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To illustrate his “general proposition” in Eureka about the cyclic implosion and explosion of cosmic matter, Poe imagines a spectator whirling in circles at the top of Mount Etna. Poe’s image is more than a rhetorical device meant to allude to the volcano’s towering presence in contemporary scientific literature, although it does make such an allusion. As I argue in this chapter, Etna is a microcosm of Poe’s project in Eureka to demonstrate how literary composition and the creation of the universe—the cosmos—are, in fact, analogous processes that must be analyzed through poetic and scientific optics. Etna, in a very specific sense, is a space (“locus”) of recombination and rewriting, just as Poe turns all of space into a locus of rewriting in Eureka. “Space,” writes Philip Edward Phillips in the preface to Poe and Place (2018), figures “the idea or the extension of the idea of place.” As space in this sense, Etna conceptualizes and, to use Yi-Fu Tuan’s terminology, “opens” the geographical place of the volcano on Sicily to uncover a poetic archive that Eureka adds to and remakes. The cosmological prose poem does more than reconfigure the topic of Etna in nineteenth-century English, however. It also rearticulates what Gareth D. Williams calls “the Etna Idea” in his study of the volcano’s tropological significance from the Greco-Roman period to the Renaissance. Williams’s “Etna Idea” is, in brief, a “doubleness” of classical and postclassical vision that comprehends both fabula (a narrative story or poem) and ratio (reason, science). In its blending of fabula and ratio, the Etna Idea mirrors the idea of Eureka, which is to compound science and poetry into both an analytical tool (to explore composition) and a creative device (to compose). Writing Eureka, Poe had to ask (in John Tresch’s words) “how poetry might confront, engage, challenge, reimagine, or align with science.” I conclude the chapter by discussing how Poe’s Eureka has been reimagined in “La Spirale” (“The Spiral”), the final entry in Italo Calvino’s genre-defying Le Cosmicomiche (1965, Cosmicomics). Like Poe, Calvino turned “the diverse relationship between scientific data and fantastic creation” into a poetic space of recombination.

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Etna’s Observatory: Poe’s Eureka and Spaces of Literary and Scientific Recombination

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  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Micah Donohue

摘要

To illustrate his “general proposition” in Eureka about the cyclic implosion and explosion of cosmic matter, Poe imagines a spectator whirling in circles at the top of Mount Etna. Poe’s image is more than a rhetorical device meant to allude to the volcano’s towering presence in contemporary scientific literature, although it does make such an allusion. As I argue in this chapter, Etna is a microcosm of Poe’s project in Eureka to demonstrate how literary composition and the creation of the universe—the cosmos—are, in fact, analogous processes that must be analyzed through poetic and scientific optics. Etna, in a very specific sense, is a space (“locus”) of recombination and rewriting, just as Poe turns all of space into a locus of rewriting in Eureka. “Space,” writes Philip Edward Phillips in the preface to Poe and Place (2018), figures “the idea or the extension of the idea of place.” As space in this sense, Etna conceptualizes and, to use Yi-Fu Tuan’s terminology, “opens” the geographical place of the volcano on Sicily to uncover a poetic archive that Eureka adds to and remakes. The cosmological prose poem does more than reconfigure the topic of Etna in nineteenth-century English, however. It also rearticulates what Gareth D. Williams calls “the Etna Idea” in his study of the volcano’s tropological significance from the Greco-Roman period to the Renaissance. Williams’s “Etna Idea” is, in brief, a “doubleness” of classical and postclassical vision that comprehends both fabula (a narrative story or poem) and ratio (reason, science). In its blending of fabula and ratio, the Etna Idea mirrors the idea of Eureka, which is to compound science and poetry into both an analytical tool (to explore composition) and a creative device (to compose). Writing Eureka, Poe had to ask (in John Tresch’s words) “how poetry might confront, engage, challenge, reimagine, or align with science.” I conclude the chapter by discussing how Poe’s Eureka has been reimagined in “La Spirale” (“The Spiral”), the final entry in Italo Calvino’s genre-defying Le Cosmicomiche (1965, Cosmicomics). Like Poe, Calvino turned “the diverse relationship between scientific data and fantastic creation” into a poetic space of recombination.