Barry Wood

The Growth of the Soul: Coleridge's Dialectical Method and the Strategy of Emerson's Nature

A TURE, as every student of Emerson realizes, has met with mixed reception almost from the moment of publication (1836). If Amos Bronson Alcott thought it was a gem throughout and Thomas Carlyle saw in it the Foundation and Ground-plan for a whole career, a true Apocalypse, others have found it less than satisfactory. Emersons first important reviewer, Francis Bowen, attacked the whole Transcendental movement for its mysticism and Nature for ideas Bowen found unacceptable: The effort of perusal is often painful, the thoughts excited are frequently bewildering, and the results to which they lead us, uncertain and obscure.2 The official organ of the New Jerusalem Church in America, offended by Emersons treatment of Swedenborgian ideas, noted that Nature tended to confuse the mind, adding that since it pretended to be the religious philosophy of nature it should be recalled and repudiated at the earliest moment.3 These responses are extremely dated. Nevertheless, difficulties with Emersons first book persist even though the focus of these difficulties rests now upon questions of structure, method, and meaning. Stephen E. Whichers remarks are typical: Since Nature is written under several strong and not always harmonious influences---Coleridge, Swedenborg, and various varieties [sic] of Platonism--and since it discusses such an array of elaborately subdivided topics, one cannot always easily penetrate its rapid criss-cross of ideas and see its underlying intention.4 Quite apart from the motley influences Whicher notes, Nature presents a conjunction of internal problems which can be described as compositional. First, Emerson published nothing of significance before 1836, so that Nature seems to emerge full-blown, with no obvious clues to its making. Second, some of the most obvious features of the work are unique to it. For example, the elaborate subdivisions noted by Whicher are dropped in Emersons next book, Esscays: First Series (1841). Similarly, the kind of exact formulation that has made the Language chapters so attractive does not recur in later essays, which tend to develop analogically or associatively rather than according to carefully stated propositions. Third, in his later essays Emerson conceals controversial ideas much more carefully than he does with, for example, the celebrated noble doubt (CW, i, 29), which has drawn so much critical debate. Finally, the innocently absurd tone, to use Jonathan Bishops description,6 of the transparent eye-ball passage (CW, I, 10)evident too in the sentence, I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons (CW, 1, 35)--is absent from Emersons later publications.7 Nature stands, therefore, as Emersons most uncharacteristic work, a fact emphasized by his return to the lecture-essay form in his subsequent books. Yet, atypical as it may be, Nature is Emersons most important book and the central document of the Transcendental movement of the 1830s. Its few flaws, rather than consigning the book to oblivion, have contributed to its notoriety, if only by stretching the critical debate. In terms of the form, opinions have been varied. Most commentators have noted the resemblance between its numbered topics and sections and the use of this method in the traditional sermon. Emerson had absorbed this method as an oratorical strategy from Hugh Blairs Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) and observed it in sermon collections read while he was at Harvard; later he utilized the method, on an irregular basis, in his own sermons.8 F. O. Matthiessen, however, suggested that Nature shared a kinship with the seventeenth-century prose meditation exemplified in Vaughan and Traherne9-a connection more persuasively argued in recent discussions of Emersons poetry.l Finally, Richard Lee Francis, in an essay full of valuable suggestions, has

Malcolm Lowry's Metafiction: The Biography of a Genre

only in a first draft with inserted notes for revision; and Margerie Lowry includes an apologetic footnote to this effect in her Psalms and Songs version (1975).1 Yet this story, with its hesitations, variants for the next draft, Lowrys inserted notes, and apparent confusions and philosophical speculations, offers revealing glimpses into Lowrys creative processes. Moreover, while Ghostkeeper seems incomplete as a story by Malcolm Lowry, it functions as a complete story about a writer called Tom Goodheart who struggles to bring a story he is writing to completion. Ghostkeeper is, in fact, a remarkable piece of metafiction-a fictional work about the process of writing fiction.2 Approaches to metafiction have appeared whenever storytellers within a fiction result in an inner frame, as in Jamess The Turn of the Screw (1898), Conrads Heart of Darkness

Quarks, culture, combogenesis

A multidisciplinary tour of cosmic history charts the “grand sequence” of existence The value of Tyler Volk’s Quarks to Culture is evident when the book is placed against popular histories of the universe, dozens of which have provided evidence for an immense cosmic past. But such histories are often anecdotal, like early British histories of the kings of England. Unlike these works, Volk artfully presents the case for structural continuity and systematic creativity across 13.8 billion years of cosmic history.

Imagining the Unimaginable: Narratives of the Big Bang: Time, Space, Matter, Energy

The term big bang has an uneasy history of problematic and misleading implications. As a derogatory and simplistic metaphor it is incompatible with current understandings of Planck time, inflationary theory, self-organizing dynamics, and emergent complexity. Scientific theory is judged and accepted as much by vocabulary as by content; content-specific nomenclature is a crucial key to understanding. Additionally, imaginative nomenclature that triggers a narrative meets the human need for a relevant story. Creative descriptions for the big bang that reformat it as a complementary cluster of stories are herein proposed with acronyms appropriate to the action of the big bang and meanings consistent with current science; approaches through analytical physics and complex mathematics are here replaced with series of suggestive narratives. Together, they combine to create a multi-strand narrative compatible with our present understanding of cosmic history understood as the Grand Sequence or the Big Story. Additionally the acronyms central to this presentation emphasize that the foundations of reality as we know it—Time, Space, Matter, and Energy—did not exist before the big bang but were in fact created in that event. Anyone venturing into astronomy or cosmology inevitably has to grapple with the big bang. While there are more complex topics in science—quantum physics, for instance, or cell signaling—big bang cosmology challenges our customary experience and understanding of the world. It is simply impossible to imagine how an entire universe could unfold from next to nothing or how time and space—the apparent containers of everything we know—could have come into existence rather than always existing. Lawrence Krauss (2012) makes “a universe from nothing” seem simple, logical, and inevitable; most of us find it otherwise. The following notes provide a brief history of the big bang idea, its eventual acceptance, and current understandings organized into some unique ways to historicize or narrativize what we might more congenially call the big beginning or the first event.

Museum of the Bible: Questionable science

In her News Feature “Original sin” (20 October, p. [295][1]), L. Wade describes the problematic provenance of many of the artifacts in the Museum of the Bible and observes that the exhibits “tiptoe around subjects that challenge them.” Yet she stops short of recognizing that the museums

Underlying Temporalities of Big History

Traditional history, beginning around 3000 BCE , depends on dateable written records. The expanded scope of big history (13.8 byr) requires new understandings of time. Following the work of J. T. Fraser, I explore the underlying temporalities of big history. To Fraser’s atemporality and eotemporality , which govern the history of galaxy, star, and planet formation, I add petrotemporaliity which governs three processes—in the freezing of time in mineralized fossils, the chronological structuring of geohistory from stratified rock, and the slow unwinding of time through the decay of radioactive isotopes—and genotemporality which bypasses the vagaries of species transition and extinction, utilizing instead the incorporation of viral DNA within the human genome and its continuity of umwelt to construct a big history of life that connects the earliest life forms with humans. I conclude that the possibility of constructing a big history depends on these underlying temporalities.