Introduction

Science and literature, views from an academic horizon

Science-and-literature studies are a relatively new endeavour, having emerged as a main topic in the last decades, especially in the Anglo-American academy, but also in other academic traditions¹ (Willis 2014). The proposal of some exponents of this emergent field is to erase the boundaries between science and culture and, by extension, between nature and society. The latter was initiated in the Early Modern episteme by Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle, as Bruno Latour suggests in We Have Never Been Modern (1993, 47), quoting Leviathan and the Air Pump by Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin. Although during the whole twentieth century, in English-speaking academia, the relationship between science and literature was not negligible, especially with poetry, as Lance Schachterle very well describes in the introduction of the Encyclopedia of Literature and Science (Gossin 2002). This dialogue started to become particularly intense during the last decades of the twentieth century. The claim for a dialogue is at the centre of Order out of Chaos (1984), written by physicist Ilya Prigogine and historian of science Isabelle Stengers to overcome the separation between the two cultures denounced by C. P. Snow (1959).²

During the first decades of the twenty-first century, the field has strongly developed from multiple and different perspectives. Important handbooks on science-and-literature studies have been published, such as Pamela Gossin’s Encyclopedia of Literature and Science (2002), crafted as an introduction for students, instructors and interdisciplinary scholars in an encyclopaedic manner, or The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science (2011), edited by Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini, focused on the humanistic perspective and dedicated primarily to literature in English. Other publications have compiled the academic interaction and dialogue between scientists, writers, artists and humanists, such as #Nodos (2017), edited by Gustavo Schwartz and Víctor Bermúdez.

Furthermore, recently different academic institutions launched several projects on science-and-literature studies. From a European perspective, one should mention the ambitious project developed around Bremen and Oldenburg in north-western Germany, Fiction Meets Science (FMS). FMS constructs a dialogue between experts in science studies (sociologist, historians) and experts in literary studies, including writers and scientists. According to their webpage (Fiction Meets Science 2022), ‘Fiction Meets Science (FMS) is an academic research program made up of literary and sociological studies; residencies for fiction writers; book clubs; and public readings and interchanges between humanities, arts, and science communities.’ Specializing in the relationship between literature and physics and focusing on language and metaphors both in creative writing and scientific research, ELINAS Center for Literature and Natural Science was created by another group of scholars in Germany at Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen.

There has also been intensive work in the creation and consolidation of societies of scholars focused on the study of the relationships between science and literature. The Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA), founded in 1985 in Berkeley, at the 17th International Congress of the History of Science, develops its work in the American academy, with a European sister organization (SLSAeu) launched in 2000. The British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS), founded in 2005, also operates worldwide, although its initial environment was the UK. The Commission on Science and Literature (CoSciLit) was founded at the International Congress on the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Manchester in 2013 and launched the following year with its own conference in Athens. One of several commissions of the Division of History of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IUHPST/DHST), CoSciLit aims to bring together both scholars and scientists from around the world to advance the study of science and literature in dialogue with one another.

SLSA sponsors Configurations, a journal on science, literature and the arts that has been in print for 30 years. This is one of the two principal periodicals in the field along with the online Journal for Literature and Science, which was first published in 2008 and maintains strong links with BSLS. In 2017 and 2018, JLS and Configurations published two special issues on the intersections between the humanities and the technoscientific discourse in contemporary research, entitled ‘The State of the Unions’ (2017; 2018). The main question of these calls was: What are the relations between literature, science and the arts within our field today? And there were significant contributions, such as Jay Labinger’s article ‘Where are the Scientists in Literature and Science?’ (Labinger 2017, 65–69). Labinger asks for more participation of scientist in the debates and highlights some future successful strategies.

