Literature And Science

This article addresses the recent attempts to integrate evolutionary history in the US national narrative. Focusing on the cultural, legal, and scientific controversy over Kennewick Man, the ancient human remains discovered in Washington state in 1996, the article explores the narrative politics of American national belonging. Through a popular historical novel on Kennewick Man's life, the article further theorizes nostalgia as a narrative tool in imagining the evolutionary origins of the nation. The article argues that nostalgia produces a temporal dynamic that bridges the gap between national history and global prehistory, and that this dynamic is reinforced through cultural ideas of genetic knowledge. At the same time, prehistoric nostalgia renders problematic ideas of ethnic difference largely invisible.

In questo saggio viene approfondito il percorso di ricerca sulla semantica della felicità nell’opera leopardiana, i cui primi risultati sono apparsi in un precedente articolo (cfr. “Otto/Nove- cento”, n. 2/2017). Attraverso un metodo d’indagine di natura lessicografica si intende analizzare qui ulteriori reti concettuali legate al termine “felicità”, al fine di offrire un quadro più completo su una questione complessa ed estesa nel pensiero dell’autore. I risultati del lavoro investono principalmente tre macro-aree tematiche: il legame tra la felicità e il pensiero scientifico; il rapporto che l’autore istituisce tra il valore della felicità e le strutture sociali; il ruolo di alcuni principi matematici e artistici, in particolar modo la prospettiva, nella riconfigurazione della felicità proposta da Leopardi.

International conference. Trieste, Novembre, 13-15 2014
This conference aims at analyzing the history of Italy’s nuclear energy policies during the Cold War, by placing the Italian case in a comparative perspective and highlighting the importance of the international context in shaping the country’s specific experience. It builds upon a previous conference, organized by Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A and the University of Trieste in 2012 (Nuclear Energy in Italy after the Second World War: Research, Culture, Politics - http://www.elettra.trieste.it/Ippolito/). This conference proposes to examine the ways in which international politics and economics, technological and scientific exchanges, as well as social and cultural movements, influenced Italian nuclear energy policies, both civilian and military. Furthermore, it seeks to understand how the Italian case compares to other national histories, in Western and Eastern Europe, the U.S., Latin America, Asia and Africa.
With few important exceptions, the Italian case has largely remained on the margins of a growing scholarship on the history of nuclear energy. This conference intends to provide a venue for work-in- progress by junior and senior scholars, with the aim of consolidating a national and international research group on this topic. We are particularly interested in fostering an interdisciplinary dialogue and encourage papers that use a variety of approaches, such as history, science and technology studies, physics, engineering, political science, economics, international relations, anthropology, and geography.
Some of the issues that the conference will address are:
1. The ways in which the Cold War shaped Italian civilian and military nuclear policies.
2. The role public opinion, social and cultural groups, anti-nuclear and pro-nuclear movements, had in shaping Italian nuclear policies.
3. The ways in which an interdisciplinary approach such as that of Science and Technology Studies (STS) might provide a new understanding about the history of nuclear energy in Italy.

This conference is organized by Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A., the Department of Humanities of the University of Trieste, the Department of Political Sciences of the University of Roma Tre, and the Department of Documentary, Linguistic-Philological and Geographic Sciences of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”.
The working group responsible for the conference programme includes professors and researchers from the University of Trieste – Humanities Department; University of Roma Tre – Political Science Department; Machiavelli Center for Cold War Studies – CIMA; University of Rome “La Spaienza” - Physics Department and Departments for Documentary, Linguistic-Philological and Geographical Sciences; Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A.


Scientific Committee:
Giovanni Battimelli (University of Rome “La Sapienza”)
Elisabetta Bini (University of Trieste)
Igor Londero (Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A.)
Leopoldo Nuti (University of Roma Tre)
Giovanni Paoloni (University of Rome “La Sapienza”)
Carlo Rizzuto (Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A.)
Elisabetta Vezzosi (University of Trieste).


