Dissertation Fellow 2001-02
Dorothea Rice (English)
University of Chicago
Rewriting Early Modern Eden: Literature,
Epistemology, and Discourses of the Fall, 1605-1674
Much recent scholarship on early modern European epistemology
emphasizes the emergence of secular modes of knowing. Yet the Genesis
story of the Fall and Expulsion from Eden provided a central site
for literary considerations of the problem of knowledge in seventeenth-century
England. Its earlier treatments understand the Fall as an event
that badly damaged the human capacity for knowledge; its later literature
variously imagines an imminent recovery of Edenic epistemology through
empiricism, "inner light," or education. By analyzing
representations of the Fall from Francis Bacon to John Milton, my
project traces the relationship between emerging reinterpretations
of Eden, on the one hand, and shifting conceptions and assessments
of human epistemological capacities, on the other. I aim to offer
a fine-grained literary account of the tangled roots of religious
and secular discourse on knowledge. Although focused on seventeenth-century
England, my dissertation takes as its central concern the interplay
between a religious master narrative and the limits of human capacities
for knowledge. This concern shows continuing pertinence in the light
it can shed on modes of intellectual practice, both religious and
secular, in contemporary America.
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