It is commonly thought that the divorce between literature and science became final a while back, and since then they have been permanently settled into separate and incommunicative professional cultures, literature in its cozy academic bungalow and science in its flashy mansion on the hill. In 1959, British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow delivered his famous Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures,” providing a durable catch-phrase for and launching a raft of further commentaries on this intellectual separation. However, as contributor Emma Gee rightly remarks to begin her chapter on Greece and Rome, “Snow’s opposition between literature and science may seem more naive to us than to his audience of 1959; to the Greeks and Romans it would have been incomprehensible. The concept of antipathy between representatives of the two poles, as it operates today, was unavailable to ancient thinkers.” And fifty years after Snow’s lecture, we no longer see as stark a split between literature and science. To some extent this more nuanced view is the result of efforts by scholars, such as those gathered in this volume, dedicated to address and overcome, at least on the side of literary knowledge and scholarship, the more glaring deficits of humanistic fluency in scientific matters. But from both sides of this divide, efforts have been made to develop finer-grained understandings of the interrelations of natural research and cultural discourse, of scientific theory and experiment on the one hand, and of literary meditation, fictionalization, and popularization on the other.
Since the Renaissance, humanistic letters in the West have been framed by worldviews that we now, since the mid-nineteenth century, call “scientific”–for instance, the Copernican model of the solar system. At the same time, what we now call “scientists” have inevitably worked with models of reality formed or informed by what we now call the “humanities”–for instance, the literature and philosophy of “the Enlightenment.” If modern knowledge confronts schisms, it is nothing so pat or “naive” as a two-cultures divide. Nonetheless, to frame the situation in Jean-François Lyotard’s idiom, it is the case that there is no longer a credible metanarrative that could bind the current profusion of academic cultures and their specialized disciplines into an ordered hierarchy, let alone a unity. The rift Snow observed at mid-twentieth century was in fact an early diagnosis of our postmodern condition. “Two cultures” marks a popular recognition of what contemporary systems theory terms the operational differentiation of modern social sub-systems. In other words, knowledge production in the modern world increasingly proceeds through the specialized or technical languages that enclose separate disciplinary spheres. Under these conditions, perhaps ironically, cross-disciplinary contact has had to become a discipline in its own right.
The field of literature and science has come about precisely as a scholarly response to these social conditions at the interface of scholarly discourse and literary production, academic and popular communication. Indeed, the contents of this Routledge Companion present a range of dynamic contact zones, fields of intensive cognitive and conceptual encounters between the humanities and the natural sciences in general, and between literature and various domains of science in particular. The literature and science scholarship gathered here has been authored largely (but not exclusively) by humanities scholars – literature specialists, historians, cultural theorists, students of media and the fine arts, and communications scholars – intent on addressing “two-cultures” disparities and opportunities within their home disciplines. But many of them are also intent on complicating the issues that attach to disciplinary boundaries.
For instance, consider – as viewed from an influential perspective within literature and science scholarship, that of French sociologist of science Bruno Latour – the common separation of “science” from “technology.” Undoubtedly there are proper distinctions to be made between them. One can say that the sciences seek to know natural objects while the technologies aim to make artifacts that are instrumental for cultural purposes. It is nevertheless the case that neither practice can be adequately contemplated in the absence of the other. One is always already concerned, in Latour’s coinage, with technoscience. Only technological artifacts allow the sciences to construe natural objects scientifically, and this inscribes the objects that science describes (and most certainly, those it creates) with significant cultural traces. Similarly, the discipline of literature and science theorizes texts as technologies of communication and meaning embedded in some material medium of discourse or narration. Books and textual media are matrices for the formal and historical interplay of cultural inscriptions. Machines and their products – material and textual artifacts – are complexly legible as allegories of technoscience. A recent work of literature-and-science pioneer Katherine Hayles is titled Writing Machines, and this redescription of the literary text in the digital era follows directly from the postmodern confrontation of literature and science. In sum, the discussion of technologies is broadly dispersed throughout this Companion tracking the intersections of literatures and sciences.
All of these counter-trends toward transdisciplinary convergences-in-difference between the discursive, technical, and natural disciplines have been accelerating for several decades. Marking a decisive moment of consolidation in the evolving scholarly relations of literature and science, the Routledge Companion to Literature and Science aims, first, to provide undergraduate majors and graduate students across the curriculum with access to the most advanced thinking at the nexus of literature and science, and second, to document the range and diversity of this work for the use of professional scholars. However, this is not a “top-down” edition: except for length, we did not issue or enforce comprehensive editorial constraints. Each author was encouraged to contribute a chapter reflecting his or her predilection and special expertise while representing their usual focus and discursive style.
Taking literature in English as a paradigmatic but not exclusive example, Part I highlights specific scientific specializations with regard to their literary connections. Part II details the current range of disciplinary and theoretical approaches in and around literature and science scholarship. Part III approaches the divisions of scholarly labor in literature and science along the axes of world-historical units and global cultural location. This wide-angled approach makes the Routledge Companion to Literature and Science an especially useful guide and point of orientation for diverse departments and programs in literature and related discursive and cultural disciplines. It is also part of the ongoing growth of larger networks for cross-disciplinary teaching and research.
We also see this Companion as an important resource for researchers in science and technology studies, cultural studies, and narrative studies; for fields like narrative ethics and narrative medicine, already institutionalized in Medical Humanities programs; for programs pursuing a transdisciplinary agenda, involving non-academic expertise; for science journalists and creative writers; and last but not least, for scientists themselves. There has been an ongoing imperative to turn literary studies toward cultural studies, while maintaining a strong focus on literature as an important medium and form of cultural production. This tendency has been accompanied by a widening of the terms “literature” and “text” to refer to the narrative nature of all writing, including scientific writing, and the concomitant emergence of a “poetics of knowledge.” Moreover, the explicit encouragement, if not enforcement, of inter- and transdisciplinarity has also led to more integrative projects where literature has been joined by the fine and media arts as partakers in discussions about developments in technology, medicine, and science.
Our readers may consult the Routledge Companion to Literature and Science for detailed overviews of how various writers, theoreticians, and disciplines at large have conceptualized and dealt with the coevolutionary dependencies among literature, science, technology, mathematics, and medicine. While science fiction has recently increased in cultural importance and cachet, for some centuries now canonical and mainstream literary writers have been seriously engaged with the sciences, spreading as well as questioning constructions of scientific knowledge. Literature and its scholarship are also formidable forms of knowledge production and key contributors to the episteme of a culture. At the same time, here scientists as well can learn more of their own disciplines’ cultural histories, for instance, the many ways that their works have been appropriated and popularized or criticized through literary texts and so rendered productive of further social effects. For anyone needing authoritative, accessible, and succinct treatments of particular scientific disciplines in their literary dimensions, or of contemporary theoretical paradigms that engage the sciences within wider cultural frameworks, the Routledge Companion to Literature and Science will be a valuable resource.