문학의 수학적 공간과 샬롯 브론테의 『빌레트』
The Mathematical Space of Literature and the Case of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
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This essay conceptualizes a way to read literary space mathematically by turning to mathematical formalism. Mathematical formalism, an emerging method of literary criticism, allows us to reexamine literary forms mathematically. Its major tenet is that pure mathematics, unlike materialist mathematics such as statistics, builds aesthetically autonomous forms with no reference to the physical world, and, in so doing, it shares the same formal ground with aesthetics. It is on this mathematical ground that this essay tries to read literary space geometrically. Yet, starting with Euclidean geometry, this essay moves onto non-Euclidean geometry. As Hermann von Helmholtz’s work illustrates, non-Euclidean geometry comes into being when geometry breaks with the Kantian a priori reading of Euclidean geometry: non-Euclidean spaces are empirical at bottom. The paradox, however, is that despite its empiricist strain, non-Euclidean spaces end up being purely formalist with no regard to the physical world. Hegel’s critique of Kant’s synthetic space can be read as an account of this paradox in that it reads the geometrical shift from empirical to formal as a result of matter’s existential positing of its own essence (form). Based on the Hegelian reading of mathematical space, this essay foramlizes what can be called a spatial logic of the One (form) and zero (matter negated, or the subject of mathematics), and, from that perspective, it reads the literary space of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette as built on non-Euclidean, projective geometry.
Abstract
This essay conceptualizes a way to read literary space mathematically by turning to mathematical formalism. Mathematical formalism, an emerging method of literary criticism, allows us to reexamine literary forms mathematically. Its major tenet is that pure mathematics, unlike materialist mathematics such as statistics, builds aesthetically autonomous forms with no reference to the physical world, and, in so doing, it shares the same formal ground with aesthetics. It is on this mathematical ground that this essay tries to read literary space geometrically. Yet, starting with Euclidean geometry, this essay moves onto non-Euclidean geometry. As Hermann von Helmholtz’s work illustrates, non-Euclidean geometry comes into being when geometry breaks with the Kantian a priori reading of Euclidean geometry: non-Euclidean spaces are empirical at bottom. The paradox, however, is that despite its empiricist strain, non-Euclidean spaces end up being purely formalist with no regard to the physical world. Hegel’s critique of Kant’s synthetic space can be read as an account of this paradox in that it reads the geometrical shift from empirical to formal as a result of matter’s existential positing of its own essence (form). Based on the Hegelian reading of mathematical space, this essay foramlizes what can be called a spatial logic of the One (form) and zero (matter negated, or the subject of mathematics), and, from that perspective, it reads the literary space of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette as built on non-Euclidean, projective geometry.
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