My first book, Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. It tells the story of long-term aspirations, first in ancient epic and then in a wide range of literary and non-literary works from the early modern era and Enlightenment, to capture and disseminate "complete knowledge" of the world. It is also a story of the persistent failure of these aspirations, their collapse in the late eighteenth century, and the subsequent redefinition of the concept of completeness in modern literary and disciplinary terms.
The book argues that the pursuit of complete knowledge advanced the separation of epic from encyclopedia, literature from "Literature", and the sciences from the humanities; it demonstrates that the distinctions between "high" and "low", ephemeral and eternal, useful and useless that persist today all stem from the concepts of completeness that emerged during and as a result of the Enlightenment.
SETH RUDY
Professor | Author | 18th Centuryist
Seth Rudy is Associate Professor of English at Rhodes College. He earned his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from NYU in 2010. A scholar of Eighteenth-Century British literature, his work address authors and areas of inquiry from the Scientific Revolution to the end of the Romantic period. He writes and teaches about the history of ideas and large-scale knowledge projects, particularly Enlightenment encyclopedias and encyclopedism.
The Latest:
ASECS 24 | TORONTO | APRIL 3-5TH
Discursive Selection: A Computational Approach to Disciplinary Evolution in Eighteenth-Century Natural History
Mark Algee-Hewitt (Stanford) and I create a contextual embedding model of the ECCO corpus over time that can reveal the ways that the Natural History as a whole underwent a large-scale transformation. Our model recovers a shared vocabulary of “Natural History’ early in the period which we then use to trace the shifting sub-discourses it contains throughout the remainder of the century as they assume new configurations that map onto the emergence of the disciplines in the nineteenth century.
Thursday 2:30-4:00PM, Kenora
Bringing together an exciting group of knowledge workers, scholars and activists from across fields, The Ends of Knowledge revisits a foundational question of the Enlightenment: what is “the last or furthest end of knowledge”? It is a book about why we do what we do, and how we might know when we are done.
In the reorganization of knowledge that characterized the Enlightenment, disciplines were conceived as having particular “ends,” both in terms of purposes and end-points. As we experience an ongoing shift to the knowledge economy of the Information Age, this collection asks whether we still conceptualize knowledge in this way. Does an individual discipline have both an inherent purpose and a natural endpoint? What do an experiment on a fruit fly, a reading of a poem, and the writing of a line of code have in common?
Focusing on areas as diverse as AI; biology; Black studies; literary studies; physics; political activism; and the concept of disciplinarity itself, contributors uncover a life after disciplinarity for subjects that face immediate threats to the structure if not the substance of their contributions. These essays – whether reflective, historical, eulogistic, or polemical – chart a vital and necessary course towards the reorganization of knowledge production as a whole.
PUBLICATIONS
Peer-Reviewed
“Is This the End?” with Rachael Scarborough King (UCSB). Special Issue: Critical Conversations. The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 62.3-4 (Fall-Winter 2023): 483-88.
“Encyclopedism: Fire, Faith, and Future Learning,” in A Companion to World Literature, edited by Ken Seigneurie, Christopher Lupke, Frieda Ekotto, and B. Venkat Mani, Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell (December 2019): 1-6.
“Gaming the Golden Age of Piracy.” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries 7.1 (Fall 2015): 34-65.
“Stories of Everything: Epics, Encyclopedias, and Concepts of ‘Complete’ Knowledge 1667 – 1729.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55.4 (Winter 2014): 411-30.
“Knowledge and the Systematic Reader: The Past and Present of Encyclopedic Learning.” Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, 6.26 (2014): 505-26.
“Pope, Swift, and the Poetics of Posterity.” Eighteenth-Century Life 35.3 (Fall 2011): 1-28.
“Stage Presence: Performance and Theatricality in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend.” Dickens Studies Annual 37 (2006): 65-80.
REVIEWS
Review of Translation and Transfer of Knowledge in Encyclopedic Compilations, 1680-1830, eds. Clarinda Donato and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink. The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats. Forthcoming.
“Nothing, Something, Everything: Invisible Hands by Dror Wahrmann and Jonathan Sheehan,” Review Essay in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 59.3 (Fall 2018): 375-80.
Review of Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-Century England, by Courtney Weiss Smith. Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 30.1 (Fall 2017): 147-49.
OTHER PUBLICATIONS AND MEDIA
“Why knowing when to finish is as important as getting started,” Interview for Future Tense with Antony Funnell, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Radio. 18 November 2023.
“By understanding the ends of research can universities regain relevance?” London School of Economics (LSE) Impact Blog. 14 November 2023.
“Should Academic Disciplines Have Both a Purpose and A Finish Date?” with Rachael Scarborough King. Aeon. 29 September. 2023.
“Scholars Consider the End Points of Their Disciplines (Opinion),” with Rachael Scarborough King. Inside Higher Ed. 17 October 2023.