Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction, or the thing at hand
- Chapter 1 Toward an anthropologic: poetry, literature, and the discourse of the species
- Chapter 2 Do rustics think?: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the problem of a “human diction”
- Chapter 3 Literate species: populations, “humanities,” and the specific failure of literature in Frankenstein
- Chapter 4 The “arithmetic of futurity”: poetry, population, and the structure of the future
- Chapter 5 Dead poets and other romantic populations: immortality and its discontents
- Epilogue: Immortality interminable: the use of poetry for life
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Introduction, or the thing at hand
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction, or the thing at hand
- Chapter 1 Toward an anthropologic: poetry, literature, and the discourse of the species
- Chapter 2 Do rustics think?: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the problem of a “human diction”
- Chapter 3 Literate species: populations, “humanities,” and the specific failure of literature in Frankenstein
- Chapter 4 The “arithmetic of futurity”: poetry, population, and the structure of the future
- Chapter 5 Dead poets and other romantic populations: immortality and its discontents
- Epilogue: Immortality interminable: the use of poetry for life
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM
Summary
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”A need for poetry.
John Cage, Themes and VariationsAny particular academic monograph in the humanities appears as a creature whose species is known in advance. Whether we choose to classify it via “the system” or “the method,” as Michel Foucault distinguishes the taxonomic procedures of natural history, nevertheless the particular kind of thing before us tends to display all or some of the following characteristics: an impressive array of footnotes (scholarly and/or discursive), an extensive bibliographic apparatus, a statement on method, acknowledgments, a title page, chapters. All this above and beyond “the argument” or the body of the thing, which itself of course must simultaneously internalize, disguise and yet manifest the requirements of those regimes – intellectual, institutional, interpersonal, economic, ideological – that variously sponsor (even as they impede) the production of academic things.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Romanticism and the Human SciencesPoetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species, pp. 1 - 9Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000