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Title:
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Mathematical Metaphors in Early Seventeenth-century English Poetry
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Author:
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Roberto Bertuol
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Glasgow
, English Language
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Degree Date:
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1998
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Semantics
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Subject Language(s):
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Middle English
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Director(s):
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Robert Cummings
Christian Kay
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Abstract:
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This thesis investigates the use of 'mathematical' imagery in early seventeenth-century English poetry as a manifestation of the desire to delimit and control both the material and the spiritual world. The work consists of a 'dictionary' of quotations containing occurrences of mathematical words from sixteenth and seventeenth-century poetry, and of a commentary on its component parts. The 'dictionary', compiled by resort to the Chadwyck-Healey's 'English Poetry Full-Text Database', aims to provide evidence to support the general thesis of the study. Lakoff's cognitive approach to the study of figurative language proves to be a powerful instrument for investigating systems of conceptual metaphors, like mathematical metaphors, and to discover more about the categories of the mind.
The commentary on the component parts of the 'dictionary' is divided into six chapters. The first four chapters explore the metaphorical use of main arithmetical and geometric concepts in the works of a group of 15 sixteenth and seventeenth-century poets. The fifth chapter focuses on the metaphor 'squaring the circle', the crystallisation of seventeenth-century frustration about the difficulty of reducing reality to rational terms by means of mathematics. The last chapter attempts to determine the reason for, and the efficacy of the use of mathematical concepts to express non-mathematical ones and the impact on people's way of thinking.
The study shows that the seventeenth century sees a consolidation in the belief that mathematical concepts help describe the universe with extreme clarity and efficacy. This is confirmed by the fact that certain mathematical terms and expressions become novel metaphors. This linguistic change is informative of a far deeper change which takes place at mental and cultural levels. Concepts borrowed from mathematics to talk about reality are not only the realisation of a process of systematisation and rationalisation of thinking, but they also, in turn, contribute to implementing this same process.
This work offers a different and, hopefully, more comprehensive view than hitherto of a particular kind of metaphors used in the seventeenth century by showing the extent to which they reflect people's way of thinking and culture. The 'dictionary' of mathematical occurrences is not only a reference work, but aims to demonstrate some of the possibilities allowed by the application of computer technology to the study of literature.
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