In this thematic issue of Interdisciplinary Science Review, we shall revisit this key question of ‘our field’, understood to mean studies on literature and science, and further develop this discussion of interdisciplinarity through a series of case studies derived from the Fourth International Conference on Science and Literature held by CoSciLit and the Bofill Chair on Science and Literature at the University of Girona in July 2022. Rather than trying to take stock of the field for practitioners within that field, as they do in JLS and Configurations, we are showcasing concrete examples of the work we do for scientists and other interdisciplinary scholars in the spirit of empiricism, across multiple languages and literatures, in particular Spanish and Greek as well as English (plus Korean, Italian, among others). We are thinking too about the relevance of this material to how we practice, teach and communicate science.

Interdisciplinarity, a tough question

What happens when a researcher starts from a discipline of origin and expands into others, in the particular context of science and literature studies? What new discoveries can be made and how do they bear on the disciplines involved? In the case of researchers that merge scientific and artistic interests, this process is much more difficult to map. According to Schachterle, in the case of science-and-literature studies, ‘the absence of a fundamental definition to which even a significant plurality of its self-confessed practitioners might subscribe’ (Gossin 2002, xvi) makes it a field that is very open to interdisciplinarity, as we can read in this issue. Moreover, interdisciplinarity is a tough issue, as Simon Goldhill shows in ‘How Interdisciplinary Is God?’ It is not the mere juxtaposition of contents of different disciplines, but study that expands from one discipline into others, erasing the boundaries between them. Goldhill states that ‘interdisciplinarity is not a good in itself’ (2017, 17). According to him, interdisciplinarity is useful when it becomes the only response to a certain type of question (17). The necessary condition of interdisciplinarity, he suggests, centres on the question: ‘what types of explanation – what types of knowing – are to be privileged, and how are the different forms of knowing to be integrated or interrelated?’ (17). How far is literature and science scholarship interdisciplinary at all? Maybe the interdisciplinarity does not arise from the work of any one interdisciplinary scholar but from the context of discussion in which scientists and scholars are in the same room sharing ideas about related topics. This applies to a multidisciplinary team but also, more loosely but nonetheless productively, to the pages of this special issue and the wider work of the Commission on Science and Literature.

Willard McCarty states some warnings related to interdisciplinarity. He agrees with the need to transgress boundaries between disciplines, as stated by different scholars, whom he quotes. However, according to McCarty, complete denial of these boundaries is a serious mistake. The ‘godhead’ perspective attempted by such denial leads to imposition of the denier's point of view (2016, 73–74). In order to define his perspective, he states:

my approach fits somewhat uncomfortably into the burgeoning literature on the subject, which in the last decade or so has orbited the abstraction called ‘interdisciplinarity’ and devoted considerable energy to its inter-, multi-, trans-, and other relations. I take the view that in dicing and re-dicing the what, this literature has not paid enough attention to the how (whatever good may have been done for the sociology of knowledge). In consequence it has been less than helpful to the adventurous but inexperienced scholar and to the discussion of changing research practices as a whole. Much of this literature begins with the abstraction and as a result gets stuck in taxonomic debate that from my perspective is a Glasperlenspiel. (McCarty 2016, 70)

McCarty points out that one of the fundamental characteristics of interdisciplinary processes is curiosity (2016, 70). This is an excellent basis on which to calibrate the interdisciplinarity in science-and-literature studies. The case of Marcel Proust (1871–1922) and his prospective description of associative memory in the complete framework of the French society developed in À la recherche du temps perdu is a clear sample of how curiosity, interdisciplinarity and an artistic gaze work in the case of creative writing and neurology. Proust distinguished between voluntary and involuntary memory when he wrote In Search of Lost Time. Hence the episode of the madeleine. In four pages, the French writer tells how the memory of one sense, taste (the bite of a madeleine soaked in infusion), can give rise to the memory of an entire world. In his own words ‘all of Combray and its surroundings […] emerged […] from my cup of tea’ (Proust 1919, 69).³

Today, neurologists argue that the temporal coincidence in the perception of two sensory stimuli, such as taste and sight, strengthens the connections between neurons, connections long ago defined as synapses. The association of the taste of the madeleine, in Proust's case, was engraved in his synapses with all the images that accompanied it and was stored in a hidden place in his mind. Neurologists call this long-term memory.

