The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
Stephen Greenblatt, 2011
W.W. Norton
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393343403
Summary
Winner, 2011 National Book Award, Nonfiction
Winner, 2012 Pulitzer Prize, Nonfiction
One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.
Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.
The copying and translation of this ancient book-the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age-fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 7, 1943
• Raised—Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A, Ph.D., Yale University; B.A., M.A.,
Cambridge University
• Awards—National Book Award; Pulitzer Prize
• Currently—lives in
Stephen Jay Greenblatt is a Pulitzer Prize winning American literary critic, theorist and scholar. He is regarded by many as one of the founders of New Historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term.
Greenblatt has written extensively on Shakespeare, the Renaissance, culture and new historicism and is considered to be an expert in these fields. He is also co-founder of the literary-cultural journal Representations, which often publishes articles by new historicists. His most popular work is Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare that was on the New York Times Best Seller List for nine weeks.
Education and career
Greenblatt was born in Boston and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After graduating from Newton North High School, he was educated at Yale University (B.A. 1964, M.Phil 1968, Ph.D. 1969) and Pembroke College, Cambridge (B.A. 1966, M.A. 1968). Greenblatt has since taught at University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University. He was Class of 1932 Professor at Berkeley (he became a full professor in 1980) and taught there for 28 years before taking a position at Harvard University, where in 1997 Greenblatt became the Harry Levin Professor of Literature. He was named John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities in 2000. Greenblatt is considered "a key figure in the shift from literary to cultural poetics and from textual to contextual interpretation in U.S. English departments in the 1980s and 1990s."
Greenblatt is a permanent fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. As a visiting professor and lecturer, Greenblatt has taught at such institutions as the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, the University of Florence, Kyoto University, the University of Oxford and Peking University. He was a resident fellow at the American Academy of Rome, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has been president of the Modern Language Association.
Family
Greenblatt has three children. He was married to Ellen Schmidt from 1969–96; they have two sons (Joshua, an attorney, and Aaron, a doctor). In 1998 he married fellow academic Ramie Targoff, also a Renaissance expert and a professor at Brandeis University; they have one son (Harry).
New Historicism
Greenblatt first used the term “new historicism” in his 1982 introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance wherein he uses Queen Elizabeth's “bitter reaction to the revival of Shakespeare’s Richard II on the eve of the Essex rebellion" to illustrate the “mutual permeability of the literary and the historical." While some critics have charged that it is “antithetical to literary and aesthetic value, others praise new historicism as “a collection of practices” employed by critics to gain a more comprehensive understanding of literature by considering it in historical context while treating history itself as “historically contingent on the present in which [it is] constructed."
Greenblatt has said ...
My deep, ongoing interest is in the relation between literature and history, the process through which certain remarkable works of art are at once embedded in a highly specific life-world and seem to pull free of that life-world. I am constantly struck by the strangeness of reading works that seem addressed, personally and intimately, to me, and yet were written by people who crumbled to dust long ago.
Publishing
Greenblatt joined M. H. Abrams as general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature published by W.W. Norton during the 1990s. He is also the co-editor of the anthology's section on Renaissance literature and the general editor of the Norton Shakespeare, “currently his most influential piece of public pedagogy." (From Wikipedia. Read the complete article.)
Book Reviews
A warm, intimate…volume of apple-cheeked popular intellectual history. Mr. Greenblatt…is a very serious and often thorny scholar…. But he also writes crowd pleasers…. The Swerve…brings us Mr. Greenblatt in his more cordial mode. He wears his enormous erudition lightly…. There is abundant evidence here of what is Mr. Greenblatt's great and rare gift as a writer: an ability, to borrow a phrase from The Swerve, to feel fully "the concentrated force of the buried past."
Dwight Garner - New York Times
In The Swerve, the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt investigates why [Lucretius's] book nearly died, how it was saved and what its rescue means to us. [Greenblatt]...was amazed by how personally it spoke to him. Such encounters have become central to the philosophy Greenblatt has elaborated in several decades of work as a literary historian and theorist of the “new historicism” in literary studies. It combines hardheaded investigations of historical context with a profound feeling for the way writers somehow pull free from time, to enter the minds of readers.
Sarah Bakewell - New York Times Book Review
Pleasure may or may not be the true end of life, but for book lovers, few experiences can match the intellectual-aesthetic enjoyment delivered by a well-wrought book. In the world of serious nonfiction, Stephen Greenblatt is a pleasure maker without peer.
Long Island Newsday
[The Swerve] is thrilling, suspenseful tale that left this reader inspired and full of questions about the ongoing project known as human civilization.
Boston Globe
But Swerve is an intense, emotional telling of a true story, one with much at stake for all of us. And the further you read, the more astonishing it becomes. It's a chapter in how we became what we are, how we arrived at the worldview of the present. No one can tell the whole story, but Greenblatt seizes on a crucial pivot, a moment of recovery, of transmission, as amazing as anything in fiction.
Philadelphia Inquirer
The Swerve is one of those brilliant works of non-fiction that's so jam-packed with ideas and stories it literally boggles the mind.
