The Museum and the Formula
tamed nature in Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-2096.2023.40052Keywords:
Second World War, All The Light we Cannot See, Anthony Doerr, scientific discourse, nature, cultureAbstract
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.
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Copyright (c) 2022 Luiz Gustavo Leitão Vieira, José Otaviano da Mata Machado Silva (Autor)
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