This handbook illustrates the evolution of literature and science, in collaboration and contestation, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The essays it gathers question the charged rhetoric that pits science against the humanities while also demonstrating the ways in which the convergence of literary and scientific approaches strengthens cultural analyses of colonialism, race, sex, labor, state formation, and environmental destruction.
The broad scope of this collection explores the shifting relations between literature and science that have shaped our own cultural moment, sometimes in ways that create a problematic hierarchy of knowledge and other times in ways that encourage fruitful interdisciplinary investigations, innovative modes of knowledge production, and politically charged calls for social justice. Across units focused on epistemologies, techniques and methods, ethics and politics, and forms and genres, the chapters address problems ranging across epidemiology and global health, genomics and biotechnology, environmental and energy sciences, behaviorism and psychology, physics, and computational and surveillance technologies.
Chapter 19 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Author(s): The Triangle Collective
Series: Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 689
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Praise for The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter Outline
Epistemologies
Methods and Approaches
Ethics and Politics
Forms and Genres
References
Part I Epistemologies
Chapter 2 Mediating the Moon: Ferdinand Kriwet’s Apollo Mission
The Moon from Afar: From Goethe to Verne
The Moon Up Close: Kriwet’s Apollo Project
Conclusions
Works Cited
Chapter 3 Writing the Elements at the End of the World: Varlam Shalamov and Primo Levi
States of Suspension
Scales of Representation
All That Is Solid (Does Not) Melt into Air
References
Chapter 4 The Aesthetic Textuality of Oil
Archiving Oil Texts
Case Study: The Oil Road
Works Cited
Chapter 5 Literature and Energy
Introduction
From Energy Infrastructures to Energy Superstructures and Cultures
Literature, Energy, and Aesthetics
Energy and Periodization Beyond the Oil Encounter
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6 Triangulate: Literature and the Sciences Mediated by Computing Machines
The Great Divide
Computing as Ubiquitous Writing
Arts of Programming
Powers of Abstraction, Dangers of Extraction
A Fundamentalist Universe of Information, or a Livable World of Meanings?
Writing Programs Against the Programs
Open Ends
Bibliography
Chapter 7 Behaviorism and Literary Culture
Bibliography
Chapter 8 I’m Dying to!: Biopolitics, Suicide Plots, and the Ecstasy of Withdrawal
Biopolitical Economies
Suicidology
Death Drives
Bodies and Pleasures
References
Chapter 9 Science, Literature, and the Work of the Imagination
Epistemologies: Modes, Methods, Paradigms
Constitutions: Humans, Animals, Machines
Fields: Inquiries, Impacts, Actions
Coda
Works Cited
Chapter 10 Edith Wharton’s Microscopist and the Science of Language
Works Cited
Part II Methods and Approaches
Chapter 11 Reading Generously: Scientific Criticism, Scientific Charity, and the Matter of Evidence
From Classical Curriculum to Scientific Criticism
Richard Moulton and Literary Facts
Mary Richmond and Social Evidence
The Science of Critique and the Sociology of Literature
References
Chapter 12 How Can Literary and Film Studies Contribute to Science Policy? The Case of Henrietta Lacks
Genetic Privacy
Systematic Review of Research on Genetic Privacy
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 13 Incantatory Fictions and Golden Age Nostalgia: Futurist Practices in Contemporary Science Fiction
SF and Futurism: From Predicting to Making the Future
The Hieroglyph Theory of Incantation
Winged Towers, Golden Age Nostalgia, and the Problem of Inspiration
Analogical and Ecological Approaches
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 14 Reading Science: SF and the Uses of Literature
Introduction
Science and Science Fiction: Literature, Modernity and Technoscientific Imaginaries
Fiction and Science Fiction: Reading, Poetics, and Protocols
Readers and Reading: Reception, Phenomenology, and Social Practices
Meeting Readers: Online Encounters, Ethnographies, and Interviews
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 15 Linguistic Relativity and Cryptographic Translation in Samuel Delany’s Babel-17
Untranslatability and the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis
Translation and Information
Babel-17
Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 16 Autopoiesis Between Literature and Science: Maturana, Varela, Cervantes
Why Autopoiesis?