Organizing offices: Giulia Iannuzzi (University of Trieste)
Contacts: nuclearitaly@gmail.com
Web: www.elettra.eu/Conferences/2014/NuclearItaly

SP_AND_09_048-054. indd 48 12/3/09 5: 02: 13 PM lan Wade, David Buss, Daniel Goleman—all these writers must also have agents driving up prices in Miami and San Diego. But no one before Dutton has had anything like this kind of popular success with an evolutionary book in the humanities. The Gottschall and Wilson collection The Literary Animal (2005) was a success with critics outside the postmodern establishment—in scientific journals and the lay press—but was not a blockbuster at the box office.

Memoirs and Madness examines memoir as a literary genre, investigates the creation of Leonid Andreev's posthumous legacy by his contemporaries, and explores the possibility that Andreev, Russia's leading literary figure at the beginning of the twentieth century, suffered from mental illness. Frederick White's primary focus is A Book About Leonid Andreev (1922), the most important collection of memoirs dedicated to the Russian author, presented here in the first English translation. The agendas of the memoirists resulted in portraits that have influenced how Andreev is read and spoken about to the present day. White pays special attention to Andreev's history of mental illness, which the memoirists described with vague terms such as "creative energy" or "inner turmoil." Past scholarship has focused on philosophical and sociological factors in the author's life but this concentration on his mental health provides a fruitful approach to deciphering the literary portraits.

Early literary instances of artificial humanoid and intelligent systems anticipate in a general way the kinds of thematic issues that cyborgs, androids, and intelligent networks like supercomputers bring up for the contemporary notion of the posthuman, understood as a condition in which the human and the machine are becoming increasingly intermingled. Humans have never really been autonomous entities, but rather have always been intimately interdependent upon their environments and tools. And their dreams of intelligent tools even extend back into the era of ancient Rome and Greece, as I will describe below. Thus the seemingly modern idea of a reciprocal dependency upon mechanical devices is just a variation of a much older theme.

Mark Haddon’s Polar Bears (2010) and Nick Payne’s Constellations (2012) are two recent plays of the British stage exploring the minds of women suffering from a psychological or neurological disorder: in Haddon’s play, Kay, an artist, is bipolar; in Payne’s play, Marianne, a scientist, has a brain tumour. Both pieces question the protagonists’ freedom of self-determination and highlight our sense of reality as a construct, using poetic structures which break with the traditional dramatic linearity of the conventional play. Indeed, instead of providing a chronological succession of scenes, they allow the drama to emerge from a random alternation of parallel scenarios to be read as probabilities. The contradictory, disordered fragments that make up the plays thus invite the reader-spectator, in a suggestive way, to imagine the dramatic possibilities of a story which is never set or decided, instead of merely registering a given narrative. As a result, in providing structural metaphors for the female characters’ pathological states, these plays not only reflect on the tentative process of their own writing, they also encourage us to question our perception of reality as a unique object – a view contradicted by the paradigm shift of quantum physics. While Marianne explains the scientific theory that "In the quantum universe, every choice, every decision you’ve ever and never made exists in an unimaginable vast ensemble of parallel universes", Kay seems to experience Everett’s many-worlds interpretation from a first-person perspective, exclaiming, "We think there’s only one world. […] But there are so many worlds, aren’t there, one laid over the other. […] It’s so beautiful it makes me want to cry." This study aims to look at how these two plays, as instances of a “Theatre of Possibilities”, to use Jean-Pierre Sarrazac’s expression, explore mind and brain disorders to open a dramatic space which allows for a subversive form of realism to develop, based on the quantum principle of uncertainty. They resort to tropes – quantum principles and phenomena used as thematic and structural metaphors – as a means to portray our cognitive processes and, more specifically, to conjure up the hidden reality of pathological subjective experience, paralleled by the most mind-blowing theories of modern science. I argue that in Payne’s and Haddon’s plays, the dramatic space becomes a place where quantum descriptions of reality and psychopathological distortions of reality tend to converge to form a consistent landscape/mindscape, making room for theatrical realism to be reinvented from the very matter of what should intuitively appear as the most delusional imaginings.

