The Topological Imagination: Spheres, Edges, and Islands

Angus Fletcher

Published by Harvard University Press 2016

The Topological Imagination

Spheres, Edges, and Islands

Angus Fletcher

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674968844

Overview
Contents

About this book

In a bold and boundary defining work, Angus Fletcher clears a space for an intellectual encounter with the shape of human imagining. Joining literature and topology—a branch of mathematics—he maps the ways the imagination’s contours are formed by the spherical earth’s patterns and cycles, and shows how the world we inhabit also inhabits us.

Reviews

In Angus Fletcher’s fascinating, deliciously abstract, but literally down-to-earth meditations on the topological imagination, we are given a subtle new synthesis, new insights into our site and situation, and, at least in this reader, an incitement to poeticize. Like his master figure, the sphere, Fletcher wraps up what was never really apart.
-- Dorion Sagan, author of Cosmic Apprentice

Angus Fletcher’s new book brings the mathematical richness of topological connectivity to bear on our understanding of the literate power of imagination and its potential for metaphor. Synthesizing insights from the arts and sciences, Fletcher offers a visionary proposal for navigating our contemporary condition. With brilliance and brio, The Topological Imagination charts the flow of our life along the edges of our biosphere.
-- O. Bradley Bassler, author of The Pace of Modernity

Angus Fletcher’s new book The Topological Imagination is a visionary work of literary criticism. In the tradition of Kant’s thought on the ‘schematizing’ function of the imagination, Coleridge’s ‘esemplastic’ powers of imagining, and Wittgenstein’s and Einstein’s meditations on ‘picturing,’ Fletcher explores the many ways shapes, surfaces, and edges are the playground of consciousness. Asking ‘how spectral is any apparently single thing? What if a single object is actually an odd combination of smaller objects? What happens when shapes are actually compound?,’ he demonstrates a fundamental affinity between the history of mathematics, geography, and cosmology and works of poetry and speculative thought. Along the way he illuminates, with his usual brilliance, writings by Ovid, Shakespeare, Donne, Browne, Vico, Clare, Emerson, Rachel Carson, Walker Evans, and many others. In a blinkered and divisive era, Fletcher has written a self-help book for our planet.
-- Susan Stewart, author of The Poet’s Freedom

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
I. Topology and the Idea of Form Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	11
II. The Mind Imagining Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	40
III. Disparities in Metaphor Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	63
IV. Euler Discovers the First Edge Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	76
V. Vico and the Cycles of Human History Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	88
VI. “The Round Earth’s Imagined Corners” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	102
VII. Notes on a Family of Edges Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	126
VIII. Shape and the Ethics of Scale Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
IX. “No Man Is an Island” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	182
Background Reading Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	209
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	211

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Pages
- Main content: 224
Illustrations
- Other: 1 halftone, 1 line illustration

eBook

Published: April 4, 2016
ISBN: 9780674968844