Cybernetics Before Autopoiesis
The Uses of Autopoiesis
Autopoiesis: Return to a “A Word Without a History”
Self-Assembly in Don Quixote
Bibliography
Chapter 17 Listening to Pandemics: Sonic Histories and the Biology of Emergence
Sound and the Primacy of Vision
The Tortured Silence of Science
Silence and the Machismo of Techno-Science
Monet in Africa: Sound in the Picture of Disease
Acoustic Debris
Bibliography
Chapter 18 To Feel an Equation: Physiological Aesthetics, Modern Physics, and the Poetry of Jay Wright
Partial Analysis of an Unpublished Lecture
Navigating Absences
Amplified by a Silence
References
Chapter 19 Max Ritvo’s Precision Poetry
Precision and Poetry
Imaging, Substitution, and Proximity
Legacy, Love, and Harm
Works Cited
Part III Ethics and Politics
Chapter 20 New Physics, New Faust: Faustian Bargains in Physics Before the Atomic Bomb
A Faustian Tradition
“The Blegdamsvej Faust”
Bibliography
Chapter 21 The Matter of In-Vitro Meat: Speculative Genres of Future Life
The Future Birth of Real Artificial Meat
Eat Celebrity Meat?
The Matter of Genre in Designs on Future Life
References
Chapter 22 Bodies Made and Owned: Rewriting Life in Science and Fiction
“You Can’t Sell Life, Without a License”: The Only Ones
“Every Day Is Two Worlds; Every Day We Are Split into Two”: Underground Airlines
Works Cited
Chapter 23 The Sciences of Mind and Fictional Pharmaceuticals in White Noise and The Corrections
White Noise: Symptom or Drug Effect?
The Corrections: Drug or Medication?
References
Chapter 24 Eugenic Aesthetics: Literature as Evolutionary Instrument in the Early Twentieth Century
Life Itself: A Shifting Political Target
Physiological Aesthetics
Eugenics Before Genetics
Eugenic Plots
Conclusion
References
Chapter 25 Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Alternate Futures
The Double Meaning of Eco-Revolution
Robinson’s Returning Cyborgs
3D Lenses for a Long Emergency
Bibliography
Chapter 26 Oil and Energy Infrastructures in Science Fiction Short Stories
Oil, Power, and Politics
Stories of Weird Oil
“Oh, the Past—The Past Remains”
Works Cited
Chapter 27 Biology at the Border of Area X: The Significance of Skin in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy
Living Borders
Cognising Membranes
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 28 Overlapping Agencies: The Collision of Cancer, Consumers, and Corporations in Richard Powers’s Gain
“No One Knows Their Own Body”: Alienation and Laura’s Cancer
“Oh, There’s a Cluster Here. Believe It”: Laura and Clare’s Complicity
Works Cited
Part IV Forms and Genres
Chapter 29 “Golden Dust” in the Wind: Genetics, Contagion, and Early Twentieth-Century American Theatre
Inheritors: Staging Heredity in Plants and People
Yellow Jack: Staging a Medical Detective Story
Works Cited
Chapter 30 The Art and Science of Form: Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Olson, and F. O. Matthiessen at Mid-Century
Nineteenth-Century Poetics Meets Twentieth-Century Physics
F. O. Matthiessen and “Organic Form”
The Life of Poetry and “Projective” Poetics
Works Cited
Chapter 31 Racial Science and the Neo-Victorian Novel
Introduction
Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000)
Kunal Basu’s Racists (2006)
Bibliography
Chapter 32 W.E.B. Du Bois’s Neurological Modernity: I.Q., Afropessimism, Genre
Reading Black Writing “Within the Veil” of Science
Normative Eugenicism and Social Activism
Double Consciousness and the Dialectics of “Talent”
The Generic Trauma of “the Comet”
Works Cited
Chapter 33 Graphic Bombs: Scientific Knowledge and the Manhattan Project in Comic Books
Introduction
Nuclear Initiators: Early Atomic Comics
What Powers (Nuclear) Comics?
Ottaviani’s Fallout & Hickman and Pitarra’s Manhattan Projects
Fetter-Form’s Trinity & Elias and Wild’s Atomic Dreams
Conclusions
References
Chapter 34 “The Path of Most Resistance”: Surgeon X and the Graphic Estrangement of Antibiosis
The Spatial and Temporal Scales of AMR
Amputational Biopolitics
References
Chapter 35 The Automation of Affect: Robots and the Domestic Sphere in Sinophone Cinema
Affective Labor and Robots as Cultural Memes
The Post-Socialist Robot—Huang Jianxin and Urban Alienation
Uncanny and Unfamiliar
Global Shifts in Labor—The Beautiful Washing Machine
Looking Forward: Whither Sinophone SF Cinema?
Bibliography
Chapter 36 Superman Holey Weenie and the Sick Man of Asia
The Sick Man of Asia
Superman Holey Weenie
Coda
Works Cited
Chapter 37 Modeling Long Novels: Network Analysis and A Brief History of Seven Killings
The Models: Measuring Character Co-occurrence
Discussion: Why Measure Character Co-occurrence?
Bibliography
Index
