A. H. Halsey
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- April 2004
- ISBN:
- 9780199266609
- eISBN:
- 9780191601019
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0199266603.003.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, UK Politics
It is becoming standard for sociologists to preface their books with a brief autobiography. This I have done, emphasizing belief in the potency of politics as the atmosphere of LSE in the 1940s. A ...
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It is becoming standard for sociologists to preface their books with a brief autobiography. This I have done, emphasizing belief in the potency of politics as the atmosphere of LSE in the 1940s. A strong tradition of empirical sociological enquiry has existed since the ‘invisible college’ of the seventeenth century. But sociology belongs to all human civilization, not only to Britain, which was arguably slow in promoting academic sociology.Five themes will be elaborated in the following chapters: (1) The consequences of Darwin; (2) the division of ownership of the subject between science and literature; (3) methods in the study of society focussing on the scientific and statistical history of the sample survey; (4) the use of sociology in social policy and its characteristic capture by the Fabians and (5) the institutionalization of academic sociology at LSE before 1950.Less
It is becoming standard for sociologists to preface their books with a brief autobiography. This I have done, emphasizing belief in the potency of politics as the atmosphere of LSE in the 1940s. A strong tradition of empirical sociological enquiry has existed since the ‘invisible college’ of the seventeenth century. But sociology belongs to all human civilization, not only to Britain, which was arguably slow in promoting academic sociology.
Five themes will be elaborated in the following chapters: (1) The consequences of Darwin; (2) the division of ownership of the subject between science and literature; (3) methods in the study of society focussing on the scientific and statistical history of the sample survey; (4) the use of sociology in social policy and its characteristic capture by the Fabians and (5) the institutionalization of academic sociology at LSE before 1950.
Howard Marchitello
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199608058
- eISBN:
- 9780191729492
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608058.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, Shakespeare Studies
The Introduction offers an overview of the history of science as it impacts on the study of early modern literature and culture. This history has two general phases. The first begins in the 1930s and ...
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The Introduction offers an overview of the history of science as it impacts on the study of early modern literature and culture. This history has two general phases. The first begins in the 1930s and lasts into the 1980s and is dedicated to demonstrating the influence of science on literary texts. The second phase emerges in the 1980s and 1990s and develops in response to a certain revolution in science studies, a term meant to designate the multidisciplinary study of science as both a socially and a historically embedded set of practices and habits of thought. This revolution is also therefore part of the story this chapter tells about early modernity, science, and literary culture. The most significant consequence of the new science and literature criticism is its understanding of the ways in which both the scientific and the literary are equally (though differently) engaged in the knowledge production.Less
The Introduction offers an overview of the history of science as it impacts on the study of early modern literature and culture. This history has two general phases. The first begins in the 1930s and lasts into the 1980s and is dedicated to demonstrating the influence of science on literary texts. The second phase emerges in the 1980s and 1990s and develops in response to a certain revolution in science studies, a term meant to designate the multidisciplinary study of science as both a socially and a historically embedded set of practices and habits of thought. This revolution is also therefore part of the story this chapter tells about early modernity, science, and literary culture. The most significant consequence of the new science and literature criticism is its understanding of the ways in which both the scientific and the literary are equally (though differently) engaged in the knowledge production.
Simon J. James
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199606597
- eISBN:
- 9780191738517
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199606597.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The scientific discoveries of the Victorian era enlarged the scope of fantastic fiction. Wells extrapolates from evolutionary theory, geology, temporal physics, and optics to imagine alternate forms ...
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The scientific discoveries of the Victorian era enlarged the scope of fantastic fiction. Wells extrapolates from evolutionary theory, geology, temporal physics, and optics to imagine alternate forms of cultural production. Wells’s use of the fantastic does not constitute escapism, however. The irruption of the fantastic into an otherwise realistically narrated fictional world is a reminder that the indefinite passing of history will repeatedly threaten or displace humanity’s misplaced faith in its imagined superior position in the hierarchy of nature. Darwin’s formulation of the theory of evolution, and Wells’s imagining of fictional possibilities, constitute both an opportunity and a warning for humankind: Wells repeatedly insists on the impermanence of the status quo. This chapter also notes the frequency of images of reading and writing in Wells’s fiction: numerous texts include images of defaced or ineffective books and other artworks.Less
The scientific discoveries of the Victorian era enlarged the scope of fantastic fiction. Wells extrapolates from evolutionary theory, geology, temporal physics, and optics to imagine alternate forms of cultural production. Wells’s use of the fantastic does not constitute escapism, however. The irruption of the fantastic into an otherwise realistically narrated fictional world is a reminder that the indefinite passing of history will repeatedly threaten or displace humanity’s misplaced faith in its imagined superior position in the hierarchy of nature. Darwin’s formulation of the theory of evolution, and Wells’s imagining of fictional possibilities, constitute both an opportunity and a warning for humankind: Wells repeatedly insists on the impermanence of the status quo. This chapter also notes the frequency of images of reading and writing in Wells’s fiction: numerous texts include images of defaced or ineffective books and other artworks.
