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Modernism: Modernism:

Modernism: - PowerPoint Presentation

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Modernism: - PPT Presentation

Literature and Science Dr Katherine Ebury Structure Introduction to the field of literature and science My research and teaching as a case study The Field of Literature and Science What is literature and science ID: 240137

literature science universe scientific science literature scientific universe cultures mind good utopia

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Slide1

Modernism: Literature and Science

Dr Katherine EburySlide2

StructureIntroduction to the field of literature and science

My research and teaching as a case studySlide3

The Field of Literature and ScienceSlide4

What is literature and science?Branch of literary study that looks at relationships

between literature and scienceEmphasis on ‘interchange’ – the idea that literature may influence science as much as science influences literature.Often historical Often

theoreticalOften textualSlide5

What is interchange?: J. Craig Venter and the synthetic cell.

In 2010, J. Craig Venter announced that they had created the first synthetic cell.Venter’s team inserted DNA watermark codes into the genome so that they can distinguish between natural and synthetic bacteria moving.

When this code is translated into English, it spells out the names of the 46 researchers who helped with the project, quotations from James Joyce, physicist Richard Feynman and J. Robert

Oppenheimer.The quotation from Joyce’s Portrait reads: ‘To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

HdgfzdlgUHw

From 10min30Slide6

What questions should we ask ourselves about science in literature?

What scientific ideas are being used?What kinds of sciences are referenced? Physics, chemistry, astronomy, medicine, biology, zoology, anthropology?Where does the author’s scientific knowledge come from?Are these ideas author’s or are they being critiqued?

Is scientific terminology being used? Does the scientific language fit in with the text or disrupt it deliberately?

Is the texts’s form affected by the use of science?Slide7

The Two Cultures Debate1959 lecture by C. P. Snow, eventually

published in book formCaused much debate but only after F. R. Leavis replied to Snow in a vitriolic lecture ‘Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow’.

Leavis’s response was that the literary intellectual’s function was to critique a scientific and technological society. In a Cold War situation, this makes quite a lot of sense. It’s certainly how modernism often related to such science.Slide8

From The Two Cultures

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's

?I

now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their

neolithic ancestors would have had (15).Slide9

The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures – of two galaxies, so far as that goes ought to produce creative chances. In the history of mental activity that has been where some of the break-

throughs came. The chances are there now. But they are there, as it were, in a vacuum, because those in the two cultures can’t talk to each other. It is bizarre how very little of twentieth-century science has made its way into twentieth century art. Now and then one used to find poets conscientiously using scientific expressions, and getting them wrong – there was a time when ‘refraction’ kept cropping up in verse in a mystifying fashion, and when ‘

polarised light’ was used as though writers were under the impression that it was a specially admirable kind of light.

Of course, this isn’t the way that science could be any good to art. I has got to be assimilated (16)Slide10

Why do I love literature and science? Why is it good for students?

Rejection of ‘The Two Cultures’ – also, rejection of overvaluation of STEM.Modeling difficulty: ‘supercomplexity’Close readingSlide11

Modernism and Einstein’s RevolutionSlide12

Beckett: Dream of Fair to Middling Women

The night firmament is abstract density of music, symphony without end, illumination without end, yet emptier, more sparsely lit, than the most succinct constellations of genius. Now seen merely, a depthless lining of hemisphere, its crazy stippling of stars, it is

passional movements of the mind charted in light and darkness. The tense passional intelligence, when arithmetic abates, tunnels...through the interstellar

coalsacks of its firmament in genesis, it twists through the stars of its creation in a network of loci that shall never be coordinate. The inviolable criterion of poetry and music, the non-principle of their punctuation, is figured in the demented perforation of the night colander. The ecstatic mind, the mind achieving creation, take ours for example, rises to the shaft-heads of its statement, its recondite relations of

emergal, from a labour and a weariness of deep castings that brook no schema. The mind suddenly entombed, then active in an anger and a rhapsody of energy, in a scurrying and plunging towards

exitus

, such is the ultimate mode and factor of the creative integrity, its proton, incommunicable; but there, insistent, invisible rat, fidgeting behind the astral incoherence of the art surface (16-17)

.Slide13

His (Bloom's) logical conclusion, having weighed the matter and allowing for possible error?

That it was not a heaventree

, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not a

heavenman. That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from the known to the unknown: an infinity, renderable equally finite by the suppositions probable apposition of one or more bodies equally of the same and of different magnitudes: a mobility of illusory forms

immobilised in space, remobilised

in air: a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a present before its future spectators had entered actual present existence.Slide14

from Utopianism, Modernism and Literature in the Twentieth Century

Yet another complicating factor in the utopian ‘field’ is the persistence

of definitions which take as their starting point Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), but which then detail their models of utopianism

using a reductive version of More's text and word. It is a familiar maxim, for example, that the term ‘utopia’ refers to a no-place (u-

topia) and also that it evokes, homophonically

, a good place (

eu-topia

) - thus

capturing a

signified no-place that is also good. However, modern

utilizations of

‘utopia’ often take its ’

notness

’ as meaning ’unachievable’

– not because

unachievability

might have been what More had in mind

when he

coined the word, but on the less justifiable assumption

that ‘not’ must

mean ’never’, rather than ‘not yet’ or ‘not here’. The key

accomplishment

of More's Utopia is that it manages to articulate a

complex tension

between the affirmation of a possibility and the negation

of its

fulfilment

’ (Vieira, 2010, p. 6), an ambiguity that the word ‘

utopia’ itself

articulates by virtue of its semantic doublings.Slide15

Zena Meadowsong on Bloom’s negativity

Bloom has, of course, been criticized for this [negative] view…[H]e may be attracted to astronomy because, as

Budgen notes, it “flatter[s] his pessimism by making him feel small” (277). Yet Bloom’s observation suggests also that the possibilities of the universe are infinite. Concluding that “there [was] no known method from the known to the unknown” (

U 17.1140–41)—no way of defining, or reaching, “utopia”—Bloom, in fact, insists upon a condition of infinite possibility.Slide16

Breakthroughs of the new cosmology (1920-1935)

New understanding of how time and space worked throughout the universe (relativity theory, space-time continuum)New cosmic models (curved universe, expanding universe)

New understanding of the origins of the universe (big bang theory)

New understanding of the speed of light as standard of measurementNew galaxies found

New telescopes (Mount Wilson)Slide17

Eclipse mania (1927)Slide18

Joyce’s Notes and ManuscriptsSlide19

Holly Henry on utopian cosmology

In The Human Value of the New Astronomy, science writer F. S. Marvin noted in 1929 the “work by which in the strictest sense man is creating his own universe.” That work, carried out by the League of Nations and in the field of cosmology, Marvin asserted, promised new hope for human collaboration and world peace: “[T]

hroughout the tumult and the disillusionment, two supreme pieces of human organization have gone on, which in different spheres carry humanity to heights untouched and hardly dreamt of before. The League of Nations and its allied associations is one. The new cosmogony is the other.”