Science and LiteratureHarry Raphael Garvin, James M. Heath This issue explores the tensions between literature and the sciences, focusing on responses which see science as an alien ideology that threatens everything the arts hold dear, and on a more positive response that sees the sciences as providing new tools, viewpoints, and knowledge about the world. |
Contents
| 17 | |
Epistemological Historicism and the Arts and Sciences | 38 |
Scriblerian Satire and the Fate of Language | 63 |
Thomas Pynchon and the Technologies of Interpretation | 81 |
Beckett and the Heavenly Sciences | 96 |
Madness and Its Method in The House of the Seven Gables | 108 |
Style Science Technology and William Carlos Williams | 132 |
The Poem as Object in Itself | 159 |
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aesthetic American analogy artistic banana Beckett become Bergson black holes called Callisto causality century cited Clifford Computer poem Computer poetry Concrete poem Concrete Poetry creative critics cybernetic death describes Dunciad ence engineers entropy epistemological essay Feyerabend fluid style Gravity's Rainbow Gumpel Hawthorne Hawthorne's historicism history of science Holgrave human Ibid ideas images imagination interpretation Jaffrey Kuhn Kuhn's Kuhnian language light linguistic literal literary literature machine Max Bense meaning mechanical metacritic metaphor modern modernist nature Newtonian notion object paradigm Pattern poetry philosophy Phoebe physics poet poetics Popper produced Pynchon quantum mechanics rational reference relationship revolution Rocket romance Samuel Beckett schizophrenic scientific theories scientists Scriblerians seems sense Seven Gables social space Sprat's structure subtile process suggests Swift things Thomas Kuhn Thomas Pynchon tion traditional University Press visual white dwarfs William Carlos Williams Williams's words writing York Young Sycamore
Popular passages
Page 56 - The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
Page 56 - Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
Page 123 - When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod...
Page 66 - I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us; who, when they met in the streets, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together ; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burthens, and take their leave.
Page 66 - An expedient was therefore offered, that since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on.
Page 67 - Imagination, fancy, and invention, they are wholly strangers to, nor have any words in their language, by which those ideas can be expressed ; the whole compass of their thoughts and mind being shut up within the two forementioned sciences.
Page 56 - ... the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
Page 19 - normal science' means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.
Page 74 - The other project was a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever ; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health as well as brevity. For it is plain, that every word we speak is in some degree a diminution of our lungs by corrosion, and consequently contributes to the shortening of our lives.
Page 47 - What is more, he proved that it is impossible to establish the internal logical consistency of a very large class of deductive systems — elementary arithmetic, for example — unless one adopts principles of reasoning so complex that their internal consistency is as open to doubt as that of the systems themselves.