Early Modern Fictions of Science

Interview by Whitney Sperrazza in conversation with Debapriya Sarkar, author of Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

​​Sometimes a new book offers us a critical concept that’s so persuasive and generative that it’s hard to remember reading without it. This is the gift of Debapriya Sarkar’s Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science. Sarkar anchors the book with her concept of “possible knowledge,” which urges readers to shift focus from “what was thought” to “what was thinkable” in early modern texts. In this shift, Sarkar models the important difference between applying a prefabricated critical framework to early modern texts and building a new critical apparatus from early modern texts — a difference that has become a hallmark of the most compelling work on literature and science, as well as form and poetics.

I came to Sarkar’s work through her collaboration with Jenny C. Mann on the excellent 2019 special issue of Philological Quarterly. In their introduction, Mann and Sarkar urge us to approach literary form as an “engine of knowledge production”, and Sarkar reiterates and refines this call in Possible Knowledge, where she “prompts literary scholars to reclaim poesy as a philosophical mode of being and knowing.” The chapter on Francis Bacon sings at the book’s center with an argument that is importantly different from the usual claims about Bacon’s figurative language (no spoilers, go get your hands on it!). That chapter is indicative of Sarkar’s nuanced (and copious) close readings throughout the book, and it will immediately give a sense of how her concept of “possible knowledge” cracks open new methods of interdisciplinary reading. I hope readers of The Sundial will enjoy my conversation with Sarkar as much as I did.

Whitney Sperrazza: I want to ask first about the capacious concept of “possible knowledge,” which you define in the book’s introduction as “the mobile and unpredictable energies that constitute varied practices of literary worldbuilding.” How did you develop this concept, and why were the writers central to your book’s archive particularly generative in helping you define it?

Debapriya Sarkar: My book began as an attempt to engage the common scholarly narrative that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were periods of intellectual flux, characterized by the loss of philosophical certainty. In the absence of certainty, the argument goes, scientists (or natural philosophers) embraced probabilistic knowledge. Yet, in tracing a literary prehistory of scientific probability, I soon became aware of two things: (1) the binary of probability and certainty was insufficient to capture the intellectual energies of the period, and (2) literary writers seemed to thrive in this culture of uncertainty by mobilizing strategies of worldmaking and resources of rhetoric.

I gravitated towards the “possible” because this concept functioned both as an ontological and methodological tool for writers. The possible encapsulated both the kinds of worlds writers could build (futuristic, alternate, hypothetical, etc.), and the modes of thinking and knowing they could deploy because of pedagogical training (in logic, or grammar). Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, which states that the poet deals with the “may be and should be,” became the theoretical touchstone for my project. Indeed, writers ranging from Spenser to Cavendish employ similar language, stating that authors create “what might best be” (The Faerie Queene) and “may be” (The Blazing World), respectively.

These examples directed me to other questions about the connotations of the “possible.” My research on how Spenser’s allegorical worldmaking constructed ideas about political futurity through modes of knowing such as prophecy led me to study Macbeth’s prophecies as practical recipes for future-oriented action in tragedy. Baconian induction — a key element of the so-called Scientific Revolution — was formally similar to a Spenserian romance, because it was structured around ideas of delay, dilation, and error. These connections reoriented me from noticing particular linguistic elements (e.g. “may” or “might”), or a single keyword (“possible”), to tracing a constellation of ideas — of futurity, counterfactuals, continuation, prediction. I termed this constellation “possible knowledge.” The core of my argument is that different literary genres model different facets of possible knowledge.

WS: In our initial conversation, you described Possible Knowledge as a book about “literary knowledge” rather than one about the conceptual and rhetorical links between early modern literature and science. How does “possible knowledge” help us make that shift from content to form, a shift that has been central to all of your work?

DS: At least from the 1990s, the field of early modern literature/science — which studies “conceptual and rhetorical links” between literature and science — has foregrounded relations of form and content. Yet this field emerged in relation to the older disciplines of history and philosophy of science. As a result of this legacy, even when literary scholars complicate stories told by historians of science, they typically operate within the rubric of content framed by the more established field (often engaging literary texts with histories of optics, physics, astronomy, etc.). This orientation creates the perception that the content of scientific disciplines drives scholarship on literature and science. My work, however, moves away from such rubrics to center questions of form — which, in early modern literary studies, have largely been shaped by scholarship on poetics, aesthetics, and rhetoric.

