Intuition and authority: literary expression and scientific communication

Abstract

In my dissertation, I investigate how images—whether pictorial, poetic, or narrative—determine and change human intuitions about the natural world. I argue that by adopting form and content from one another, literary and scientific writers alike break and reframe their reader’s intuition. George Herbert, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Margaret Cavendish, on the one hand, and Galileo, Paracelsus, and Kepler, on the other demonstrate that narrative, poetic, and pictorial images are instrumental in rendering the world intelligible and intuitive. In my first chapter, I provides a survey of sixteenth-century writers from Chaucer to Spenser and from Copernicus to Bacon, showing how they construct authority and attempt to rewrite intuitions about nature and her students. My subsequent chapters on physics, chemistry, and astronomy explore how conventions in poetry and fiction facilitate the communication of novel ideas.