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He extends his inquiry beyond the boundaries of early modernity, arguing for a literary theory that trades strict methodological commitment for an openness to lawless drift.
David Carroll Simon is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago.
"David Carroll Simon presents an exciting new orientation for our reading of some of the foundational writers of the new sciences of the seventeenth century and the poets that followed them. The aim of Light without Heat is less to convince you of its rightness than to offer you new ways to think about the things it considers."
Alan Stewart, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University:
"In Light without Heat, David Carroll Simon explicitly writes against the common critical notion that scientific investigation in the seventeenth century is defined by its method and the stringency of its procedures. Simon's work is a distinctive contribution to the field, and he puts forward a controversial argument. This argument leads to some bracing, original, and accomplished close readings that reveal new and surprising features of literary and philosophical works."
Richard Rambuss, Brown University:
"David Simon aims to recapture a forgotten perspective on what it means to know (and to emotionally experience) the natural world, and he succeeds marvelously. Instead of inevitably privileging method and rigor, this book expounds upon a different conceptual space—that of nonchalance, discomposure, languorous drift, digression, and abandonment—as characteristic of the ‘observational mood’ of the early modern poets, scientists, and philosophers with whom Simon here tarries. Easygoing waywardness, Simon shows at every turn, aids perception by expanding its reach—this the better to catch the natural world’s astounding variety and strangeness. Though Light Without Heat makes an argument for emotional cool as a condition for a certain kind of intellectual freedom, this book itself glows. It’s been awhile since I’ve encountered a work about the seventeenth century that makes so much look so wonderfully different. And Simon’s final chapter on Edenic labor in Milton’s Paradise Lost is a subtle tour de force"
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