--

Polar Bears de Mark Haddon (2010) et Constellations de Nick Payne (2012) sont deux pièces britanniques récentes qui explorent la psyché de personnages féminins souffrant soit d’un trouble psychiatrique soit d’une maladie neurologique : dans la pièce de Haddon, Kay, une artiste, est bipolaire ; dans la pièce de Payne, Marianne, une scientifique, déclare une tumeur cérébrale. En faisant dialoguer santé mentale, fonctionnement cognitif et mécanique quantique, les deux pièces interrogent la liberté et la capacité des protagonistes à s’autodéterminer malgré la maladie et, à travers la mise à mal des fonctions cognitives, mettent en lumière notre perception de la réalité comme construction subjective en utilisant des structures poétiques qui rompent avec la linéarité traditionnelle du drame conventionnel. En effet, au lieu de proposer un enchaînement chronologique de scènes déterminantes dont le déroulé crée progressivement l’univers de la fiction sur le mode indicatif, Polar Bears et Constellations se tissent toutes deux autour d’une alternance aléatoire de scénarios parallèles qui s’appréhendent sur un mode conditionnel comme autant de probabilités décrochées de la flèche du temps. Les fragments contradictoires et désordonnés qui les constituent invitent ainsi le lecteur-spectateur, par touches suggestives et non successives, à imaginer les possibilités d’une histoire sans résolution, qui n’est jamais fixée ou déterminée, au lieu d’enregistrer simplement les avancées d’un récit donné. Cet article vise à montrer que les hésitations et oscillations qui s’élaborent autour des états pathologiques des personnages féminins (et dont elles sont le résultat et le symptôme) mettent non seulement en abyme le processus même d’écriture (dimension métadramatique), elles nous encouragent également à interroger notre rapport au réel (dimension philosophique) non pas tant comme objet unique et extérieur au sujet qui l’observe, mais comme onde de probabilités ou écosystème d’états superposés dans lequel l’observateur lui-même joue un rôle déterminant. Ce changement de paradigme introduit par la physique quantique rencontre ainsi l’instabilité ou l’indécidabilité psychologique. Tandis que, dans Constellations, Marianne explique la théorie scientifique selon laquelle « dans l’univers quantique, chaque choix que l’on fait, chaque décision que l’on prend existe dans un ensemble infiniment vaste d’univers parallèles », dans Polar Bears Kay semble faire l’expérience directe, à la première personne, de la théorie des mondes multiples d’Everett (many-worlds interpretation) lorsqu’elle s’exclame, en proie à une phase maniaque : « On croit qu’il n’existe qu’un seul monde. […] Mais il existe tellement de mondes (so many worlds), n’est-ce pas, empilés les uns sur les autres. […] C’est si beau que ça me donne envie de pleurer. » Ce travail s’intéresse à la manière dont ces deux pièces illustrent ce que l’on pourrait appeler, avec Jean-Pierre Sarrazac, un « Théâtre des Possibilités » et explorent les maladies de l’esprit et du cerveau pour ouvrir un espace dramatique dans lequel se développe une forme subversive de réalisme postdramatique fondé sur le principe quantique d’incertitude (Heisenberg). Les tropes qui s’y déploient – principes et phénomènes quantiques utilisés comme métaphores thématiques et structurelles – permettent de rendre compte de nos processus cognitifs et, plus précisément, de la réalité cachée de l’expérience intime de la maladie, tout en mettant ces expériences en relation avec les théories les plus révolutionnaires de la science moderne. Chez Payne comme chez Haddon, l’espace dramatique devient le lieu où les descriptions quantiques et les distorsions psychopathologiques de la réalité tendent à converger pour former un paysage étonnamment cohérent dans sa relativité et permettre au réalisme théâtral de se refonder à partir de cela-même qui s’apparente intuitivement aux délires d’une imagination malade et à des dysfonctionnements cognitifs, pour finalement poser la question essentielle de notre libre-arbitre.

