Henry S. Turner

Descriptions and Downloads

“Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa): Reflections on ‘Form.’” An essay on recent discussions of the problem of form in literary studies, drawing on the work of Bruno Latour to suggest several ways in which the notion of form might be expanded and suggesting how an expanded category of form might be useful to historians of science and literary critics alike. Written for the Focus section of Isis, the journal of the History of Science Society, on “History of Science and Literature and Science: Convergences and Divergences,” ed. James J. Bono, with pieces by Bono, Colin Milburn, Laura Otis, and Laura Dassow Walls. Isis 101 no. 3 (September 2010): 578-589.

“Mathematics and the Imagination: A Brief Introduction.”  An introductory essay written by Arielle Saiber and myself for a special issue of Configurations 17.1-2 (2010), the journal of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, for which we were guest co-editors.  The issue is available now and includes essays by Reviel Netz, Robert Goulding, Tom Conley, Arkady Plotnitsky, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, and Lori Emerson.

“Of Dramatology: Action in the Form of Tools and Machines,” an essay on cybernetics, tools and machines in the work of Norbert Wiener, Plato, and Aristotle, with reflections on Shakespeare and Bacon. Postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1.1-2 (Spring-Summer 2010): 199-207, a special issue on “When did we become post/human?”, ed. Eileen A. Joy and Craig Dionne.

“Toward an Analysis of the Corporate Ego: The Case of Richard Hakluyt.” On problems of legal personhood, value, narration, networks, and the political imagination.  Written in the voice of Freud, as a “lost lecture,” for a special issue of differences 20 nos. 2-3 (Summer-Fall 2009): 103-147 on “The Future of the Human,” ed. Nancy Armstrong and Warren Montag.

“Life Science: Rude Mechanicals, Human Mortals, Posthuman Shakespeare,” an article about dramatic character as a form of artificial life and theater as the new media of the sixteenth century, via Canguilhem, Agamben, and Kant.  South Central Review 26.1&2 (Winter & Spring, 2009): 197-217.

“The Problem of the More than One: Friendship, Calculation, and Political Association in The Merchant of Venice“, an article on philosophies of value, friendship, decision, and justice in classical ethics and in Shakespeare’s play, as viewed through Derrida’s late work. Shakespeare Quarterly 57.4 (Winter, 2006): 413-442.

“Literature and Mapping in England, 1520-1688.” In The History of Cartography, Vol. III: Cartography in the European Renaissance, Part I, ed. David Woodward (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 412-426. Traces the literary use of maps and the map-image during the early modern period and proposes several avenues for future research into the problem of topographesis, or the relationship between cartographic and literary modes of representation.

“From Homo Academicus to Poeta Publicus: Celebrity and Transversal Knowledge in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589)“, on the place of Renaissance homo academicus in relation to early modern epistemologies of poetics, technology and magic. Written collaboratively with Bryan Reynolds (Theater and Drama, UC-Irvine) for Writing Robert Greene: Essays on England’s First Notorious Professional Writer, ed. Edward Gieskes and Kirk Melnikoff (Ashgate Press, 2008), 73-93.

“Performative Transversations: Collaboration Through and Beyond Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay“, on homology, academic discourse, and State power in Greene’s play and the 21st century academy. Written collaboratively with Bryan Reynolds in Bryan Reynolds, Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (London: Palgrave, 2006).

“Plotting Early Modernity,” in The Culture of Capital, 85-127. An omnibus statement of the argument and primary evidence of The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics and the Practical Spatial Arts.

“Nashe’s Red Herring: Epistemologies of the Commodity in Lenten Stuffe (1599).” Undertakes an intellectual history of the commodity form from Aristotle to Nashe to Marx and examines different competing modes of understanding material objects in Renaissance antiquarianism and natural philosophy. ELH 68 (2001): 529-561.

“King Lear Without: The Heath.” Examines problems of spatial representation on stage and in print. Renaissance Drama, n.s. 28 (1997): 161-193.

“‘Empires of Objects’: Accumulation and Entropy in E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910).“  Examines Forster’s formal techniques for representing the processes of capital accumulation, imperialism, and the radical loss upon which both are predicated. Twentieth Century Literature 46 (2000): 328-345.