Abstract

Giordano Bruno's writing is a striking example of geometry's explicit and implicit participation in language. His work demonstrates an attentiveness to the figurative; that is, to the figures of both classical rhetoric and Euclidean geometry. My dissertation investigates what is geometric of Bruno's language and what is rhetorical about his geometric diagrams. Through three "geometric readings" I demonstrate that certain geometric figures echo and complement Bruno's use of the figurative idiom. ;Chapter One offers an historical overview of geometry in sixteenth-century Europe, and an assessment of Bruno's mathematical expertise. Here, I also account for the paucity of scholarship on Bruno's geometry and on the relationship between his language and his mathematics. In the body of the dissertation, I isolate three categories of geometric form---the curve, the angle, and the straight line---and three works by Bruno. In Chapter Two, I consider the "curvilinear tropes" of circumlocution, hyperbole, ellipsis, and parable in the Cena de le ceneri, arguing that ethical, cosmological, and theological principles are reflected in and emphasized by the geometric rhetoric of the dialogue. In Chapter Three, I examine the "angles" in Bruno's De gli eroici furori as expressed in tropes of contradiction and in "axial" tropes that revisit Bruno's philosophy of coincidentia oppositorum . In the fourth chapter, I trace Bruno's critique of pedantic thought in the Candelaio through manifestations of rhetorical and conceptual "rectilinearity" in the tropes of listing and inversion. ;In Bruno's writing, word and image intersect and clamor for recognition. To expand our understanding of Bruno's philosophical thought, we must articulate this intersection. In so doing, we also open a door onto the larger question of how geometry contributes to the rhetoric of argumentation and literature as a whole. In my Conclusion, I draft a theory for the "geometric reading" of literature, outlining the metaphoric geometry that is present in all forms of literature