effects: Newton.................................................................................................25 III. The Analyst & The Artificial Infinite: Berkeley & Burke.........................................34 Chapter Two: Counting to Infinity & Discounting Infinity I. The Same Numerical Soul: Locke...................................................................................41 II. Nothing Less Than Infinity............................................................................................50 III. The Good Minute Goes................................................................................................52 IV. Anti-Infinity: Hume........................................................................................................56 PART TWO: THE POETICS OF INFINITY Interlude: kimonos, wrap-arounds and diatribes.....................................................................................65 Chapter Three: The Poetics of the Quotidian I. A Theory of the Particular................................................................................................69 II. Communal Genres...........................................................................................................82 III. The Grasmere Journals: A Counter-History..............................................................89 Chapter Four: Forms of Transcendence.........................................................................................95 I. Journeys, Mostly Inward: Byron & Wordsworth..........................................................96 II. A Note on Whitman......................................................................................................102 III. And All: William Carlos Williams..............................................................................106 IV. Sending the Line to Hell: Spicer.................................................................................111 V. Ghosts of Departed Quantities....................................................................................121 Conclusion: Forms of Inheritance I. Summation & Further Iterations...................................................................................123 ! iv! ! ! ! II. Coda: Neo-Romantic Infinity......................................................................................126 Notes...................................................................................................................................................137 Works Cited.......................................................................................................................................145 ! v! ! ! ! List of Figures Fig. 1. Manuscript page containing Emily Brontë’s [I’m happiest when most away], printed with permission of the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library...................................................................................................................................................17 Fig. 2. Excerpt from Lorine Niedecker’s Next Year Or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous. Printed in Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 44............................................................................................................66 Fig. 3. Manuscript page from Dorothy Wordsworth’s commonplace book, printed with permission of the Wordsworth Trust. DCMS 120.26..................................................................72 Fig. 4. Excerpt from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journals, printed with permission of the Wordsworth Trust. DCMS 20...................................................................................................90 ! vi! ! ! ! INTRODUCTION This is a dissertation written decades after the long 1980s; as such, it must deal with its own romantic idealizations of that period in literary-critical history. Because the project’s guiding obsession is with Romantic poetry and its afterlives, the argument’s center of gravity falls on the Romantic sublime, an aesthetic category that is both intellectually evergreen and, as I will show, always already dated. The project is therefore fueled, at least in part, by a desire to reopen the classical Romanticist discourse on the sublime, or rather, by a curiosity about what would happen were one to reopen that discourse. The Romanticist discourse on the sublime was, in many ways, a debate about Romanticism, and about the aesthetics of literary criticism itself in a period of methodological innovation and theoretical inquiry. Thomas Weiskel diagrams the connections between Romantic aesthetics and the modern obsession with mind1; Neil Hertz mobilizes the Romantic sublime as the perfect metaphor for critical inquiry2; and, for all his poststructuralist twists and turns, Steven Knapp points out the obvious—that the sublime was deconstruction before deconstruction was deconstruction.3 Frances Ferguson’s stunning defense of Idealism is, in the end, a critique of materialism—a materialism that, for Ferguson, sneaks into academic argumentation.4 ! 1! ! ! ! Like many books about the Romantic sublime, this one makes