Evocations of the past are based on memory networks, marvellous structures that intertwine with the networks perceived by the senses. For this reason, if one of the associated stimuli is repeated (in Proust's case, taste), the associative memory network is activated, allowing the other stimulus (the images of Combray) to be retrieved. It is the two stimuli together that trigger long-term memory, the mechanism that allowed Proust, the first to explain involuntary memory, to recover the time lost in writing thanks to a madeleine dipped in tea. In his short stories, curiosity also informs Jorge Luis Borges' (1899-1986) intention to develop conceptual ideas fit for the aesthetic of creative writing. As physicist and musician Alberto Rojo states in a paper (1999), Borges predicts the possibility of parallel universes in the short story ‘El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan,’ (Borges 1944) more than fifteen years before Hugh Everett III proposed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and, with it, reality, in his doctoral dissertation.

On the side of science, curiosity is very common in the crafting of revolutionary theories. Gillian Beer, in Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot & Nineteenth Century Fiction, focuses on the dialogue between Darwinism and Victorian literature. She demonstrates not only that Darwinian ideas influenced Victorian literary plots, but also that Charles Darwin (1809–1882) himself as a writer influenced Victorian language and literature. Most obviously, the words ‘evolution’ and ‘natural selection’ acquired a different meaning after Darwin’s work (Beer 1983, 11 and 63). Beer also recognizes traces of Carlyle’s romantic materialism in Darwin’s prose that he would go on to transmit to the Victorian writers who came after (75 and 227). According to Beer, Darwin:

did not invent laws. He described them. Indeed, it was essential to his project that it should be accepted not as invention, but description. His work is, therefore, conditional upon the means of description: that is upon language. And his description is necessarily conditioned by the assumptions and beliefs condensed in the various kinds of discourse active at the time he was writing. Though the events of the natural world are language-free, language controls our apprehension of knowledge, and is itself determined by current historical conditions and by the order implicit in syntax, grammar, and other rhetorical properties such as metaphor, as well as by the selective intensity of individual experience. (Beer 1983, 46)

In fact, Beer affirms that conversation and the description of senses are the predominant modes in the narration, much more than abstraction (Beer 1983, 61).

Finally, as the last sample of curiosity in the relationship between science and literature, one finds enough material with one of the founders of quantum mechanics. In Mind and Matter (1958)⁴, as an example of his profound intellectual curiosity, Erwin Schrödinger reflects about what he considers his perception of the author in his/her work of art:

Sometimes a painter introduces into his large picture, or a poet into his long poem, an unpretending subordinate character who is himself. Thus the poet of the Odyssey has, I suppose, meant himself by the blind bard who in the hall of the Phaeacians sings about the battles of Troy and moves the battered hero to tears. In the same way we meet in the song of the Nibelungs, when they traverse the Austrian lands, with a poet who is suspected to be the author of the whole epic. In Durer's All-Saints picture two circles of believers are gathered in prayer around the Trinity high up in the skies, a circle of the blessed above, and a circle of humans on the earth. Among the latter are kings and emperors and popes, but also, if I am not mistaken, the portrait of the artist himself, as a humble side figure that might as well be missing. (Schrödinger 1967)

According to Schrödinger, the image emerging from this statement, which includes also painting and, in general, the arts, is ‘the best simile of the bewildering double role of mind’ (1992, 137). However, the significant thing is that, as Proust does with associative memory, Schrödinger is with this reflection anticipating the role of the author in narration. This philosophical statement turns into a fine observation of the author’s position in a narration in a period when first-person narrative and the narratives of the self are going to transform the author’s position in the narrative, leading to future autofiction (Schrödinger first made this view public in 1956). All in all, science and literature are intertwined in the resonance of the ideas and the anticipation of concepts that feed both disciplines. This interdisciplinary engagement, visible in creative literature and creative science, is the prime subject of literature and science research.

