The boundaries of science and literature are permeable; they are continuously crossed and illuminated by a variety of narrative forms and their interpretations. Changes in our perception of the world are informed in equal measure by scientific and humanistic disciplines. This volume treats both literary and scientific texts as products of the human mind, therefore abiding by all the rules it creates, scientific and humanistic alike. The volume does not propose to replace all literary or discourse analysis with a cross-disciplinary science-based approach, but, rather, uses this theoretical stance when more conventional means fail to explain (or even explore) the intricacies of a text. It argues that scientific discourse can also be analysed through the prism of literary theories, since all texts are governed in varying measure by the unity of contexts that characterize their nature, the process of their creation, and their place in the cognitive realm of humanity. This approach will allow the nature and limitations of scientific research to be questioned, while opening up more venues to explore scientific creativity that crosses the subject boundaries of science and humanities. Latin American literature offers many examples of the interconnection between literary and scientific discourse. Notwithstanding the often explored relationship between Jorge Luis Borges’s literary themes and contemporary scientific discoveries, a more general question should be asked: is the influence of scientific thought a privilege of the select few or is it indeed an all-pervading experience in Latin American literary narrative from late modernism to present day? This book explores the texts that overtly incorporate scientific content or are structured in such a way that immediately reminds the reader of a scientific phenomenon; it will also examine the texts that are presented in such a way that a conventional literary analysis does not help penetrate the many narrative layers that the text comprises. The volume offers cross-disciplinary readings of such authors as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Ernesto Sábato and Gustavo Sainz, to name but a few.

In modern times science has avoided rhetorical and poetical forms. Its hallmarks were brevity and exactitude, with disdain for "non-functional" ornamentation. This book shows that the language of scientists does remain language and that a skillful use of its rhetorical and poetic aspects often determines the "facts" and the transmission of information. The exceptional literary qualities of Darwin's The Origin of Species are taken as a point in case. The importance of language in science has ontological implications: science can no longer be considered an action performed by a speaking subject on a mute object. Does the creative role of language in science mean that human beings "create" the world? The author emphatically rejects a conclusion which would degrade nature to mere malleable material at the mercy of human beings. A hermeneutical model for the relationship between knower and known is suggested: creative interaction between reader and text. The reader's responses actualise a text's meaning; in like manner, scientists give their responses to reality by actualising one of many possibilities. The hermeneutical ontology proposed in this book steers away from the rocks of realism and anti-realism.

First published in 1954, Literature and Science discusses historically the relationship between science and literature and between scientists and men of letters from the Renaissance onwards. It shows periods when writers were enthusiastic about science as in the early days of the Royal Society and notably through the influence of Newton. Further it explores the later alienation between science and literature in the technological and industrial age. There is a full account of Wordsworth’s crucial relationships to these problems which leads to a number of new conclusions. Apart from his historical survey, Dr. Ifor Evans emphasises the contemporary importance of the relationship of the artist and the scientist and outlines an approach to a new humanism, in which the writer may reach some closer understanding of science than he has at present attained. Students interested in literature, history of literature and critical theory will find this book enlightening.

These essays throw new light on the complex relations between science, literature and rhetoric as avenues to discovery in early modern England. Analyzing the contributions of such diverse writers as Shakespeare, Bacon, Hobbes, Milton, Cavendish, Boyle, Pope and Behn to contemporary epistemological debates, these essays move us toward a better understanding of interactions between the sciences and the humanities during a seminal phase in the development of modern Western thought.

Can religious belief survive in a scientific era? Aldous Huxley thought so. His early recognition of the profound significance of twentieth-century science and the need for moral and spiritual direction resulted in his espousal of mysticism. An examination of his fiction and nonfiction reveals Huxley's significance for cross-disciplinary debates between religion, science and literature and provides examples of the transmission or refraction of knowledge from one discourse to another.

In Between Literature and Science Peter Swirski examines the true intellectual scope of Edgar Allan Poe and Stanislaw Lem. Using a genuinely interdisciplinary approach he shows that they propose far-reaching hypotheses in aesthetics, epistemology, cognitive science, philosophy of science, literary studies, and pragmatics as well as in cosmology, artificial intelligence, and futurology. Swirski argues that previous studies of their science fiction works, in neglecting these broader philosophical and scientific ambitions, have misrepresented Poe and Lem's artistic achievements.

The nineteenth-century sciences cleaved sensory experience into two separate realms: the bodily physics of sensation and the mental activity of perception. This division into two discrete categories was foundational to Victorian physics, physiology, and experimental psychology. As David Sweeney Coombs reveals, however, it was equally important to Victorian novelists, aesthetes, and critics, for whom the distinction between sensation and perception promised the key to understanding literature’s seemingly magical power to conjure up tastes, sights, touches, and sounds from the austere medium of print. In Victorian literature, science, and philosophy, the parallel between reading and perceiving gave rise to momentous debates about description as a mode of knowledge as well as how, and even whether, reading about the world differs from experiencing it firsthand. Examining novels and art criticism by George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Vernon Lee, and Walter Pater alongside scientific works by Hermann von Helmholtz, William James, and others, this book shows how Victorian literature offers us ways not just to touch but to grapple with the material realities that Clifford Geertz called the "hard surfaces of life."

Physics and Literature is a unique collaboration between physicists, literary scholars, and philosophers, the first collection of essays to examine together how science and literature, beneath their practical differences, share core dimensions – forms of questioning, thinking, discovering and communicating insights.This book advances an in-depth exploration of relations between physics and literature from both perspectives. It turns around the tendency to discuss relations between literature and science in one-sided and polarizing ways. The collection is the result of the inaugural conference of ELINAS, the Erlangen Center for Literature and Natural Science, an initiative dedicated to building bridges between literary and scientific research. ELINAS revitalizes discussion of science-literature interconnections with new topics, ideas and angles, by organizing genuine dialogue among participants across disciplinary lines. The essays explore how scientific thought and practices are conditioned by narrative and genre, fiction, models and metaphors, and how science in turn feeds into the meaning-making of literary and philosophical texts. These interdisciplinary encounters enrich reflections on epistemology, cognition and aesthetics.