Avril Pyman
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263181
- eISBN:
- 9780191734595
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263181.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Russian Formalist theory argued that biography should be studied scientifically as the history of form, rather than as a history of personalities, ideas, or content. In other words, the study of ...
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Russian Formalist theory argued that biography should be studied scientifically as the history of form, rather than as a history of personalities, ideas, or content. In other words, the study of literature is not philosophy, sociology, theology, or mythology, but an exact science of the primary matter of text: the word, the language, the speech, and the stylistic device. Biographies of authors were thought of as belonging to the separate ‘series’ parallel to the evolution of literature. However, in practice, the lives and times of the writers were often found not so much to run parallel to as to be contingent upon the texts they produce, in a way that made it increasingly difficult to preserve the clinical purity of the ‘science’ of literature. Hence, to deal with this, Formalists formulated new terms such as ‘literary facts’ and ‘literary milieu’. This chapter discusses Yury Tynyanov, who sought to distinguish his books about the writers' lives from his ‘scientific’ works of theory and research by writing them in the form of novels that were closely associated with film scenarios and historical fiction. It examines his Pushkin, an unfinished biography that culminated his achievements and which marked the beginning of the merging of literary-historical research, biography, and fiction.Less
Russian Formalist theory argued that biography should be studied scientifically as the history of form, rather than as a history of personalities, ideas, or content. In other words, the study of literature is not philosophy, sociology, theology, or mythology, but an exact science of the primary matter of text: the word, the language, the speech, and the stylistic device. Biographies of authors were thought of as belonging to the separate ‘series’ parallel to the evolution of literature. However, in practice, the lives and times of the writers were often found not so much to run parallel to as to be contingent upon the texts they produce, in a way that made it increasingly difficult to preserve the clinical purity of the ‘science’ of literature. Hence, to deal with this, Formalists formulated new terms such as ‘literary facts’ and ‘literary milieu’. This chapter discusses Yury Tynyanov, who sought to distinguish his books about the writers' lives from his ‘scientific’ works of theory and research by writing them in the form of novels that were closely associated with film scenarios and historical fiction. It examines his Pushkin, an unfinished biography that culminated his achievements and which marked the beginning of the merging of literary-historical research, biography, and fiction.
Philipp Erchinger
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474438957
- eISBN:
- 9781474453790
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474438957.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The general introduction outlines the topic of the study, experimental knowledge-making in Victorian literature and science, and the practice-based method through which it will be explored. To this ...
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The general introduction outlines the topic of the study, experimental knowledge-making in Victorian literature and science, and the practice-based method through which it will be explored. To this end, it provides a brief exposition of relevant work in science studies, sociology and anthropology while emphasising the literary critical perspective of the book. Moreover, the introductory chapter situates Artful Experiments in the field of Victorian literature and science scholarship, showing, by means of two examples from the work of Charles Darwin and Robert Browning, how it deviates from the well established ‘two-way traffic’ approach and what it has to offer instead. The relation between experiment and writing is also introduced and clarified here.Less
The general introduction outlines the topic of the study, experimental knowledge-making in Victorian literature and science, and the practice-based method through which it will be explored. To this end, it provides a brief exposition of relevant work in science studies, sociology and anthropology while emphasising the literary critical perspective of the book. Moreover, the introductory chapter situates Artful Experiments in the field of Victorian literature and science scholarship, showing, by means of two examples from the work of Charles Darwin and Robert Browning, how it deviates from the well established ‘two-way traffic’ approach and what it has to offer instead. The relation between experiment and writing is also introduced and clarified here.
Vincent Debaene
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226106908
- eISBN:
- 9780226107233
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226107233.003.0011
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This chapter examines how writers and men of letters responded to the birth of the social sciences in France by considering reactions to the foundation of sociology at the turn of the twentieth ...
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This chapter examines how writers and men of letters responded to the birth of the social sciences in France by considering reactions to the foundation of sociology at the turn of the twentieth century. Figures such as Agathon and Gustave Lanson wrestled with the question of how to defend literature as a knowledge project when faced with the ambitions of sociology and the social sciences. Whereas the former takes up the dispossession of the artist by the social scientist, the latter rails against the new sciences’ claims to rigor and rejection of rhetoric. These analyses point to a significant change in the function of literature in the modern era, namely that the humanistic scholar can no longer claim to have anything to teach the scientist in the name of the exercise of aesthetic judgment.Less
This chapter examines how writers and men of letters responded to the birth of the social sciences in France by considering reactions to the foundation of sociology at the turn of the twentieth century. Figures such as Agathon and Gustave Lanson wrestled with the question of how to defend literature as a knowledge project when faced with the ambitions of sociology and the social sciences. Whereas the former takes up the dispossession of the artist by the social scientist, the latter rails against the new sciences’ claims to rigor and rejection of rhetoric. These analyses point to a significant change in the function of literature in the modern era, namely that the humanistic scholar can no longer claim to have anything to teach the scientist in the name of the exercise of aesthetic judgment.
Vincent Debaene
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226106908
- eISBN:
- 9780226107233
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226107233.003.0012
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Whereas chapter 10 turned to the beginning of the twentieth century to gauge writers’ and literary scholars’ reactions to the advent of the social sciences, chapter 11 examines the 1930s through the ...