Possible Knowledge thus intervenes in conversations about scientific knowledge (happening in literature/science studies, and the history and philosophy of science) and in debates about form (in literary studies). It is first and foremost a book about the kinds of strategies and techniques inherent in literary making, emerging from the art of poesie, rather than from scientific disciplines and methods. It focuses on the epistemological principles underlying literary form at the macro level (of genres including utopia, romance, tragedy, epic, lyric) and at the micro level (of grammatical moods and figures of speech). It is particularly interested in how different kinds of literary production differently interact with and relate to reality: while Paradise Lost’s epic events (as I argue in chapter 5) make intelligible an inaccessible prelapsarian world, Bacon’s utopian New Atlantis (I show in chapter 3) is a hypothesis about intervening directly in the physical world we inhabit.

Possible Knowledge, therefore, expands the purview of formalist scholarship in early modern literary studies, urging scholars of poetics and rhetoric to foreground — even reclaim — the philosophical stakes of poetic production. My focus on form ultimately recovers how literature is a knowledge-making enterprise that is varied and capacious, rather than one that generalizes or universalizes. In calling possible knowledge a literary epistemology, I emphasize that poetic knowledge is fundamentally pluralistic, and thus different from disciplines which aim to produce universal theories, abstract knowledge, or facts. Thus, my argument addresses both literary scholars working on form and poetics and intellectual historians: literary knowledge is a distinctive site of inquiry in its own right in the history of ideas.

WS: Your book powerfully responds to a long tradition of literature and science work (especially in the history of natural philosophy) that either creates an implicit hierarchy between the fields or puts the fields in creative dialogue with each other. Building on, but importantly resisting, these critical tendencies, you instead urge us to think of poesy and natural philosophy as simultaneous ontological and epistemological engines offering different and adjacent forms of knowing. How does such an interdisciplinary perspective require new kinds of evidence gathering from the early modern archive? What kinds of evidence did you find most useful in your reading?

DS: I absolutely love these questions, because you remind us that evidence is inextricable from methodology. My early challenge was that there was no standard archive of possible knowledge, or a category of ideas under the rubric of the “possible.” Though I expected to find references to the “possible” in natural philosophical works analogous to what I had encountered in literary texts, I now realize that this expectation was shaped by juxtapositions typical in early modern literature/ science studies, and I had expected to follow the same evidentiary protocols — for example, pairing Cavendish’s Blazing World with Hooke’s Micrographia. My project, however, demanded a shift. I was extremely fortunate to study not only with literary scholars but also with historians of science. This cross-disciplinary training helped me to become attuned to the specific ways in which the methodological questions and evidentiary standards valued by historians of science differed from those of scholars of literature/science, and it gave me the confidence to tell a story about literary epistemologies.

This is a long preamble to your question of evidence: what I want to emphasize is that immersion in cross- and inter-disciplinary studies enables us to be bolder about our own disciplinary practices. Because I argue that literary epistemologies are central to early modern intellectual culture, it seemed obvious to me that my primary body of evidence, even writing on literature and science, had to be literary texts. This is not to say that I don’t engage with scientific works — Possible Knowledge studies recipe culture, experimental methods, physics, etc., and reads texts like Novum Organum, but it engages with this material by letting the methodologies and ideas generated by literary works such as Faerie Queene and Poems and Fancies drive the project. This is why the primary evidence for my book might look more typically like studies on poetics and form rather than those on intellectual history.

My construction of an archive is thus interrelated with my methods of inquiry as a literary scholar. My primary mode of engagement with the past is through close reading, a key method for literary studies. Because I attend to what was conceivable or possible at a particular time, my approach does not require amassing a quantity of evidence about a topic, showing a pattern of collective thinking in a certain way, or establishing how an entire organization institutionalized a particular kind of knowledge to demonstrate significance. Reading for the possible fosters a different kind of intellectual work, a work that literary scholars are particularly well-trained to perform. I show, for instance, why one tragic play is as important as treatises on experimental science to think about predictive and practical knowledge. Possible Knowledge thus makes the case that certain evidentiary standards of literary studies — such as looking closely and slowly at one piece of evidence — can productively expand both methods and archives in intellectual history.

