Swinford develops a key claim about the form of the Somnium as it relates to early science: Kepler relies on a genre that is closely connected to a Ptolemaic, or earth-centered, model of the cosmos as a way of explaining and justifying a model of the cosmos that does not posit the same connections between the individual and the divine that are so important for the Ptolemaic model. In effect, Kepler uses the cosmic dream to describe a universe that cannot lay claim to the same correspondences between an individual’s dream and the order of the cosmos understood within the rules of the genre itself. To that end, Kepler’s Somnium is the first example of science fiction, but the last example of Neoplatonic allegory.
Dean Swinford is an Assistant Professor of English at Fayetteville State University. He is interested in the narrative practices employed in early scientific texts, particularly as these practices highlight the connections between religious mysticism and scientific reasoning. He has examined the historical contextualization of allegorical signification in authors ranging from Kepler to Kafka. His publications have appeared in Neophilologus, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and Revue d’Histoire des Sciences.