Some scholars of literature and science repaired from training in the sciences to graduate programs in literature. Their work thus rests on especially strong preparation in science and familiarity with its institutions. But most academics who would approach scientific matters for purposes of literary scholarship and its related disciplines do not have advanced scientific training. Parts I and II of this Companion are designed to provide advanced introductions to the range of scientific disciplines and multiple points of entrance of the interdisciplinary specializations in literature and science. Part III reflects the circumstance that many current practitioners in these specializations initially came up to speed on their sciences of interest through the rigorous tutorials provided by modern scholarship in the history of science. As Henning Schmidgen argued in Part II (Chapter 29), the history of science is “an interdiscipline, and arguably the interdiscipline par excellence.” Works such as Energy and Empire, Norton Wise and Crosbie Smith’s cultural biography of Lord Kelvin, and Lily Kay’s history of modern genetics, Who Wrote the Book of Life?, ease the details of scientific and technological developments toward the cultural chronologies of the humanities. Solid historical platforms such as these help prepare one to do literature and science with the requisite empirical as well as critical purchase.
A longer historical view attunes us to the multiple anachronisms we commit when reading our modern ideas of “science” back into any number of earlier historical periods. Emma Gee’s article on Greece and Rome, for instance, notes that during the classical period, “Areas which we might call ‘scientific’ were covered by a range of terms, often more different from one another in nuance than in meaning. These terms include sophia (wisdom) and philosophia, logos (reason, often opposed to mythos), techne (art, skill), and episteme (knowledge or understanding).” And Arielle Saiber reminds us that, during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, while both “scientia and ars were part of ‘natural philosophy,’” debates over the sense of scientia revolved “around the Aristotelian distinction between scientia quia (knowledge of the fact) and scientia propter quid (knowledge through the cause)”–that is, between bodies of knowledge we now distinguish as scientific, on the one hand, and philosophical, on the other.
Both institutionally and with regard to the practical overlap of scholarly activities, the history of science is the prior disciplinary specialization closest to literature and science. Acknowledging the more recent imperative to relativize and complicate the Western Eurocentrism endemic to the standard chronicling of scientific thought and practice, Part III also pairs Western historical periods with non-European cultures. In his chapter on Russia, Kenneth Knoespel studies how “Russian natural history involves the continuous rehearsal of the place and exploratory capacity of the Russian language,” in a dialectic both of openness and of resistance to Western European developments. And as Thomas Lamarre remarks (Chapter 42), the case of Japan highlights the limitations of both unitary and binary models of world and scientific culture: “Japan’s technoscientific modernization has frequently been presented not only as the exception among non-Western nations but also as a model for them.” These historical constructions presume “a unitary Eastern or Oriental worldview or cultural paradigm.” However, all “such unities are metaphysical, as are the binary oppositions of East and West, and tradition and modernity.” Historical periodizations and cultural comparisons remain indispensable, if always debatable, organizational principles for the scholarly work of literature and science.
In earlier accounts of post-Renaissance culture, the sense of “science” became attached to the notion of a “revolution,” which notion has itself come under recent historical critique. Alvin Snider (Chapter 37) affirms that “Historians of science now generally doubt the existence of a revolutionary moment of origin in the seventeenth century, of a fixed method for the production of new knowledge, of a cultural totality captured by the anachronistic word ‘science.’” These properly revisionist accounts of early modern science are matched by a similar tendency in the discussion of postmodernism. In his chapter concluding this volume, Stefan Herbrechter comments on “the effect of a new permeability between science and culture – a certain ‘culturalization’ of science as a practice combined with an increased ‘presence’ of science within culture.”
Even while one still marks a distinction between “science” and “culture,” this is now done in the cognizance of their mutual “permeability.” The work in literature and science gathered here overcomes the “two-cultures” dilemma not by forcing a one-culture solution from either direction, but by intellectual acclimation to a world of many intersecting cultures, their myriad specificities as complexly coupled as the life-forms of an ecosystem. Going forward, as Richard Nash affirms (Chapter 22, this volume), we confront “an intellectual reorientation to a world in which we are responsive agents within nature-culture networks.” One will do best to model their scholarly mediations, it would seem, on complex ecologies, within which multiple systems are always enmeshed with coevolving and unpredictable environments.