About this issue

Writers anticipating science, scientists reflecting about contents that will change the literary paradigm and scholars around them trying to understand these streams of ideas: the reader can monitor these different gazes in the contributions of this issue. All of them bar one are based on presentations at the 4th International Conference on Science and Literature, which was held in Girona in 2022. The conference was organised by the Commission on Science and Literature (CoSciLit) of the Division of the History of Science and Technology (DHST) within the International Union for History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IUHPST). Contributions were selected by a Committee formed by George Vlahakis (Hellenic Open University), Kostas Tampakis (National Hellenic Research Foundation), John Holmes (University of Birmingham) and Carlos Gamez-Perez (University of Barcelona & Dr Bofill Chair on Science and the Humanities). The selected contributions are arranged in four sections. In the first section you will find two accounts of the state of the field from different perspectives, following on from the general overview in the introduction of literature and science as a field. In ‘Queerness in science and literature: towards a “naturalisation” of the queer in the crossroads of physics, biology and literary theory’, Benito García-Valero resignifies the concept of queerness, combining it with recent developments on science and critical theory. García-Valero applies this approach to contemporary Mexican literature written by women, in a dialogue between cognitive sciences and literature. In the second one, ‘Digital humanities at global scale’, Salvador Ros and his team, located in different Spanish universities (UNED, Universidad de Granada, IE School of Human Sciences & Technology and FECYT), develop the question of the Digital Humanities from a global perspective in the dialogue between science and literature and other fields of the humanities. Where the first of these articles is a theoretical intervention, the second is a technical study grounded in statistical data and experimentation.

The second section focuses on conceptual interventions drawing on Spanish Golden Age literature. In ‘Why do we engage (and keep engaging) in tragic and sad stories? Negativity bias and engagement in narratives eliciting negative feelings’, Julien Simon deals with the appeal of tragedy. He reflects on the fact that we engage with tragic stories with the help of affect theory. With a brief analysis of Fernando de Rojas’ Celestina, Simon addresses the psychological phenomenon of ‘Negativity Bias’. In ‘Can fiction lead to prosocial behaviour? Exclusion, violence, empathy, and literature in early modernity’, Isabel Jaén-Portillo addresses the question on prosociality by analysing the relationship between positivity and negativity in affect theories and literary analysis. Jaén-Portillo focuses on the connection between empathy, gender and literature in early modernity. Finally, Jorge García López focuses on the imperative to find a language for science. In ‘Science, philosophy and literature in the early Spanish enlightenment: the case of Martin Martinez’, one finds both detailed and exquisite philological analysis, with the etymological study of some technical words to define instruments and practises that appeared with the Scientific Revolution and the judgements of the history of science applied to evaluate the language of medicine and Enlightenment in seventeenth-century Spain.

The third section comprises three historicist case studies on Anglophone epic: Wolfgang Funk’s ‘Life built herself a myriad forms: epics of gestation and co-operation in late nineteenth-century women’s poetry’, Michael Whitworth’s ‘Situating selfhood in a scientific universe, 1925–1931’ and John Holmes’s ‘This too is poetry: Ronald Duncan, science and ignorance’. These contributions form a triptych for understanding the resonances of science in modern poetry in English, focussing on the epic as a form. The three papers work from an historical framework that entwine literary studies with the description of the surrounding cultural context. Funks’s article traces a cultural perspective on the discussion around evolutionary epic in the aftermath of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) from a gendered perspective. The paper looks to this genre’s foundations in Victorian literature and the incipient feminist movement, a key period for literature and science studies, with a discussion centred on the German-born poet Mathilde Blind’s prophetic epic The Ascent of Man. Whitworth carries the story forward into the 1920s and the continuing dialogue between emerging scientific theories and the poetic avant-garde in British poetry. The author describes the revisitation of the old-fashioned epic during the period under the influence of scientific concepts and theories. Finally, Holmes examines the English poet Ronald Duncan’s herculean effort, across the 63 cantos of his poem Man, written in the 1960s and 1970s, to find a poetic language capable of carrying the charge of science. Holmes focuses on a close reading of Duncan’s cantos, with a previous description of the author’s personal circumstances, including a crisis that prompted him to carry out this poetic project. The work intimately links epic and science.

