Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: The pursuit of a distinction between “culture” and “nature” is a staple of Western thought since Antiquity. The intellectual endeavor of the Enlightenment accelerates these efforts in its attempt to make the natural world completely cognizable and reducible to human intellect. The Second World War is a fundamental watershed event where one can observe the crisis of this model of thought. In this sense, this article proposes an investigation of two models that reduce nature to human cognition that are present in Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See: the museum of natural history and the trigonometric formula. Departing from Huyssen’s (2014) notion of a “tamed nature” and Alberti’s (2008) critique of “nature behind glass”, it aims at illustrating how Doerr plays out, in the pages of his novel, the crisis of the Enlightened thought set in motion during the Second World War.
Institution: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4407904453