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Modernism:
Literature and Science
Dr Katherine Ebury
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Structure

 Introduction to the field of literature and science

 My research and teaching as a case study

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The Field of Literature and
Science
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What is literature and science?

 Branch of literary study that looks at relationships between

literature and science

 Emphasis on ‘interchange’ – the idea that literature may

influence science as much as science influences literature.

 Often historical

 Often theoretical

 Often textual
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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/wat
ch?v=HdgfzdlgUHw
From 10min30
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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?

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The Two Cultures Debate

 1959 lecture by C. P. Snow, eventually published in book form

 Caused 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.
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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).
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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)
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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 reading
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Modernism and Einstein’s
Revolution
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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).
+ 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.
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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.
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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.
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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

measurement

• New galaxies found

• New telescopes (Mount Wilson)

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Eclipse mania (1927)
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Joyce’s Notes and Manuscripts
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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.”