Spring 2007 Courses

English 294-03: Literature and Science (Wilkens)

M/W/F 1:10-2:10pm, MAIN 011 (Syllabus)

Literature has long drawn on science as a source of both subject matter (as in science fiction) and metaphorical associations (from Defoe to Pynchon, and countless points between). Science has likewise relied on literature not only as a means to popularization, but also in its professional propagation. But is this connection between the two fields more than a superficial and coincidental alignment of interests? Do literature and science work in similar ways? Can we compare the kinds of knowledge they produce? What does it mean to "produce" knowledge? And how do we do it?

This course attempts to answer these questions by considering recent developments in science studies in conjunction with both literary theory and works of contemporary fiction. It explores the connections between the terms "objectivity," "truth," "paradigm," "collective," "event," "narrative," and "allegory" and argues that knowledge is the product of a situated interaction between them. NB: This is not a course in science fiction.

The semester will be divided into five three-week units, each comprising a primary theoretical and fictional text, along with supplementary articles and other materials. The first unit covers the historical origins of science studies, including Ludwik Fleck's concepts of "thought styles" and collectivities. It pairs this work with Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 to examine both the complexity and inescapability of social structures of knowledge. The second unit, covering Thomas Kuhn and Alain Robbe-Grillet, continues and expands the first, moving away from collectivities as pre-given entities and beginning to examine the temporal processes through which they are formed, stabilized, and transformed. The third section takes up the related problems of narrativization and exclusion, drawing heavily on Bruno Latour and John Edgar Wideman's metaphors of contagion and contamination, both of which are intimately connected with racial discourses. Sandra Harding and Margaret Atwood supply the primary texts for the fourth unit, devoted to feminist and post-humanist conceptions of science, gender, and social organization. The fifth and final unit will consider the relationship between mathematics, cognitive science, and constructivist epistemology through readings of selected essays in the philosophy of mathematics and Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2.

Spring 2007 Course Listings