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Whereas chapter 10 turned to the beginning of the twentieth century to gauge writers’ and literary scholars’ reactions to the advent of the social sciences, chapter 11 examines the 1930s through the 1960s in order to take a more contemporary look at how literature writ large responded to the development of the social sciences. This chapter engages with figures such as Ramon Fernandez, André Breton, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Roland Barthes, highlighting specific moments (such as the reception of Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques) where the figure of the artist coexists uneasily with that of the scientist. The chapter explores how literature sought to define itself and its role in relation to new scientific disciplines that redrew old lines of disciplinary demarcation.Less
Whereas chapter 10 turned to the beginning of the twentieth century to gauge writers’ and literary scholars’ reactions to the advent of the social sciences, chapter 11 examines the 1930s through the 1960s in order to take a more contemporary look at how literature writ large responded to the development of the social sciences. This chapter engages with figures such as Ramon Fernandez, André Breton, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Roland Barthes, highlighting specific moments (such as the reception of Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques) where the figure of the artist coexists uneasily with that of the scientist. The chapter explores how literature sought to define itself and its role in relation to new scientific disciplines that redrew old lines of disciplinary demarcation.
Gavin Parkinson (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381434
- eISBN:
- 9781781382387
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381434.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
As well as examining the points of contact and the differences and antagonisms that lie between Surrealism and SF, this collection is concerned with the related literature of comics, which were ...
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As well as examining the points of contact and the differences and antagonisms that lie between Surrealism and SF, this collection is concerned with the related literature of comics, which were admired and exploited by Surrealists from the 1940s, and influenced in turn by the imagery, themes and styles of Surrealism and its art. It is about Surrealism specifically, and how the movement in France, the US, and Britain used, informed, contributed to, and criticised SF and comics. Among the aims of the book are an assessment of Verne in the light of Surrealism and an analysis of the debate in the 1950s on the ‘new’ literature arriving in France, which received, in fact, a mixed reception from the later Surrealists of that decade even though writers and intellectuals close to the movement in the 1920s were directly responsible for its success. It looks in two further essays at the subsequent impact of Surrealism on SF novelists JG Ballard and Alan Burns, and features essays that argue for Salvador Dalí’s closeness to SF in the 1960s and his disagreement with the earlier scientific romance defined by Verne. The chapters on Surrealism and comics range from theoretical discussions of the relation between the original comic strips of Rodolphe Töpffer (1799-1846) and the key Surrealist technique of automatism, used in art and writing, through the cybernetic implications of the proto-SF Surrealist ciné-roman ‘M. Wzz…’ of 1929 (never discussed in any detail before) to the 1948 Vache paintings by René Magritte, inspired by Louis Forton’s strip Les Pieds nickelés. As in the chapters on SF, it goes on to show how Surrealism did not just receive and adapt the genre but impacted it in its later manifestations.Less
As well as examining the points of contact and the differences and antagonisms that lie between Surrealism and SF, this collection is concerned with the related literature of comics, which were admired and exploited by Surrealists from the 1940s, and influenced in turn by the imagery, themes and styles of Surrealism and its art. It is about Surrealism specifically, and how the movement in France, the US, and Britain used, informed, contributed to, and criticised SF and comics. Among the aims of the book are an assessment of Verne in the light of Surrealism and an analysis of the debate in the 1950s on the ‘new’ literature arriving in France, which received, in fact, a mixed reception from the later Surrealists of that decade even though writers and intellectuals close to the movement in the 1920s were directly responsible for its success. It looks in two further essays at the subsequent impact of Surrealism on SF novelists JG Ballard and Alan Burns, and features essays that argue for Salvador Dalí’s closeness to SF in the 1960s and his disagreement with the earlier scientific romance defined by Verne. The chapters on Surrealism and comics range from theoretical discussions of the relation between the original comic strips of Rodolphe Töpffer (1799-1846) and the key Surrealist technique of automatism, used in art and writing, through the cybernetic implications of the proto-SF Surrealist ciné-roman ‘M. Wzz…’ of 1929 (never discussed in any detail before) to the 1948 Vache paintings by René Magritte, inspired by Louis Forton’s strip Les Pieds nickelés. As in the chapters on SF, it goes on to show how Surrealism did not just receive and adapt the genre but impacted it in its later manifestations.
Stanislaw Lem
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9781781380178
- eISBN:
- 9781781384862
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781380178.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
In Stanislaw Lem: Selected Letters to Michael Kandel, Peter Swirski brings a treasury of unknown elements of Lem's life and literary legacy to light. The Polish science fiction writer died in 2006, ...
