Stanford Humanities Center
Mattea Scheiber Koon is a PhD Candidate in English at Stanford University. She specializes in early modern literature with a focus in philosophy and critical theory. Her dissertation, a literary history of Renaissance analogy, explores these interests. Koon holds a bachelor’s degree in English and Anthropology from Oberlin College and a master’s degree in English from Stanford University.
SHC Project
Analogical: A Literary History of an Early Modern Idea
Analogy is the workhorse of the humanities. Scholars from T. S. Eliot and Claude Lévi-Strauss to Alan Turing and Quentin Skinner appeal to the concept. Despite its ubiquity, analogy remains undertheorized. Its capaciousness—and the intellectual flexibility it engenders—renders analogy broadly appealing. But these qualities obscure its historicity. “Analogical: A Literary History of an Early Modern Idea,” proposes a novel theory of analogy. It identifies analogy as a temporally conditioned tool, a technology that came of age in the pre- and early modern periods. “Analogical” traces analogy from its origin in classical mathematics to its development in medieval ontotheology and through its permutations in Renaissance poetics. This interdisciplinary genealogy embraces key literary, philosophical, and religious works in the western European tradition. Together, these texts thematize a fundamental epistemological dilemma: incommensurability. How do we compare the incomparable? How do we know the unknown?
