Amanda Jo Goldstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 1636149 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Amanda Jo Goldstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Amanda Jo |
| FAMILY NAME | Goldstein |
| SIGNATURE | GOLDSTEIN A J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Berkeley |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5663-9976 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Nerve poetry and fiber art
This essay explores the philosophy and poetry of the nervous system in Erasmus Darwin's late 18th‐century science of life, arguing that Darwin's theory of animation constitutes an unrecognized chapter in the history of what is now called “biosemiotics.” I show how Darwin's earlier modern approach to epigenesis and plasticity—concepts resurgent not only in present day developmental biology and neuroscience, but also in continental theory and philo…
Sweet Science
Chapter 4. Growing Old Together
This chapter and the next focus on the writings of Percy Shelley in order to examine social history as an ontogenetic and biopoetic force. Reading, anew, a poem that has been the touchstone of critical arguments about the relation between life, matter, language, and history in Romantic poetics, this chapter argues that Shelley’s The Triumph of Life mobilizes Lucretian materialist poetics to articulate the way personal bodies produce and integrate…
Chapter 2. Equivocal Life
This chapter and the next focus on Goethe’s periodicals On Morphology for their paradigmatically neo-Lucretian treatment of biological life and its poetic documentation. In the morphology project, living beings are composite, equivocally generated forms whose vitality is coextensive with their transience; each “seeming individual”—not least the morphologist—is a fractious and plural “Being-Complex” whose incessant metamorphoses the science attemp…
Chapter 5. A Natural History of Violence
This chapter puts the book’s valorization of “sweet” and “tender” poetic science to the test of state violence of material exploitation. It asks why Shelley’s “wholly political” poem, The Mask of Anarchy – a lightening rod for critical debates about politics and aesthetics in lyric poetry – treats the Peterloo Massacre as an event of natural history. Yet from “naturalizing” the damage, the chapter argues, natural historical discourse enables The …
Chapter 3. Tender Semiosis
This chapter presents a thorough discussion of the book’s sense of material semiotics and figuration. Focusing on Goethe’s neo-Lucretian poem “Dauer im Wechsel [Permanence in Change],” the first part of the chapter argues that the atomist sign, in its joint capacity as verbal figure and datum of sensation, eludes Paul de Man’s seminal distinction between symbol and allegory in Romantic figuration. The chapter summons non-Saussurean semiotics (Cha…
Coda
Each of the book’s chapters differently argues for a Romantic poetic conjunction, through the problem of natural “life,” between materialisms of nature associated with Enlightenment science and the coming nineteenth-century science of historical materialism. The Coda resituates Marx in this Romantic tradition, uncovering (with help from Althusser and Deleuze) the ecological and poetic intelligence of the “sensuous science” he elaborated in his di…
Chapter 1. Blake’s Mundane Egg
This chapter introduces readers to the key problem of “epigenesis” in both Romantic biopoetics and the history of biology in general. Romantic aesthetics and biology are frequently said to converge in the ideal of “organic form”: the organism or artwork as autonomous, self-organizing whole. But William Blake’s The First Book of Urizen, for instance, satirically demolishes this vitalist depiction of life as the power to self-organize. Putting Blak…
Epigenesis by experience
Growing Old Together
This essay explores Percy Shelley's The Triumph of Life as a strategic revival of Lucretian poetic science: a materialism fit to connect the epochal, romantic interest in biological life to the period's pressing new sense of its own historicity. Shelley mobilizes Lucretian natural simulacra to show how personal bodies produce and integrate passages of historical time, exercising a poetics of transience that resists the triumphalism characteristic…
Growing Old Together
This essay explores Percy Shelley's The Triumph of Life as a strategic revival of Lucretian poetic science: a materialism fit to connect the epochal, romantic interest in biological life to the period's pressing new sense of its own historicity. Shelley mobilizes Lucretian natural simulacra to show how personal bodies produce and integrate passages of historical time, exercising a poetics of transience that resists the triumphalism characteristic…
Sweet Science
Chapter 4. Growing Old Together
This chapter and the next focus on the writings of Percy Shelley in order to examine social history as an ontogenetic and biopoetic force. Reading, anew, a poem that has been the touchstone of critical arguments about the relation between life, matter, language, and history in Romantic poetics, this chapter argues that Shelley’s The Triumph of Life mobilizes Lucretian materialist poetics to articulate the way personal bodies produce and integrate…
Chapter 2. Equivocal Life
This chapter and the next focus on Goethe’s periodicals On Morphology for their paradigmatically neo-Lucretian treatment of biological life and its poetic documentation. In the morphology project, living beings are composite, equivocally generated forms whose vitality is coextensive with their transience; each “seeming individual”—not least the morphologist—is a fractious and plural “Being-Complex” whose incessant metamorphoses the science attemp…
Chapter 5. A Natural History of Violence
This chapter puts the book’s valorization of “sweet” and “tender” poetic science to the test of state violence of material exploitation. It asks why Shelley’s “wholly political” poem, The Mask of Anarchy – a lightening rod for critical debates about politics and aesthetics in lyric poetry – treats the Peterloo Massacre as an event of natural history. Yet from “naturalizing” the damage, the chapter argues, natural historical discourse enables The …
Chapter 3. Tender Semiosis
This chapter presents a thorough discussion of the book’s sense of material semiotics and figuration. Focusing on Goethe’s neo-Lucretian poem “Dauer im Wechsel [Permanence in Change],” the first part of the chapter argues that the atomist sign, in its joint capacity as verbal figure and datum of sensation, eludes Paul de Man’s seminal distinction between symbol and allegory in Romantic figuration. The chapter summons non-Saussurean semiotics (Cha…
Coda
Each of the book’s chapters differently argues for a Romantic poetic conjunction, through the problem of natural “life,” between materialisms of nature associated with Enlightenment science and the coming nineteenth-century science of historical materialism. The Coda resituates Marx in this Romantic tradition, uncovering (with help from Althusser and Deleuze) the ecological and poetic intelligence of the “sensuous science” he elaborated in his di…
Chapter 1. Blake’s Mundane Egg
This chapter introduces readers to the key problem of “epigenesis” in both Romantic biopoetics and the history of biology in general. Romantic aesthetics and biology are frequently said to converge in the ideal of “organic form”: the organism or artwork as autonomous, self-organizing whole. But William Blake’s The First Book of Urizen, for instance, satirically demolishes this vitalist depiction of life as the power to self-organize. Putting Blak…
Epigenesis by experience
Nerve poetry and fiber art
This essay explores the philosophy and poetry of the nervous system in Erasmus Darwin's late 18th‐century science of life, arguing that Darwin's theory of animation constitutes an unrecognized chapter in the history of what is now called “biosemiotics.” I show how Darwin's earlier modern approach to epigenesis and plasticity—concepts resurgent not only in present day developmental biology and neuroscience, but also in continental theory and philo…
Epistemology (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Literature (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Materialism (6 works) · History (5 works) · Poetry (5 works) · History of Science and Medicine (3 works) · Linguistics (3 works)