Part II surveys the most salient specializations currently in play at the nexus of literatures and sciences. A relative latecomer to interdisciplinary developments in the humanities and social sciences, the discipline of literature and science follows the prior establishment of academic specializations in the history of science, philosophy of science, and sociology of science. Each of these fields has produced important disciplinary discourses from which literature and science scholars continue to learn. A significant point of conceptual contact between literature and science and these related interdisciplines is a social and historical appreciation of philosophical basics, the inevitable embeddedness of theoretical assumptions within any act of observation. In his article on Philosophy of Science, Alfred Nordmann underlines this state of affairs, in the technical vocabulary of that field, as conventionalism: “After Immanuel Kant had proposed that Newton’s laws articulated the basic and necessary suppositions that make any scientific experience or knowledge of nature possible, and after physiologists of sense looked at such necessary conditions also from an empirical point of view, scientists and philosophers recognized that the formulation and adoption of theories involved an act of judgment that could not be eliminated from accounts of science.”
But above and beyond its literary specificity, one thing that sets literature and science apart from these earlier-arriving fields is its postmodernism, or more precisely, its emergence at the end of the great twentieth-century waves of theoretical and technological renovation in the natural and human sciences. The first of these was linguistic structuralism, the direct offspring of Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiology. Structuralism’s variants – linguistic, anthropological, psychoanalytic, as well as literary – were in each case oriented to and modeled on systems abstracted from linguistic signs. Such systems were putatively universal and thus “scientific” paradigms for the production of meaning. However, as Paul Cobley argues in his article on Semiotics, “The localized study of the linguistic sign, a sign type used by humans alone, is only one component of the study of the sign in general. The human phenomenon of language is just one minuscule aspect of a broader semiosis, the action of signs throughout the universe no matter how they might be embodied.” In the discourses of literature and science, one now sees a range of sign theories at work, derived from either Saussure or Charles Sanders Peirce, or from both, and applied to analyses of both literary texts and natural systems.
Another complex theoretical wave impelling work in literature and science has been deconstruction in particular and poststructuralism in general. Both developed philosophical critiques of the scientistic overreaching in structuralism, yet both have also consolidated in different ways the insights of structuralism into the relays and couplings among signification, discourse, power, and subjectivity. Noting the extent to which Deconstruction in the work of Jacques Derrida radicalizes notions of semiotic and linguistic structure through an emphasis on a productivity of writing that problematizes distinctions between the cultural and the natural, Vicki Kirby asks: “How can the language of human culture and ideas connect and merge with the deep communicative structures of the animal, the vegetable, indeed, even the inorganic? The provocation that attends this ‘expanded’ sense of language that Derrida brings under the banner of ‘writing’ was registered in the original dissemination of poststructural arguments in both the humanities and human sciences.”
The third great theoretical wave was not immediately discursive but rather, technoscientific. In tandem with major leaps in computational and communications technologies at mid-twentieth century, this was the confluence of cybernetics and information theory. While driving together the current discourses of Systems Theory and Posthumanism, this wave is already implicated in the rise of deconstruction and its poststructuralist offshoots. Kirby cites Derrida from Of Grammatology: “The contemporary biologist speaks of writing and program in relation to the most elementary processes of information within the living cell. … Whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing.” In his article on Systems Theory, Bruce Clarke noted how cybernetic systems theory “lends itself to the discourse of posthumanism” by stressing the formal and operational parallels between mechanical and living systems – the initial point of cybernetic synthesis – and more recently, through the discourse of autopoietic or self-referential systems, the operational resonances among systems producing life, consciousness, and communication. Similarly, Neil Badmington indicates how Posthumanism carries out an extension of deconstruction’s interrogations of the borders previously cordoning off separated fields of being and knowing. Citing a famous dictum of Donna Haraway’s, Badmington writes: “one of the recognitions of posthumanist culture has been that ‘the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion,’ for with the deconstruction of the opposition between the human and the inhuman also comes a waning of the conventional distinction between fact and fiction.” And as Richard Nash explains in his article on Animal Studies, alongside cybernetic posthumanism is a related variant based on the deconstruction of the human–animal boundary: “The paradigm of dominion, in which the world was a resource at the disposal of the human, is giving way to a paradigm of responsive interaction and mutual interdependencies.”
Emerging as a recognizable academic specialization in the midst or the aftermath of these various intellectual and technoscientific movements and counter-movements, literature and science immediately entered the fray with an especially pronounced level of theoretical awareness. Thus, Part II presents a range of discursive openings and entrance points into the field. Some articles are allied to well-developed areas of special academic interest – Feminist Science Studies, Art Connections, Cultural Science Studies, and Science Fiction. And other articles address nascent topics that have just arrived in the intellectual scene – Animal Studies, Game Studies, and E-Literature. For instance, in her article on Agricultural Studies, Susan M. Squier assists the development of this new specialization by defining its differences from traditional literary treatments of the pastoral and from related fields such as cultural studies and agrarian studies: “In contrast to … literary and historical explorations of the pastoral, Agricultural Studies focuses on the post-pastoral,” and “enrolls scholars in several emergent (and often interconnecting) areas of literary studies including science studies, animal studies, ecocriticism and environmental studies, women and gender studies, and science fiction.” In sum, literature and science is by far the most eclectic and experimental of the (post)humanistic interdisciplines, the most willing to challenge received academic verities and to press insights from all quarters to their transdisciplinary conclusions.