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In this seminar, we will explore how literature and the natural sciences shape each other. First, we will establish a general overview of the field Literature and Science and the discussion of the idea of the Two Cultures. After this introduction, we will investigate how literature and poetry narrate and convey scientific information, and how scientific experiments and innovations can shape literary fiction. Exemplary works of literature span from Romantic poetry (the description of scientific discoveries by John Keats, for instance) to contemporary works of fiction such as Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. However, we will also reverse this approach, and look at how narrative structure and literary devices (such as metaphor and analogy) influence scientific texts, including science books and academic journal articles. Gillian Beer’s analysis of Darwin’s Plots is one of the exemplary texts in this approach.
The reading material will be available in our Moodle course soon.
For students who wish to write a term paper in this course, a “Bib-Schein” is mandatory: https://www.uni-due.de/ub/abisz/schein.shtml
Writing Assignments: Complete all three writing assignments. They will be the central part of our seminar conversation for the day. We will also use your texts to talk about language, paragraph composition, and writing strategies. You’re required to upload your assignment on the respective date, whether you attend the seminar or not. Post your writing assignment (as text) in the corresponding Moodle forum before the seminar session (please do not upload a file). |
