Timothy M. Harrison
University of Chicago, English Language and Literature, Faculty Member
- University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought, Faculty MemberUniversity of Toronto, English, Alumnusadd
- Early Modern Literature, Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, Phenomenology, St. Augustine, History of the Life Sciences, Medieval Literature, and 32 moreBook History, English historical linguistics, John Milton, Shakespeare, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Edmund Spenser, Michel Henry, Renaud Barbaras, Montaigne, Renaissance Studies, English, Phenomenology of the body, Affect (Cultural Theory), Literature And Science, Analogy (Philosophy), Paradise Lost, Metonymy, Philosophy, Literature, English Literature, Critical Theory, Vondel, Joost van den, History of Philosophy, Erasmus, Personhood, History of the Senses, History and Philosophy of Biology, Affect/Emotion, Descartes, Edmund Husserl, and 17th Century & Early Modern Philosophyedit
- My work examines the conditions that enabled the literary representation of the first-person perspective in early mod... moreMy work examines the conditions that enabled the literary representation of the first-person perspective in early modernity. My writing and teaching focus on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, often as it relates to philosophy, theology, the sciences, and the literatures of other cultures and periods. I am jointly appointed in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, and I am Associated Faculty in the Philosophy of Religion at the Divinity School.
My first two books explore the history of first-person experience in relation to the beginning and end of human life. /Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England/ (University of Chicago Press, 2020) examines the role played by poetry in the emergence of the concept of consciousness. Somewhere between the work of René Descartes in the 1640s and the writings of John Locke in the 1690s, the modern concept of consciousness was born. Coming To analyses the historical genesis of this concept by exploring the poetry and prose of John Milton and Thomas Traherne. I argue that these writers attempt to clarify the nature of consciousness by describing in first person terms what it is like for human thought to begin. In /John Donne's Physics/ (University of Chicago Press, 2024), my co-author Elizabeth D. Harvey and I reconsider Donne’s representation of the body and embodiment in the Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. Written during an epidemic that ravaged London in 1623, when Donne fell gravely ill, Devotions grapples with the profound epistemic, social, religious, and political changes that characterized early seventeenth-century England through a first-person account of what it is like to linger at the threshold of death.
I am currently working on two book projects. In /Horizons of the Mind: Self and World in Early Modern Persian and English Poetry/, my co-author Jane Mikkelson and I construct a comparative literary history of mindedness. We use three comparative methods to examine the work of two philosophical poets—one from northern India, one from rural England—both of whom composed poetry that explores questions about the nature of the human mind: Bidel of Delhi and Thomas Traherne. First, we use a formal approach that disregards geographical and historical contexts to reveal the surprising similarities that justify our comparative endeavor. Second, we pursue weak comparisons that attempt to explain these similarities by locating each poet within their own cultural, political, religious, philosophical, and literary traditions. And third, we undertake a series of historical comparisons that show how Traherne and Bidel belonged to overlapping intellectual worlds organized around the Afro-Eurasian spread of medical ideas promulgated by Galen, philosophical notions inspired by Plotinus, and the psychology of Ibn Sīnā, known as Avicenna in Latin.
In /The Anthropology of John Milton/, I examine the most important concept in Milton’s writing—human freedom—by reading Paradise Lost in relation to its literary, rhetorical, philosophical, and theological contexts. What are we? Who are we? For Milton, the answers to these questions lie in a proper understanding of human freedom. I argue that, for Milton, such understanding is to be found not in philosophy or theology, but in poetry. I thus focus on what we might call Milton’s poetic anthropology. In the first half of the book, I explore the preconditions that, for Milton, underpin human freedom: the divine act of creation, the nature and structure of life itself. In the second half, I examine how Milton theorizes and represents human action and human politics.edit
John Milton’s Paradise Lost is shaped by an implicit theory of life. In Milton’s view, the mark of the living is the capacity to endeavor, the ability to strive in phenomenally available and self- exceeding ways. This essay examines how... more
John Milton’s Paradise Lost is shaped by an implicit theory of life. In Milton’s view, the mark of the living is the capacity to endeavor, the ability to strive in phenomenally available and self- exceeding ways. This essay examines how Milton reworks ancient and early modern ideas about life in order both to develop a concept of endeavor and to represent the activity of endeavoring.