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In Stanislaw Lem: Selected Letters to Michael Kandel, Peter Swirski brings a treasury of unknown elements of Lem's life and literary legacy to light. The Polish science fiction writer died in 2006, but in this book his voice is heard afresh for the benefit of those who believe that, with his passing, quintessential element of twentieth-century artistic and intellectual heritage has come to an end. This edited and annotated translation of Lem’s fifteen-year correspondence with his principal American translator offers an unparalleled testimony to the raw intellectual powers, smouldering literary passions, and abiding personal concerns from the central period of the writer’s life and career. Even as they reposition Lem as a consummate litterateur and an intellectual oracle, the letters reveal tantalizing glimpses of the man behind the science fiction literature giant. Fighting depression, at times hitting the bottle, plagued by ill health, obsessed by his legacy, driven to distraction by lack of appreciation in the United States, Lem the arch-rationalist emerges here at his most human, vulnerable, and likeable.Less
In Stanislaw Lem: Selected Letters to Michael Kandel, Peter Swirski brings a treasury of unknown elements of Lem's life and literary legacy to light. The Polish science fiction writer died in 2006, but in this book his voice is heard afresh for the benefit of those who believe that, with his passing, quintessential element of twentieth-century artistic and intellectual heritage has come to an end. This edited and annotated translation of Lem’s fifteen-year correspondence with his principal American translator offers an unparalleled testimony to the raw intellectual powers, smouldering literary passions, and abiding personal concerns from the central period of the writer’s life and career. Even as they reposition Lem as a consummate litterateur and an intellectual oracle, the letters reveal tantalizing glimpses of the man behind the science fiction literature giant. Fighting depression, at times hitting the bottle, plagued by ill health, obsessed by his legacy, driven to distraction by lack of appreciation in the United States, Lem the arch-rationalist emerges here at his most human, vulnerable, and likeable.
Benjamin Morgan
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226442112
- eISBN:
- 9780226457468
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226457468.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This chapter describes the longstanding challenge of accounting for embodiment and materiality within aesthetic theory, moving from Immanuel Kant’s rejection of sensuous pleasure in the Critique of ...
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This chapter describes the longstanding challenge of accounting for embodiment and materiality within aesthetic theory, moving from Immanuel Kant’s rejection of sensuous pleasure in the Critique of Judgment to contemporary approaches within affect theory that reanimate the notion that aesthetic experience is fundamentally embodied. It then provides a historical overview and definition of nineteenth-century “materialist” approaches to aesthetics that were often oriented by new psychological and evolutionary sciences, instead of by a priori philosophy. Through a discussion of five key terms--form, response, materiality, practice, and empathy--the chapter suggests that nineteenth-century approaches provide resources for rethinking current understandings of aesthetic embodiment, and of the humanities/sciences divide more broadly. The chapter also discusses the book’s methodological approach to science and literature, which departs from a current emphasis on shared languages or tropes by focusing instead on specific networks and objects that reveal points of intersection between nineteenth-century science and literature. The chapter concludes by showing how three short scenes drawn from the writing of Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, William Morris, and Walter Pater manifest the “outward turn,” or exteriorization of mind into surrounding objects, that the book argues was effected across Victorian materialist aesthetics.Less
This chapter describes the longstanding challenge of accounting for embodiment and materiality within aesthetic theory, moving from Immanuel Kant’s rejection of sensuous pleasure in the Critique of Judgment to contemporary approaches within affect theory that reanimate the notion that aesthetic experience is fundamentally embodied. It then provides a historical overview and definition of nineteenth-century “materialist” approaches to aesthetics that were often oriented by new psychological and evolutionary sciences, instead of by a priori philosophy. Through a discussion of five key terms--form, response, materiality, practice, and empathy--the chapter suggests that nineteenth-century approaches provide resources for rethinking current understandings of aesthetic embodiment, and of the humanities/sciences divide more broadly. The chapter also discusses the book’s methodological approach to science and literature, which departs from a current emphasis on shared languages or tropes by focusing instead on specific networks and objects that reveal points of intersection between nineteenth-century science and literature. The chapter concludes by showing how three short scenes drawn from the writing of Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, William Morris, and Walter Pater manifest the “outward turn,” or exteriorization of mind into surrounding objects, that the book argues was effected across Victorian materialist aesthetics.
Brady Bowman
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199976201
- eISBN:
- 9780199395507
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0009
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
Identifying cognition in general with propositional knowledge exposes the cognitive value of literature to abiding skepticism. This chapter argues that German romanticism has generated two competing ...
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Identifying cognition in general with propositional knowledge exposes the cognitive value of literature to abiding skepticism. This chapter argues that German romanticism has generated two competing views of the relation between literature and the overtly truth-seeking disciplines. One is a legacy of skepticism and antirealism that is powerless to give a positive account of literary value. The other is a complementarist legacy emphasizing literature’s cognitive priority to and its role as the cognitive fulfillment of discursive knowledge. This tradition offers important resources to aesthetic cognitivism for articulating and defending the value of literature and the institutions that support it.Less
Identifying cognition in general with propositional knowledge exposes the cognitive value of literature to abiding skepticism. This chapter argues that German romanticism has generated two competing views of the relation between literature and the overtly truth-seeking disciplines. One is a legacy of skepticism and antirealism that is powerless to give a positive account of literary value. The other is a complementarist legacy emphasizing literature’s cognitive priority to and its role as the cognitive fulfillment of discursive knowledge. This tradition offers important resources to aesthetic cognitivism for articulating and defending the value of literature and the institutions that support it.
Nina Engelhardt
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474416238
- eISBN:
- 9781474449656
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474416238.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Modernism in mathematics – this unusual notion turns out to provide new perspectives on central questions in and beyond literary modernism. This books draws on prose texts by mathematicians and on ...