Maureen Corrigan - NPR
Can a poem change the world? Harvard professor and bestselling Shakespeare biographer Greenblatt ably shows in this mesmerizing intellectual history that it can. A richly entertaining read about a radical ancient Roman text that shook Renaissance Europe and inspired shockingly modern ideas (like the atom) that still reverberate today.
Newsweek
It's fascinating to watch Greenblatt trace the dissemination of these ideas through 15th-century Europe and beyond, thanks in good part to Bracciolini's recovery of Lucretius' poem.
Salon.com
(Starred review.) In this gloriously learned page-turner, both biography and intellectual history, Harvard Shakespearean scholar Greenblatt (Will in the World) turns his attention to the front end of the Renaissance as the origin of Western culture's foundation: the free questioning of truth.... In an obscure monastery in southern Germany lay the recovery of a philosophy free of superstition and dogma. Lucretius' "On the Nature of Things." ... [The] finding lay what Greenblatt...terms a historic swerve of massive proportions, propagated by such seminal and often heretical truth tellers as Machiavelli, Giordano Bruno, and Montaigne. We even learn the history of the bookworm.... Nearly 70 pages of notes and bibliography do nothing to spoil the fun of Greenblatt's marvelous tale. 16 pages of color illus.
Publishers Weekly
Whether one poem ["The Nature of Things" by Lucretius] could be so influential is questionable. In addition to this overzealous history, book lovers are rewarded with brilliant descriptions of the history of books, libraries, and fascinating detail about manuscript production.... "Greenblatt's masterful account transcends [Bracciolini's] significant discovery," read the review of the National Book Award-winning Norton hardcover. —Susan Baird, formerly with Oak Lawn P.L., Chicago
Library Journal
Greenblatt (Humanities/Harvard Univ.; Shakespeare's Freedom, 2010, etc.) makes another intellectually fetching foray into the Renaissance—with digressions into antiquity and the recent past—in search of a root of modernity. More than 2,000 years ago, Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius wrote On the Nature of Things, which spoke of such things as the atomic structure of all that exists, of natural selection, the denial of an afterlife, the inherent sexuality of the universe, the cruelty of religion and the highest goal of human life being the enhancement of pleasure. It was a dangerous book and wildly at odds with the powers that be.... Greenblatt brilliantly ushers readers into this world.... More wonderfully illuminating Renaissance history from a master scholar and historian.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt is essentially making the argument that a poem changed the world. Do you agree that the written word can carry this kind of power? And do you think a literary rediscovery could potentially initiate a new “swerve” today?
2. Lucretius’s "On the Nature of Things" appealed to readers in part because it spoke from a lost world. People are still fascinated with the classical past. Why do humans have this nostalgia for the past, and how can this type of preoccupation help us move forward?
3. How were the intolerable ideas in Lucretius tolerated, or at least allowed to pass, after the text was copied and circulated?
4. Discuss Greenblatt’s ability to bring Poggio Bracciolini and his contemporaries to life for us, despite the very great distance in time—six hundred years—between their world and ours. How does Greenblatt handle the unfamiliarity of their world and its assumptions?
5. Greenblatt suggests that book hunting kept Bracciolini from succumbing entirely to the corrosive cynicism of his world. Why should an obsession with uncovering ancient books from a pagan past have meant so much to him?
6. What do you make of the fact that Bracciolini didn’t really grasp the importance of his discovery? Was his discovery of Lucretius’s poem just a fortunate accident?
7. What parallels do you notice between the world that suppressed Lucretius’s poem and the world in which we live today? What differences?
8. How does Greenblatt’s discussion of the loss of books to bookworms and the destruction of libraries (both willful and accidental) speak to current debates over printed versus digital books?
9. Did it surprise you that monasteries became havens for—and even producers of—forgotten books at a time when people were censoring books and burning libraries for religious reasons? Discuss the complicated relationship between the church and literary/scientific endeavors over the years.
10. "On the Nature of Things" could be thought of as a poem that “went viral.” How has the dissemination of ideas changed since the Renaissance? Can you think of another book or piece of literature that gained popularity and swayed popular thought in a similar way? Do you think literature is more likely to have a world changing impact, or can music, film, or art generate the same effect?
11. Lucretius claimed that the ideas in his work should liberate humans from fear of death, but his contemporary Cicero said that these ideas only made matters worse, since total extinction—a return to atoms colliding in an infinite universe—was more frightening than any punishment in the afterlife. Where do you stand on this debate?
12. It seems the term “Epicureanism” still conveys rash, indulgent pleasure seeking. Did Greenblatt’s exploration of the true nature of Epicurus and his followers change how you think about our collective pursuit of pleasure?
13. What is the significance of the fact that Lucretius conveyed his scientific ideas in the form of a poem? What are the consequences in our own age of the extreme separation of poetry and science?
14. How do the atomic “swerves” described in Lucretius’s poem mirror the larger “swerve” initiated by the poem itself? What might Lucretius have thought of Greenblatt’s “co-opting” his term to describe human events much larger than invisible atoms?
(Questions issued by publisher.)