Search Results

Introduction

A. H. Halsey

in A History of Sociology in Britain: Science, Literature, and Society

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 ... More

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

Introduction: Science Studies and Early Modern Literature and Culture

Howard Marchitello

in The Machine in the Text: Science and Literature in the Age of Shakespeare and Galileo

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 ... More

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 History of the Future: The Scientific Romances

Simon J. James

in Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture

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 ... More

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

Yury Tynyanov and the ‘Literary Fact’

Avril Pyman

in Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography

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 ... More

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

Literature, Letters, and the Social Sciences

Vincent Debaene

in Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science and Literature

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 ... More

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

Disputes over Territory

Vincent Debaene

in Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science and Literature

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 ... More

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

Creating an Audience

in Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

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 ... More

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

Introduction: Experiment and the Art of Writing

Philipp Erchinger

in Artful Experiments: Ways of Knowing in Victorian Literature and Science

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 ... More

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

Introduction: Materialist Aesthetics

Benjamin Morgan

in The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature

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 ... More

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

On the Defense of Literary Value: From Early German Romanticism to Analytic Philosophy of Literature

Brady Bowman

in The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic 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 ... More

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

Science For and By the Public

Stephen Gaukroger

in Civilization and the Culture of Science: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1795-1935

As scientific values became embedded in those of civilization, a new set of demands was made on science. The association of science and civilization, crucial to the standing of science in the modern ... More

As scientific values became embedded in those of civilization, a new set of demands was made on science. The association of science and civilization, crucial to the standing of science in the modern era, would not be possible without popular science because science doesn’t have the resources to effect this association in its own right. To meet the expectations of the vastly expanded role that it had assumed from the end of the eighteenth century, one in which it was displacing religion as the key to understanding our place in the world, it was crucial that science be able to engage with the world in terms of desires, expectations, anxieties, fears, hopes, goals, raw beliefs, etc. Only popular science could achieve this, for it was not science as a model of truth that placed it at the centre of modern culture, but science as a model for the future.Less

Organized Science, Usable Knowledge, and Multilateral Environmental Governance

Peter M. Haas and Casey Stevens

in Governing the Air: The Dynamics of Science, Policy, and Citizen Interaction

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 ... More

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

Sexual Orientation and Parenting

Carlos A. Ball

in Same-Sex Marriage and Children: A Tale of History, Social Science, and Law

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 ... More

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