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Modernism in mathematics – this unusual notion turns out to provide new perspectives on central questions in and beyond literary modernism. This books draws on prose texts by mathematicians and on historical and cultural studies of mathematics to introduce the so-called ‘foundational crisis of mathematics’ in the early twentieth century, and it analyses major novels that employ developments in mathematics as exemplary of wider modernist movements. The monograph focuses on Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Hermann Broch’s novel trilogy The Sleepwalkers (1930-32), and Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930/32). These novels accord mathematics and its modernist transformation a central place in their visions and present it as interrelated with political, linguistic, epistemological and ethical developments in the modern West. Not least, the texts explore the freedoms and opportunities that the mathematical crisis implies and relate the emerging notion of ‘fictional’ characteristics of mathematics to the possibilities of literature. By exploring how the novels accord mathematics a central role as a particularly telling indicator of modernist transformations, this book argues that imaginative works contribute to establishing mathematics as part of modernist culture. The monograph thus opens up new frames of textual and cultural analysis that help understand the modernist condition from the interdisciplinary perspective of literature and mathematics studies, and it demonstrates the necessity to account for the specificity of mathematics in the field of literature and science studies.Less
Modernism in mathematics – this unusual notion turns out to provide new perspectives on central questions in and beyond literary modernism. This books draws on prose texts by mathematicians and on historical and cultural studies of mathematics to introduce the so-called ‘foundational crisis of mathematics’ in the early twentieth century, and it analyses major novels that employ developments in mathematics as exemplary of wider modernist movements. The monograph focuses on Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Hermann Broch’s novel trilogy The Sleepwalkers (1930-32), and Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930/32). These novels accord mathematics and its modernist transformation a central place in their visions and present it as interrelated with political, linguistic, epistemological and ethical developments in the modern West. Not least, the texts explore the freedoms and opportunities that the mathematical crisis implies and relate the emerging notion of ‘fictional’ characteristics of mathematics to the possibilities of literature. By exploring how the novels accord mathematics a central role as a particularly telling indicator of modernist transformations, this book argues that imaginative works contribute to establishing mathematics as part of modernist culture. The monograph thus opens up new frames of textual and cultural analysis that help understand the modernist condition from the interdisciplinary perspective of literature and mathematics studies, and it demonstrates the necessity to account for the specificity of mathematics in the field of literature and science studies.
Judith H. Anderson
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823272778
- eISBN:
- 9780823272822
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823272778.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Death, light, figuration, and, especially, analogical expressions of figuration are the primary subjects of this book. They generate associated interests: the relation of literature and science, the ...
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Death, light, figuration, and, especially, analogical expressions of figuration are the primary subjects of this book. They generate associated interests: the relation of literature and science, the methodology of thought and argument, and the processes of narrative, discovery, and interpretation. Creativity, optics, and rhetoric come into focus as well. Anderson’s book begins as an intellectual process that employs mathematical science, semantics, rhetoric, grammar, and major poems inclusively as a single culture, not as C. P. Snow’s cultural opposites. It explores the figuration of Sin and Death in Spenser, Donne, and Milton, then turns to light because of its inseparability from the figuration of life, death’s other. Accordingly, Anderson examines the history and structure of analogical figuration and the bearing of analogy on light in physics and metaphysics. Analogy, a type of metaphor also called proportion, has always been the connector of the known to the unknown, the sensible to the subsensible and infinite. The perceptual opposites of light and its intermediating forms are likewise focal: blackness, darkness, shade, twilight, and night. Traditionally, light also implies vision and imagination, light being essential to optics, creation, and the figuration of Being. Chapters on Kepler’s studies of light and optics, on Donne’s epic Anniversaries of personal death and cultural loss, and on analogy, night, and light in Paradise Lost conclude the book.Less
Death, light, figuration, and, especially, analogical expressions of figuration are the primary subjects of this book. They generate associated interests: the relation of literature and science, the methodology of thought and argument, and the processes of narrative, discovery, and interpretation. Creativity, optics, and rhetoric come into focus as well. Anderson’s book begins as an intellectual process that employs mathematical science, semantics, rhetoric, grammar, and major poems inclusively as a single culture, not as C. P. Snow’s cultural opposites. It explores the figuration of Sin and Death in Spenser, Donne, and Milton, then turns to light because of its inseparability from the figuration of life, death’s other. Accordingly, Anderson examines the history and structure of analogical figuration and the bearing of analogy on light in physics and metaphysics. Analogy, a type of metaphor also called proportion, has always been the connector of the known to the unknown, the sensible to the subsensible and infinite. The perceptual opposites of light and its intermediating forms are likewise focal: blackness, darkness, shade, twilight, and night. Traditionally, light also implies vision and imagination, light being essential to optics, creation, and the figuration of Being. Chapters on Kepler’s studies of light and optics, on Donne’s epic Anniversaries of personal death and cultural loss, and on analogy, night, and light in Paradise Lost conclude the book.
Paul Hurh
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780804791144
- eISBN:
- 9780804794510
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804791144.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical ...
