Description
About the Author
Gerard Passannante is associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Reviews
"Passannante's beautifully crafted study of the epistemological anxieties of early modern materialist thought shakes up the boundaries between comparative literature, art history, and history of science. It reveals new ways of juxtaposing historical voices and visions as diverse as Leonardo's deluge drawings, Shakespeare's aporeitic 'anything' and 'nothing, ' Robert Hooke's micrographic demonstrations of providential order, the Kantian sublime, and the Museum of Jurassic Technology. With its themes of cosmic disintegration, ecological collapse, and political upheaval, Catastrophizing is also very much a book about humanism and the humanities in the twenty-first century."--Stephen J. Campbell, Johns Hopkins University "With Catastrophizing, Passannante explores how Renaissance thinkers, including Leonardo, Donne, Montaigne, and Shakespeare, responded to sudden, inexplicable manifestations of nature's powers--'the action of the mind when it approaches the imperceptible.' At a moment when the force of natural disasters could not be more sadly relevant, Passannante wisely reminds us that our predicament has an intellectual history--and that the worst responses would be either to succumb to fantasies of mastery or to utter helplessness."--Susan Stewart, Princeton University "In this deeply historical and urgently contemporary book, Gerard Passannante turns to the subtle ligature between philosophical materialism in the school of Lucretius and the imaginary (but not always, in the event, factually erroneous) phenomenon of disaster, or catastrophe, the sudden downturn and collapse. Following the perfect storm of materialist catastrophism, 'the making of disaster, ' from Leonardo's 'Deluge' drawings to Donne's earthquakes and cosmic trepidations, to Shakespeare's King Lear, Pascal's twin abysses, and the Kantian sublime, and concluding with a wise analysis of the coming ecological catastrophe, this book is, among much else for literary historians, a forceful and caring intervention in our contemporary debate on the future."--Gordon Teskey, Harvard University
Book Information
ISBN 9780226612218
Author Gerard Passannante
Format Hardback
Page Count 240
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press