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WORKSHOP IN POETICS
Workshop in Poetics: Stephen Osadetz
Wednesday April 25, 2012 | 06:00 -08:00 PM | Boardroom

"What Coleridge Saw in Principles: His Criticism and the Idea of Method"

Stephen Osadetz is an advanced doctoral candidate in English here at Stanford completing a dissertation entitled "On Principle: Newton to Coleridge." To situate this chapter in relationship to the project as a whole, Stephen sends the following abstract of his thesis: "The systematic treatise was the most important intellectual genre of the early eighteenth century, but few people were able to purchase or even understand these weighty tomes. How, then, did the ideas of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment reach a larger audience? To popularize their ideas, writers encapsulated their treatises in principles: short, elegant sentences that attempted to explain the subtle interactions that govern the universe. I argue in my dissertation that principles are among the most characteristic and yet most ignored rhetorical forms in eighteenth-century science, philosophy, and literature. These propositions were immensely important, and they quickly came to shape the works they were meant to encapsulate."