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American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical tendencies to literary terror as a rejection or contrary reaction to Enlightenment thought, this book draws upon new work in affect theory and the refreshed interest in American intellectual history to argue that American authors sought through it to produce the peculiar affect of scientific objectivity: the feeling of thinking. As what counts as knowledge comes to be aligned with a set of abstract universal rules and processes—the scientific method, propositional logic, geometric models of analysis—literary terror does not reject such progress as unfeeling, but rather sets out to describe it in feeling. Employing close reading in concert with original historical research, this book threads the story of terror’s relation to philosophy through three American writers who not only write terror, but write about terror. It begins with Jonathan Edwards’s theoretical defense of terror as a sensation of truth, develops through Edgar Allan Poe’s refinement of terror’s sensation of truth within an aesthetics of analytical methodology, and culminates in Herman Melville’s dramatization of the consequences exacted by this terrific perspective: a radically unknowable universe that everywhere refuses to relax its demands to be known. Through this critical repositioning of literary terror, American Terror charts how the dark strain of American literature carves a previously unaccounted for affective curve in the route of philosophy from Enlightenment idealism to poststructuralism.Less
American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical tendencies to literary terror as a rejection or contrary reaction to Enlightenment thought, this book draws upon new work in affect theory and the refreshed interest in American intellectual history to argue that American authors sought through it to produce the peculiar affect of scientific objectivity: the feeling of thinking. As what counts as knowledge comes to be aligned with a set of abstract universal rules and processes—the scientific method, propositional logic, geometric models of analysis—literary terror does not reject such progress as unfeeling, but rather sets out to describe it in feeling. Employing close reading in concert with original historical research, this book threads the story of terror’s relation to philosophy through three American writers who not only write terror, but write about terror. It begins with Jonathan Edwards’s theoretical defense of terror as a sensation of truth, develops through Edgar Allan Poe’s refinement of terror’s sensation of truth within an aesthetics of analytical methodology, and culminates in Herman Melville’s dramatization of the consequences exacted by this terrific perspective: a radically unknowable universe that everywhere refuses to relax its demands to be known. Through this critical repositioning of literary terror, American Terror charts how the dark strain of American literature carves a previously unaccounted for affective curve in the route of philosophy from Enlightenment idealism to poststructuralism.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226068633
- eISBN:
- 9780226068664
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226068664.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Considering how much popular science literature was produced in Britain during the Victorian period, it is surprising to find that in the early decades of the twentieth century, publishers claimed ...
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Considering how much popular science literature was produced in Britain during the Victorian period, it is surprising to find that in the early decades of the twentieth century, publishers claimed that they were responding to a renewed surge in the public demand for information. The claim may be no more than advertising hyperbole, but there was some substance to the belief that important developments were going on within the publishing industry, fueled by a genuine demand from at least a proportion of the reading public. Publishers saw that there was a growing body of ordinary people of modest means who were anxious to gain a better education through informal means. This chapter explores the publishers' views on what was happening and offers an explanation of the expansion in the potential readership for popular science based on the social developments of the time. It also outlines the publishers' efforts to respond to the surge in demand and considers what the publishers wanted from the authors whom they engaged to write for this expanding market.Less
Considering how much popular science literature was produced in Britain during the Victorian period, it is surprising to find that in the early decades of the twentieth century, publishers claimed that they were responding to a renewed surge in the public demand for information. The claim may be no more than advertising hyperbole, but there was some substance to the belief that important developments were going on within the publishing industry, fueled by a genuine demand from at least a proportion of the reading public. Publishers saw that there was a growing body of ordinary people of modest means who were anxious to gain a better education through informal means. This chapter explores the publishers' views on what was happening and offers an explanation of the expansion in the potential readership for popular science based on the social developments of the time. It also outlines the publishers' efforts to respond to the surge in demand and considers what the publishers wanted from the authors whom they engaged to write for this expanding market.
Peter M. Haas and Casey Stevens
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780262016506
- eISBN:
- 9780262298278
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262016506.003.0005
- Subject:
- Political Science, Environmental Politics
The contribution of the application of the political science literature and usable knowledge regarding the solution and management of environmental issues and the creation of multilateral ...
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The contribution of the application of the political science literature and usable knowledge regarding the solution and management of environmental issues and the creation of multilateral environmental regimes is discussed in this chapter. With the involvement of scientific bodies, the authors have identified the conditions suitable for the establishment of epistemic communities; the chapter also highlights the importance of the development of expertise and knowledge claims independent of the policy process. The authors further argue that scientific bodies are affected by political control and that policies are influenced by science before consensus has been reached. The authors are of the view that other regimes have to learn from the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP) as it has created autonomous scientific bodies involved in developing consensual knowledge.Less
The contribution of the application of the political science literature and usable knowledge regarding the solution and management of environmental issues and the creation of multilateral environmental regimes is discussed in this chapter. With the involvement of scientific bodies, the authors have identified the conditions suitable for the establishment of epistemic communities; the chapter also highlights the importance of the development of expertise and knowledge claims independent of the policy process. The authors further argue that scientific bodies are affected by political control and that policies are influenced by science before consensus has been reached. The authors are of the view that other regimes have to learn from the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP) as it has created autonomous scientific bodies involved in developing consensual knowledge.