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Did world literature exist during the period that scholars writing in English have come to call early modernity? How did early modern authors perceive or imagine relations between far-flung literary cultures? Answers to these questions... more
Did world literature exist during the period that scholars writing in English have come to call early modernity? How did early modern authors perceive or imagine relations between far-flung literary cultures? Answers to these questions depend on what is meant by world literature, a category whose meaning, scope, history, and value have been contested in recent scholarship. In this essay, we reconstruct concepts of world and world literature that were held independently by two poets: Bidel of Delhi (1644–1720) from Mughal India and Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) from rural England. During Bidel’s and Traherne’s lifetimes, projects of enlightenment and self-knowledge were driven by thinking with worlds. Taking this blurring of self and world as our point of departure, we begin by examining how Traherne’s and Bidel’s concepts of world name the relations that condition phenomenal appearance and epistemic endeavor. We then show how each poet responds to experiences of diversity (across languages, religions, temporalities, and geographies) by articulating their own concepts of world literature. Finally, we argue that these notions of world literature are structured by practices of assemblage—a concept we borrow from the early modern album (muraqqaʿ). As objects that collect varied specimens of art and calligraphy, albums solicit creative engagement with diverse materials, encouraging readers to attend to similarities and differences in style, medium, and content without imposing hermeneutic principles. We reflexively activate this early modern concept of assemblage in order to retune current scholarly approaches to world literature and early modern studies.
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Research Interests:
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Milton's Paradise Lost is the first text in the Genesis tradition to allow Adam to describe the experience of awakening to consciousness in his own words. For Adam, birth and maturity are coterminous. Since he has not developed habits of... more
Milton's Paradise Lost is the first text in the Genesis tradition to allow Adam to describe the experience of awakening to consciousness in his own words. For Adam, birth and maturity are coterminous. Since he has not developed habits of attention that privilege certain elements of his experience over others, he notices and describes the felt aliveness that supports and lies behind all other activities. In this paper, I attend closely to the verbal strategies Adam employs in his story. I argue that Adamic awakening discloses the feeling of being alive, and that it is through alterations in this feeling that Milton describes the effects of the fall. Yet the fall is not irreversible in this respect: Paradise Lost suggests that this feeling allows prelapsarian life to be grasped in the fallen present. To experience awakening along with Adam is to feel life in its purity, to apprehend a vitality that is no longer in dialectical tension with death.
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We argue in this essay that the phenomenon of resonance structures the formal and metaphoric coherence of John Donne’s Anniversaries, underpinning the poems’ allusions to magnetism, the doctrine of signatures, atomism, and Paracelsian... more
We argue in this essay that the phenomenon of resonance structures the formal and metaphoric coherence of John Donne’s Anniversaries, underpinning the poems’ allusions to magnetism, the doctrine of signatures, atomism, and Paracelsian theory. Linking analogy and metonymy through resonance allows Donne to engage emergent scientific discovery, the epistemological upheaval of the early seventeenth century, and the extra-linguistic dimensions of language. We explore the workings of this concept as a musical, scientific, and passional principle of cosmic cohesion; through his verse Donne seeks to harness resonance as a vital force of magnetic and emotional connection.
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In Coming To, Timothy M. Harrison uncovers the forgotten role of poetry in the history of the idea of consciousness. Drawing our attention to a sea change in the English seventeenth century, when, over the course of a half century,... more
In Coming To, Timothy M. Harrison uncovers the forgotten role of poetry in the history of the idea of consciousness. Drawing our attention to a sea change in the English seventeenth century, when, over the course of a half century, “conscience” made a sudden shift to “consciousness,” he traces a line that leads from the philosophy of René Descartes to the poetry of John Milton, from the prenatal memories of theologian Thomas Traherne to the unresolved perspective on natality, consciousness, and ethics in the philosophy of John Locke. Each of these figures responded to the first-person perspective by turning to the origins of how human thought began. Taken together, as Harrison shows, this unlikely group of thinkers sheds new light on the emergence of the concept of consciousness and the significance of human natality to central questions in the fields of literature, philosophy, and the history of science