The Agon

Abstract The first chapter introduces a new paradigm of the ‘agon’ in interdisciplinary literary studies. It theorizes how two-world pictures (poetry and mathematics, for example) present different accounts of reality because of differences in their modes and how the various modes have always been engaged in an agon for representational authority, with different modes winning at different historical periods. The chapter traces the early rhetorical manoeuvres of science in the seventeenth century in its attempt to undermine the authority of poetry and sketches the development of the agon between poetry and mathematics between the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, setting the stage for the modernist agon. The chapter explores limitations in the influence model (versus the agonistic one) in the literature-and-science field and the (perhaps inflated) importance of Jeremy Gray in the modernism-and-mathematics subfield. There is also at the end of the chapter a defence of close reading as a progressive mode of literary criticism that overcomes the pseudo-neutrality of historicism and asserts unique forms of knowledge only available to literary criticism if done through close reading.