In the fourth and last section you will find papers showcasing international intersections of literature and science. Sophia Denissi’s article, ‘Sherlock Holmes Saving Mr. Venizelos: using science in an early Greek crime fiction novel’, deals with the use of scientific knowledge in Greek crime fiction and its relationship to foundational Victorian crime fiction from a bibliographical perspective. In ‘The magic lantern as a gothic literary instrument’, Maria Vara shares with us the perspective of the technology of arts when analysing extremely creative periods, and how the dialogue between imagination and emerging knowledge works from this approach. A recently emerging approach to study the relationship between science and literature is biosemiotics. This perspective was initially developed in biology by Friedrich S. Rothschild, Thomas Sebeok and Thure von Uexküll. Biosemiotics interprets biology as a study of sign systems, including the study of meaning and interpretation of sign processes. Contemporary humanities have applied these linguistic-scientific perspectives to literary analysis. This application of biosemiotics to literary studies is represented here by Ryan Day’s study of William Shakespeare’s creative process in ‘Shakespeare’s Genesis: Poetry, Emergence, and Biosemiotics’. Day proposes a biosemiotics reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets. His article introduces us into the novel field of biosemiotics as a critical tool, with a deep development of its biological basis. A completely different approach to biology is developed here by the engineer Constantin Canavas. In his paper, ‘When a woman becomes a plant: philosophical discourses and metaphorical narratives in the modernity’, he merges his expertise in technology and automata with more philosophical traditions to evaluate otherness and alienation. In a suggestive exercise of comparative literature, the paper puts into dialogue Italian philosopher Emmanuele Coccia’s essay La vie des plantes (The Life of Plants) with South Korean novelist Han Kang’s works. Finally, ‘Science and literature: The importance of differences’ serves as the coda of the issue. This article is the printed version of a keynote lecture that George Levine, one of the founders of modern literature and science studies, gave on 30 March 2023 in Rome at a subsequent conference on “Literature and Science: 1922-2022”. Professor Levine's lecture revisits the overarching question of what kinds of relations we should expect or hope for between science and literature. Citing the main conflicts, such as the Sokal affair, he points out that it is difficult to consider these relationships as a conversation. However, from his point of view, this difference in perspective gives the best prospect for a fruitful discussion.

The papers in this thematic issue show the breadth of approaches currently available to scholars working at the interface of science and literature. By bringing together examples from many different literatures and a comparable range of sciences, and including the perspectives of scientists and historians as well as literary scholars, we hope to have also shown the scope of the field and the rich gains from the kind of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary conversations taking place in the pages of this special issue and cultivated by the Commission on Science and Literature.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carlos Gamez-Perez

Carlos Gámez Pérez (Barcelona, 1969) is Professor at the Universitat de Barcelona. He holds a PhD in Romance Studies from the University of Miami with a thesis on science, technology and culture in contemporary Spain, entitled Las ciencias y las letras: ciencia y cultura en España (1959–2016), published by Editorial Academia del Hispanismo (2018). He holds a degree in physics from the Universitat de Barcelona and a research proficiency in history of science from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, as well as a master’s degree in literary creation from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He has published fiction. His latest novel is Malas noticias desde La Isla (Katakana, 2018), translated into English in 2019. He is currently participating in the project ‘Urban narratives about nature. The contemporary construction of knowledge about natural history (Spain and Britain, 1950–1980)’, and in a transdisciplinary project on digital humanities. He has published several academic articles on science and literature.

Notes

1 For a succinct history of criticism in the field, see Willis (2014).

2 Although, as the editors of the Routledge Companion for Literature and Science mention in the preface, Snow’s statement ‘was in fact an early diagnosis of our postmodern condition’ (Clarke and Rossini 2011, xv) that divides the discourses of knowledge in specialized, separated disciplinary spheres.

3 The translation is ours.

4 I am using the 1967 edition.