Peter Swirski
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381861
- eISBN:
- 9781781382370
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381861.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future brings a welter of unknown elements of Lem’s life, career, and literary legacy to light. Part One traces the context of his cultural influence, telling the ...
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Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future brings a welter of unknown elements of Lem’s life, career, and literary legacy to light. Part One traces the context of his cultural influence, telling the story of one of the greatest writers and thinkers of the century. It includes a comprehensive critical overview of Lem’s literary and philosophical oeuvre which comprises not only the classics like Solaris, but his untranslated first novels, realistic prose, experimental works, volumes of nonfiction, latter-day metafiction, as well as the final twenty years of polemics and essays. The critical and interpretive Part Two examines a range of Lem’s novels with a view to examining the intellectual vistas they open up before us. It focuses on several of Lem’s major but less studied books. “Game, Set, Lem” uses game theory to shed light on his arguably most surreal novel, the Kafkaesque and claustrophobic Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961). “Betrization Is the Worst Solution… Except for All Others” takes a close look at the quasi-utopia of Return From the Stars (1961) and at the concept of ethical cleansing and mandatory de-aggression. “Errare Humanum Est” focuses on the popular science thriller The Invincible (1964) in the context of evolution. “A Beachbook for Intellectuals” is a critical fugue on Lem’s medical thriller cum crime mystery, The Chain of Chance (1976). Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future closes with a two-part coda. “Fiasco” recapitulates and reflects on the literary and cognitive themes of Lem’s farewell novel, and “Happy End of the World!” reviews The Blink of an Eye, Lem’s farewell book of analyses and prognoses from the cusp of our millennium.Less
Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future brings a welter of unknown elements of Lem’s life, career, and literary legacy to light. Part One traces the context of his cultural influence, telling the story of one of the greatest writers and thinkers of the century. It includes a comprehensive critical overview of Lem’s literary and philosophical oeuvre which comprises not only the classics like Solaris, but his untranslated first novels, realistic prose, experimental works, volumes of nonfiction, latter-day metafiction, as well as the final twenty years of polemics and essays. The critical and interpretive Part Two examines a range of Lem’s novels with a view to examining the intellectual vistas they open up before us. It focuses on several of Lem’s major but less studied books. “Game, Set, Lem” uses game theory to shed light on his arguably most surreal novel, the Kafkaesque and claustrophobic Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961). “Betrization Is the Worst Solution… Except for All Others” takes a close look at the quasi-utopia of Return From the Stars (1961) and at the concept of ethical cleansing and mandatory de-aggression. “Errare Humanum Est” focuses on the popular science thriller The Invincible (1964) in the context of evolution. “A Beachbook for Intellectuals” is a critical fugue on Lem’s medical thriller cum crime mystery, The Chain of Chance (1976). Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future closes with a two-part coda. “Fiasco” recapitulates and reflects on the literary and cognitive themes of Lem’s farewell novel, and “Happy End of the World!” reviews The Blink of an Eye, Lem’s farewell book of analyses and prognoses from the cusp of our millennium.
Carlos A. Ball
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- June 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199977871
- eISBN:
- 9780199383306
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199977871.003.0005
- Subject:
- Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Forensic Psychology
This chapter explores the relevance of the social science literature on the children of lesbians and gay men to the question of whether same-sex marriages bans are constitutional. The chapter ...
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This chapter explores the relevance of the social science literature on the children of lesbians and gay men to the question of whether same-sex marriages bans are constitutional. The chapter explains why, given that literature's findings, it is constitutionally untenable to raise concerns about children's psychological adjustment and social functioning in defending same-sex marriage bans. Although most studies have concluded that there is no association between parents' sexual orientation and children's gender role development and sexual orientation, a minority of studies have suggested that some differences may exist in these measures between the children of lesbian and gay parents and children of heterosexual parents. However, even if these differences could be shown to exist conclusively, they would be constitutionally irrelevant in defending same-sex marriage bans because the government does not have a legitimate interest in promoting particular forms of gender role development and sexual orientation among adults or children.Less
This chapter explores the relevance of the social science literature on the children of lesbians and gay men to the question of whether same-sex marriages bans are constitutional. The chapter explains why, given that literature's findings, it is constitutionally untenable to raise concerns about children's psychological adjustment and social functioning in defending same-sex marriage bans. Although most studies have concluded that there is no association between parents' sexual orientation and children's gender role development and sexual orientation, a minority of studies have suggested that some differences may exist in these measures between the children of lesbian and gay parents and children of heterosexual parents. However, even if these differences could be shown to exist conclusively, they would be constitutionally irrelevant in defending same-sex marriage bans because the government does not have a legitimate interest in promoting particular forms of gender role development and sexual orientation among adults or children.
Nina Engelhardt
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474416238
- eISBN:
- 9781474449656
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474416238.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The conclusion summarises the varying ways in which the modernist and postmodernist fictions discussed in this book inform the notion of mathematical modernism. Based on the results of the study, the ...
