Illuminating the Poetic Turn to Science: Louise Ackermann, or the Aesthetic Stuff of Cultural Studies

Abstract

A woman of letters who thought about evolution in a creative way, Louise Ackermann made a vital contribution to the discursive alliance of poetry and science during the second half of the nineteenth century in France. In the wake of Darwin and in the shadow of a French tradition of naturalist poetry that appropriated the vocabulary and subject of the physical sciences, she pondered humankind's place in the universe. Imaginative yet analytical, hers is an inspired symbiosis that links the history of French poetry with intellectual history and, in turn, aesthetics with culture. By thinking poetry and science together, Ackermann illustrates — with modern resonance — the importance of poetry and the cultural element of poiesis in the production of knowledge.