In recent years, literary studies has increasingly appropriated science, opening new fields for critical enquiry.
Darwinian literary studies, for example, shows how the reading of literature can be explained in terms of our evolutionary biology. Literary historians of science show how understanding the ways in which writers have represented science can help us better to communicate scientific knowledge today. Critical readers are turning to empirical studies, such as semantic analysis, to give their criticism the status of fact.
I would not want to demean such efforts to engage literature with science. Before I shifted more towards literature and game studies, my
PhD research looked at the ways in which cybernetic science had been (mis)represented in literary and film science fiction.
Science and Culture has been a key category under which I've posted on this blog over a number of years.
Nevertheless, I remain sceptical about the ultimate destination of such traffic between science and literature. There is always a feeling that such interdisciplinarity, whilst intellectually interesting in its own right, is also an attempt to lend literary studies the superficial credibility of the "real-world impact" that science possesses. If it is effective, scientific research invariably emerges from universities to have some social benefit, such as a new cure for cancer, or a green energy source. The "impacts" of science, especially the most exciting blue skies science, may not always be direct and instantaneous, but they are invariably assumed to be present. Literary studies clings to the coat-tails of the scientific impact-agenda, suggesting to policy makers and public - who increasingly demand pragmatic outcomes from their funding - that it has relevance, even if this is not always immediately obvious.
Read more ยปLabels: Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science, Science and Culture, science fiction, What Scientists Read
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