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The conclusion summarises the varying ways in which the modernist and postmodernist fictions discussed in this book inform the notion of mathematical modernism. Based on the results of the study, the conclusion again argues for the need to account for the unique status of mathematics in the spectrum of the disciplines, particularly when the specific characteristics of mathematics gain attention with its modernist transformation. At the same time, mathematics becomes a necessary and fruitful concern of modernist studies, providing new insights on the roles of reason and imaginary concepts, as well as on modernist experimentation with literary form. This book’s examination of literary engagements with mathematics leads to questioning interpretations of modernism as mainly focused on negative aspects of modernisation and instrumental rationality. Fictions written in and about the period, as well as mathematical prose texts of the time, reconsider the foundations of reason and rediscover neglected aspects of rational domains, including, counter-intuitively, non-rational and imaginary dimensions. The conclusion emphasises that examining the place of mathematics leads to a more nuanced understanding of modernism’s complex engagement with its roots in the Enlightenment and its reassessment in postmodernism.Less
The conclusion summarises the varying ways in which the modernist and postmodernist fictions discussed in this book inform the notion of mathematical modernism. Based on the results of the study, the conclusion again argues for the need to account for the unique status of mathematics in the spectrum of the disciplines, particularly when the specific characteristics of mathematics gain attention with its modernist transformation. At the same time, mathematics becomes a necessary and fruitful concern of modernist studies, providing new insights on the roles of reason and imaginary concepts, as well as on modernist experimentation with literary form. This book’s examination of literary engagements with mathematics leads to questioning interpretations of modernism as mainly focused on negative aspects of modernisation and instrumental rationality. Fictions written in and about the period, as well as mathematical prose texts of the time, reconsider the foundations of reason and rediscover neglected aspects of rational domains, including, counter-intuitively, non-rational and imaginary dimensions. The conclusion emphasises that examining the place of mathematics leads to a more nuanced understanding of modernism’s complex engagement with its roots in the Enlightenment and its reassessment in postmodernism.
Claire Preston
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198704805
- eISBN:
- 9780191780134
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198704805.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature, Prose (inc. letters, diaries)
The writing of science in the period 1580–1700 is artfully, diffidently, carelessly, boldly, and self-consciously literary. The Poetics of Scientific Investigation considers the literary textures of ...
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The writing of science in the period 1580–1700 is artfully, diffidently, carelessly, boldly, and self-consciously literary. The Poetics of Scientific Investigation considers the literary textures of early-modern science writing—its rhetorical figures, neologisms, generic adaptations. The experimental and social practices of science are examined through literary representations of the laboratory, of collaborative retirement, of utopian and georgic scientific schemes, of virtual, epistolary conversation, and of an imagined paradise of investigative fellowship and learning. The rhetorical, generic, and formal qualities of scientific writing are also the intellectual processes of early-modern science itself. How science was to be written piqued natural philosophers, who were searching for apt conventions of scientific language and report. Non-scientific writers—admirers and critics of natural philosophy—were enthralled by its developments, which deployed ideas and images from astronomy, optics, chemistry, biology, and medical practices. New or hybrid literary forms in the rhetoric of science emerged, which often collapsed the distinction between factual and imaginative, between the rhetorically ornate and the plain; because early-modern science and scientific expression are frequently indistinguishable, science and literature are mutually involved. Available generic traditions (elegy, epic, panegyric, epyllion, satire, dialogue, among others) became natural philosophy’s literary framework; new literary forms (the experimental report, the journal article) emerged to support and extend it; and existing, evolving literary forms (the letter, the essay) were reshaped to meet its needs by experimentalists, virtuosos, poets, and correspondents such as Boyle, Evelyn, Browne, Abraham Cowley, and Henry Oldenburg, all citizens of the scientific republic of letters.Less
The writing of science in the period 1580–1700 is artfully, diffidently, carelessly, boldly, and self-consciously literary. The Poetics of Scientific Investigation considers the literary textures of early-modern science writing—its rhetorical figures, neologisms, generic adaptations. The experimental and social practices of science are examined through literary representations of the laboratory, of collaborative retirement, of utopian and georgic scientific schemes, of virtual, epistolary conversation, and of an imagined paradise of investigative fellowship and learning. The rhetorical, generic, and formal qualities of scientific writing are also the intellectual processes of early-modern science itself. How science was to be written piqued natural philosophers, who were searching for apt conventions of scientific language and report. Non-scientific writers—admirers and critics of natural philosophy—were enthralled by its developments, which deployed ideas and images from astronomy, optics, chemistry, biology, and medical practices. New or hybrid literary forms in the rhetoric of science emerged, which often collapsed the distinction between factual and imaginative, between the rhetorically ornate and the plain; because early-modern science and scientific expression are frequently indistinguishable, science and literature are mutually involved. Available generic traditions (elegy, epic, panegyric, epyllion, satire, dialogue, among others) became natural philosophy’s literary framework; new literary forms (the experimental report, the journal article) emerged to support and extend it; and existing, evolving literary forms (the letter, the essay) were reshaped to meet its needs by experimentalists, virtuosos, poets, and correspondents such as Boyle, Evelyn, Browne, Abraham Cowley, and Henry Oldenburg, all citizens of the scientific republic of letters.