WS: One of my favorite moments in the book is a transition in the chapter on Francis Bacon (Chapter 3), where you basically say, despite claiming to reject all fiction, Bacon writes a utopian fiction. It’s not only a wonderfully pithy transition, but the precision of it also gets to the heart of your argument: Bacon was compelled to write a utopian fiction because the very structure of his scientific methods relies on poetic impulses. For me, this transition was related directly to the shift from a “history of science” to a “history of the imagination” that you herald at the end of your introduction. Can you say more about the relationship between these histories in your thinking (or maybe simply about the relationship between “science” and “imagination”), and how you might see such a relationship coming to bear on our current model of highly stratified disciplinary spaces for knowledge?

DS: I came to questions about the intersection of science and imagination from a background in the applied sciences, acutely aware of how current scientific education and practice are often presented as utilitarian, and often seem to exist in a vacuum, divorced from social and political concerns and devoid of an understanding about the intertwined histories of disciplinary formation. Given these limitations, I was interested in exploring how ideas and practices that seem distant from “science” impacted or interacted with it: what are the prehistories of scientific practices and methods today? What ideas had to be jettisoned and subordinated so that scientific facts could become the standard bearer of truth and authority? Were scientists always so isolated from thinking about culture?

These questions shaped my work about the imagination in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts. The early modern period offers us a particular insight into the formation of what you insightfully call “highly stratified disciplinary spaces for knowledge.” Literary writers were trying to carve out an epistemological, ontological, and aesthetic space for poesie, but this work was happening with an awareness of, and sometimes in response to, the devaluation of their art. Rhetoric, poetry, and language were often dismissed as intellectually vacuous and morally suspect, and such attacks became crucial in early Restoration England as scientific organizations like the Royal Society tried to legitimize their own natural philosophical work (as I consider in the introduction and the final chapter on Paradise Lost’s questioning of contemporary experimental philosophy).

It is easy to draw parallels between such attacks on fiction and rhetoric to the current devaluation of humanities in favor of STEM — scholars have studied the detailed histories of how these hierarchies morph and solidify across centuries — and such resonances between the past and present can help us see how imaginative modes of knowing and thinking were attacked and questioned to bolster the value of so-called utilitarian, fact-based, practical knowledge. Implicit in my project is the argument that different disciplines produce their own knowledge, and that they are also doing so in conversation with — but also distinctively from — others. If we want to keep making an argument for the value of the humanities (including literary studies), to refuse the constant push to instrumentalization, we have to make a positive case for what we do. We must show what humanistic knowledge has done and can do — rather than trying to either adapt methods of the sciences or being defensive. I would argue that such an approach also has value because it makes us aware of both the positive and negative pressures of the imagination itself. I explore some of this in the Coda, which considers both how literary artifacts have generated ideas that become engines of innovation, and how the discourse about imagination and facts get coopted for political purposes.

Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science is now available in hardcover and eBook from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Debapriya Sarkar is Assistant Professor of English and Maritime Studies at the University of Connecticut. She researches and teaches at the intersections of early modern science studies, ecocriticism, premodern critical race studies, maritime studies, women’s writing, and postcolonial theory. Her work appears or is forthcoming in SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Studies, Spenser Studies, Exemplaria, and in edited collections including The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now, and A Cultural History of the Sea in the Early Modern Age. She has co-edited, with Jenny C. Mann, a 2019 special issue of Philological Quarterly on “Imagining Early Modern Scientific Forms,” and her public writing has appeared in Arcade and The Sundial.

Whitney Sperrazza is Assistant Professor of English and Digital Humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her research sits at the intersections of early modern literary studies, histories of science, material poetics, media archaeology, and intersectional feminist theory. Her in-progress book tracks the collision of women’s poetic practice and emerging anatomical methods in early modern England. You can find her published work in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Shakespeare Studies, Women’s Writing, and in edited collections including Titus Andronicus: The State of Play and Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World. Her public writing has appeared in Lady Science, The Sundial, and The Collation.