Description: In Light without Heat, David Carroll Simon argues for the importance of carelessness to the literary and scientific experiments of the seventeenth century. While scholars have often looked to this period in order to narrate the triumph of methodical rigor as a quintessentially modern intellectual value, Simon describes the appeal of open-ended...
Brief description: David Carroll Simon is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago.
Review Quotes:
Simon's careful close readings illuminate both the scientific and literary texts under study, while his overall approach of resisting reductive binaries (Baconianism as exclusively active at the expense of passive receptivity, labor as exclusively laborious at the expense of affective pleasure) serves as a compelling corrective against the tendency of scholarship on the history of science to slip into universalizing narratives. Scholars of seventeenth-century literature and science--and of seventeenth-century culture more generally--should find it to be a provocative and stimulating read.
--Erin Webster "Milton Quarterly"