What are the biological muses of Baroque literature? The question is not trivial or immediately apparent because biology was not recognized as a science during the Baroque period. Nonetheless, the broad exposure of Europeans to art based on natural forms drove an awareness and curiosity among the social classes that ultimately demanded investigation and deeper knowledge. And the Baroque aesthetic was communicable, following European explorers and becoming intrinsic to New World settlements and culture. It transcended time as well, particularly in music, where period instrumentation has found new modern audiences drawn to recordings and performances of Baroque music, but as well in literature, where the Neobaroque genre has developed.
This panel seeks to find biological influences on literature across the Baroque aesthetic and across time: Old World, New World, and Neo. The session begins with “Vermin in the Verse,” by John Doucet, a senior scientist, poet, and science-humanities scholar, who provides a reading of biological phenomena in the verse works of English poet John Donne. Writing in London during the Second Plague Pandemic, Donne's poetic frolic "The Flea" predates identification of that infectious vector and its blood-bearing diseases by 300 years, and his descriptions of contemporaneous plague as well as his own personal illness have been lauded by the medical community as valuable beyond diagnoses. Donne is not immediately known as a naturalist, but his keen observations and descriptions during the Baroque made a lasting influence not only to literature but also to the emergence of biological science.
Next, the panel will follow Baroque influence to the New World, as doctoral candidate Anmol Sahni presents “Nature as Muse in Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps.” Exemplifying New World Baroque, Carpentier’s novel applies nature as not merely a setting but a generative muse—an active, shaping force that influences artistic creation, narrative structure, and cultural identity. Carpentier transforms the lush, untamed landscapes of the Amazon into a baroque tableau, where organic forms mirror the novel’s elaborate prose, interwoven histories, and metafictional layers. Sahni will examine how Carpentier’s prose enacts a baroque ecology, where natural abundance disrupts linear narratives and forces reconfiguration of temporal and spatial relations. By reading The Lost Steps as a meditation on nature as a Baroque muse, Sahni will expand discussions of the New World Baroque beyond cultural hybridity, centering the role of the environment in shaping literary aesthetics and offering new ways to theorize ecological representation in Latin American literature.
Following excursion to the New World, doctoral candidate Emery Jenson demonstrates the Neobaroque genre with “Cobra’s Marble Veins: Neobaroque Nature and the “Realm of Stone” From 1647 to 1972.” In Severo Sarduy’s epic Cobra (1972), the legacies of Baroque sculpture are refigured within a complex and problematic narrative of trans self-fashioning. The protagonist, Cobra, seeks to transform her body, experimenting with esoteric herbs, insect larvae, and salt compresses,. She becomes ever more beautiful: “paleness transformed her,” and across her face spread “blue, purple lines, tiny pearls.” Pre-empting Deleuze’s description of baroque “veins” of seventeenth-century marble, Cobra becomes, more than beautiful, sculptural—“white, calcareous, made of chalk dust.” Jensen will argue that Cobra’s experimental acts of transition constitute a Neobaroque alternative to the French philosopher’s engagement with the problem of Baroque sculpture. Yoking Baroque sculpture to the biological realm of transition—Cobra subjects the rationalizing categories of sex and gender to a Neobaroque nature.
This session will have no presider. Doucet will serve as ad hoc introducer of participants, moderator of questions, and enforcer of time limits for both presentations and the session as a whole. The panelists have agreed to speak on their topics for a strict limit of no longer than 15 minutes each, allowing an ample terminal period for audience interaction.
The panel incorporates a diversity of voices by a number of measures: (1) readings reflect Baroque, New Word baroque, and Neobaroque works, as well as (2) European English, Caribbean, and Latin American perspectives. Panelists include (3) an experienced doctoral scholar and two doctoral candidates, and their primary backgrounds are (4) English, Literary Studies, and Biological Science.