[PDF] Between Literature And Science eBook

Author : Wolf Lepenies
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 404 pages
File Size : 29,78 MB
Release : 1988
Category : Literature and society
ISBN : 9782735102303

GET BOOK

"The theme of this book is the conflict which arose in the early nineteenth century between, on the one hand, the literary and, on the other hand, the scientific intellectuals of Europe, as they competed for recognition as the chief analysts of the new industrial society in which they lived. This conflicts was epitomised by the confrontation between Matthew Arnold and T. H. Huxley, and later in that between F. R. Leavis and C. P. Snow. Sociology was born as the third major discipline, though in many ways it was a hybrid of the literary and the scientific traditions. The social sciences continue, even today, to oscillate between these two traditions. The author chronicles the rise of the new discipline by discussing the lives and work of the most prominent thinkers of the time, in England, France and Germany. These include John Stuart Mill, H. G. Wells, Beatrice and Sidney Webb and T. S. Eliot; Auguste Comte, Charles Peguy, Emile Durkheim; Stefan George, Thomas Mann, Max Weber and Karl Mannheim. At stake was the right to formulate a philosophy of life for contemporary society, and to predict and pre-empt the worst consequences of industrialization. The book presents a penetrating study of idealists grappling with reality, when industrial society was still in its infancy. It will be of interest to those studying sociology and its history as a discipline, but it is equally relevant to other social science subjects which may be said to have arisen at about the same time" -- Back cover.

Author : Ira Livingston
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 14,1 MB
Release : 2010-10-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0252091744

GET BOOK

Between Literature and Science follows through to its emerging 21st-century future the central insight of 20th-century literary and cultural theory: that language and culture, along with their subsystems and artifacts, are self-referential systems. The book explores the workings of self-reference (and the related performativity) in linguistic utterances and assorted texts, through examples of the more open social-discursive systems of post-structuralism and cultural studies, and into the sciences, where complex systems organized by recursive self-reference are now being embraced as an emergent paradigm. This paradigmatic convergence between the humanities and sciences is autopoetics (adapting biologist Hubert Maturana’s term for “self-making” systems), and it signals a long-term epistemological shift across the nature/culture divide so definitive for modernity. If cultural theory has taught us that language, because of its self-referential nature, cannot bear simple witness to the world, the new paradigmatic status of self-referential systems in the natural sciences points toward a revived kinship of language and culture with the world: language bears “witness” to the world. The main movement of the book is through a series of model explications and analyses, operational definitions of concepts and terms, more extended case studies, vignettes and thought experiments designed to give the reader a feel for the concepts and how to use them, while working to expand the autopoetic internee by putting cultural self-reference in dialogue with the self-organizing systems of the sciences. Along the way the reader is introduced to self-reference in epistemology (Foucault), sociology (Luhmann), biology (Maturana/Varela/Kauffman), and physics and cosmology (Smolin). Livingston works through the fundamentals of cultural, literary, and science studies and makes them comprehensible to a non-specialist audience.

Author : Jay A. Labinger
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 43,92 MB
Release : 2023-05
Category : Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge
ISBN : 9781032129129

GET BOOK

A Brief History of L&S -- The Science Wars -- Models of Engagement -- Encoding an Infinite Message: Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations -- Is That a Coded Message? It May Not Be So Simple! -- Found in Translation -- Entropy as Time's (Double-Headed) Arrow in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia -- Chirality and Life -- Making New Life -- The End of Irony and/or the End of Science?

Author : Helmut Müller-Sievers
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 32,18 MB
Release : 2015-04-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3110324342

GET BOOK

One of the most contentious questions in contemporary literary studies is whether there can ever be a science of literature that can lay claim to objectivity and universality, for example by concentrating on philological criticism, by appealing to cognitive science, or by exposing the underlying media of literary communication. The present collection of essays seeks to open up this discussion by posing the question’s historical and systematic double: has there been a science of literature, i.e. a mode of presentation and practice of reference in science that owes its coherence to the discourse of literature? Detailed analyses of scientific, literary and philosophical texts show that from the late 18th to the late 19th century science and literature were bound to one another through an intricate web of mutual dependence and distinct yet incalculable difference. The Science of Literature suggests that this legacy continues to shape the relation between literary and scientific discourses inside and outside of academia.

