The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment by Tita Chico

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment by Tita Chico Richard C. Sha Tita Chico, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2018). Pp. 256. $60.00 cloth. Tita Chico's learned and eloquent book leverages the superior status of literature over science in the Enlightenment by thinking about how literature made natural philosophical knowledge itself possible. She submits that "representing natural philosophy occasions a deliberation about its efficacy and shortcoming, particularly in contrast to the insights and truths conveyed by literariness" (1). Chico argues that because science requires literary representation, "the representation of early science persistently discloses its literary status—not merely in the tropological nature of scientific writing and practice, but also through the metaphorics of science that allow writers to posit alternative models of authority and evidence" (1–2). For Chico, science is a "literary trope" (5). With this canny reversal of the expected hierarchy between literature and science, we are off to the races. The chase she sets in motion is nothing less than invigorating, and although I have misgivings about how her argument relies upon textualism—science and natural philosophy involve practices beyond language—the chase is worth it. To be fair, she does deal with the collecting of scientific instruments. To put my objection more sharply, this literary history of science gives literary critics more to cheer about than it might scientists, though she is right to insist that these categories were in flux. The quality of thought in this book is very high. Chico's deft recognition of the period's capacious understanding of something like literariness transforms what we think we know about literature and science. Chico argues astutely that "literariness enables a whole-scale imagining of the proper object of natural philosophical inquiry as well as the proper subject to carry it out" (13). Building upon Schaffer and Shapin's famous concepts of "literary technology" and "virtual witnessing," Chico considers how the imagination facilitates the telling of the scientific story through literary technologies that construct both the modest witness and the observed particular.1 In short, the witness to scientific experiment constructs him or herself into an urbane modern subject, with an attention to the present (23–25). She carries out this argument's promise by examining how satiric representations of science enables the identification of a kind of immodesty that foregrounds self-interest. Chico then pursues the degree to which fancy is necessary to understand abstractions like Newtonianism, Cartesianism, and Copernicanism. Consequently, she offers the concept of "scientific seduction" to think about how science compels [End Page 750] belief. She concludes this study by attending to poems like Pope's "Rape of the Lock" and James Thomson's The Seasons, which argue for the superiority of literariness over science. All in all, then, this is a book no scholar of the two cultures can afford to ignore. Chico confronts science's devotion to "natural" and unrhetorical language by highlighting how scientific language itself does this through tropes. She thus highlights how Boyle converts the telescope into a trope for clarity (27), and how scientific texts embrace tropes to translate scientific knowledge. Having deconstructed the relation of scientific to literary language, Chico explores how the two are inextricable. Boyle's challenge is to convey his discovery of the elasticity of air in literary language that will translate his scientific discovery (29). As she puts it, "literariness produces visibility, which, within an optical regime, connotes knowability" (32). She adds that selecting a metaphor reproduces the problem of producing an observed particular: the naturalist thus presents a singularity while suppressing the "imaginative process behind the scientific sense of a singular instance" (34). She offers a reading of Hooke's Micrographia which considers how the technology of the book and its illustrations represents the "instrumentation of a microscope" (35). In a compelling chapter on immodest witnesses, Chico explores how the gimcrack and the coquette enable good science to be separated from bad, and how these tropes facilitate the development of scientific observation. She insists that "gimcracks ignore society and social demands in favor of studying insects. And coquettes refuse to...