Author : Peter Swirski
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 47,6 MB
Release : 2000
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780773520783

GET BOOK

In Between Literature and Science Peter Swirski examines the true intellectual scope of Edgar Allan Poe and Stanislaw Lem. Using a genuinely interdisciplinary approach he shows that they propose far-reaching hypotheses in aesthetics, epistemology, cognitive science, philosophy of science, literary studies, and pragmatics as well as in cosmology, artificial intelligence, and futurology. Swirski argues that previous studies of their science fiction works, in neglecting these broader philosophical and scientific ambitions, have misrepresented Poe and Lem's artistic achievements.

Author : Márcia Diana Fernandes Lemos
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 36,62 MB
Release : 2017-03-07
Category : Science
ISBN : 1443876054

GET BOOK

This collection of essays responds to the intense interest that the relations between the discourses of literature (and other cultural practices) and those of science have obtained throughout various fields of study. Spanning a period between the mid-nineteenth century and the twenty-first century, the work collected here is firmly focused on the cultural significance of scientific discoveries and practices, and especially on the manifold representations of science and scientists in literature and the arts. Its four sections develop from an initial moment of dwindling indefiniteness of borders between literature and the sciences to the historical perception of an increasing divide between “the two cultures,” to use C.P. Snow’s influential expression, as well as calls for a form of convergence or “consilience” in Edward Wilson’s words. The final section turns to the medical sciences, a porous scientific discipline in relation to the humanities, which suggests that consilience can already be found partially in specific areas. As such, this collection contributes towards critically extending that integration through the discussion of key literary representations of science, its promises, and its problems.

Author : B. Ifor Evans
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 100 pages
File Size : 19,88 MB
Release : 2022-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1000514854

GET BOOK

First published in 1954, Literature and Science discusses historically the relationship between science and literature and between scientists and men of letters from the Renaissance onwards. It shows periods when writers were enthusiastic about science as in the early days of the Royal Society and notably through the influence of Newton. Further it explores the later alienation between science and literature in the technological and industrial age. There is a full account of Wordsworth’s crucial relationships to these problems which leads to a number of new conclusions. Apart from his historical survey, Dr. Ifor Evans emphasises the contemporary importance of the relationship of the artist and the scientist and outlines an approach to a new humanism, in which the writer may reach some closer understanding of science than he has at present attained. Students interested in literature, history of literature and critical theory will find this book enlightening.

Author : Steven Meyer
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 26,54 MB
Release : 2018-05-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1108548075

GET BOOK

In 1959, C. P. Snow lamented the presence of what he called the 'two cultures': the apparently unbridgeable chasm of understanding and knowledge between modern literature and modern science. In recent decades, scholars have worked diligently and often with great ingenuity to interrogate claims like Snow's that represent twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and science as radically alienated from each other. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science offers a roadmap to developments that have contributed to the demonstration and emergence of reciprocal connections between the two domains of inquiry. Weaving together theory and empiricism, individual chapters explore major figures - Shakespeare, Bacon, Emerson, Darwin, Henry James, William James, Whitehead, Einstein, Empson, and McClintock; major genres and modes of writing - fiction, science fiction, non-fiction prose, poetry, and dramatic works; and major theories and movements - pragmatism, critical theory, science studies, cognitive science, ecocriticism, cultural studies, affect theory, digital humanities, and expanded empiricisms. This book will be a key resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate students alike.

Author : David Sweeney Coombs
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 34,64 MB
Release : 2019-11-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0813943434

GET BOOK

The nineteenth-century sciences cleaved sensory experience into two separate realms: the bodily physics of sensation and the mental activity of perception. This division into two discrete categories was foundational to Victorian physics, physiology, and experimental psychology. As David Sweeney Coombs reveals, however, it was equally important to Victorian novelists, aesthetes, and critics, for whom the distinction between sensation and perception promised the key to understanding literature’s seemingly magical power to conjure up tastes, sights, touches, and sounds from the austere medium of print. In Victorian literature, science, and philosophy, the parallel between reading and perceiving gave rise to momentous debates about description as a mode of knowledge as well as how, and even whether, reading about the world differs from experiencing it firsthand. Examining novels and art criticism by George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Vernon Lee, and Walter Pater alongside scientific works by Hermann von Helmholtz, William James, and others, this book shows how Victorian literature offers us ways not just to touch but to grapple with the material realities that Clifford Geertz called the "hard surfaces of life."