In the 19th century, a unique combination of scientific, social, political and cultural factors attracted crowds of visitors from all over the world to the Dolomite Mountains. This phenomenon had its epicenter in Fiemme Valley and in the town of Predazzo, where Michele Giacomelli and his family hosted a great number of these travelers in their hotel: the Nave d’Oro.
This book features a critical edition of the first manuscript volume of the guestbook of the hotel, the Memoriale (1820–1875): a document where countless characters intertwined their lives, jobs, works, and passions. A stratification of social and cultural contexts, languages and events which make this manuscript a precious source for understanding a crucial chapter in Italian and European history.

Este artículo estudia el papel que el saber científico desempeña en la obra narrativa de Javier Argüello. Para ello, se centra en la novela A propósito de Majorana (2015), si bien se tienen en cuenta sus textos anteriores, especialmente El mar de todos los muertos (2008). Ello supone trazar un recorrido por la figura del físico italiano Ettore Majorana y las hipótesis que diversos ensayos y textos literarios han alentado acerca de su misteriosa desaparición, que este artículo agrupa en tres grandes ramas. Además, se sintetizan cinco de las principales metáforas científicas que Argüello desarrolla en su obra. Una idea importante es que estas metáforas no solo se comentan temáticamente, sino que están implicadas estructural y formalmente en la obra a través de diversos recursos, así como condensadas en el mar como símbolo global.

In his 2006 novel Against the Day, set around the turn of the twentieth century, Thomas Pynchon renegotiates his relationship with modernism. His juxtaposition of postmodernism and modernism conforms to Timothy Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s account of metamodernism. De Bourcier reads the Kafkaesque story of Lew Basnight through Slavoj Žižek’s opposition between modernist absence and “The Obscene Object of Postmodernity.” The chapter examines Pynchon’s engagement with the technological contexts of modernism, focusing on his fictional inventions the Tesla device and the Integroscope, and deploying theorisations of technology by Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Kittler. It shows that Pynchon juxtaposes Divisionism—a school of painting influenced by scientific investigations into colour such as Ogden N. Rood’s Modern Chromatics—with Kit Traverse’s embroilment in Futurism and Fascism.

The paper attempts to reach at an understanding of the concepts of ‘science’ and ‘scientism’ as constructed and ideological concepts and how they contribute in shaping our commonsensical understanding of the body in terms of its relation to social identity and role. While attempting to expose modern science as a “constructed” discipline and ideology operating in tandem with the dominant hegemonic structures, the paper also attempts to briefly throw light on the limits of the current trend of interdisciplinary approaches and the concepts of “agency” and “critique” as well. Using a post-structuralist approach the paper therefore attempts not only to open-up the closed structures of both “science” and “scientism” but also to reach at an understanding how it goes on to affect questions of representation, reality, social and the body itself

In recent years, science has become a popular topic in British drama. Biology and physics are a source of new themes and metaphors, but also stimulate formal experimentation: this paper analyses Nick Payne’s Constellations (2012) as an attempt to derive new dramatic form from the hypotheses of quantum physics. Constellations draws on the Many Worlds Interpretation, in which an infinite amount of divergent universes are superposed but do not communicate: rather than a linear plot, the plays presents us with a series of variations on encounters between two lovers, corresponding to coexisting possibilities in the divergent universes. With an emphasis on paradigmatic superposition, the resulting dramatic syntax allows Payne to examine the themes of mortality and euthanasia from a fresh perspective, as the play enacts alternative conceptions of time and questions their consequences for the viewer.

In "Against Literary Darwinism," Jonathan Kramnick attacks a straw man version of literary Darwinism. His conceptual framework implies that biology is restricted to a few modular cognitive processes, like those for the autonomic nervous system, and that everything else in human experience derives from "culture" and "history." That false dichotomy displays a shallow understanding of biocultural theory, and indeed Kramnick's essay is generally under-informed and out of date.

By examining the trans-disciplinary neologisms called "terminological junctions" in writings of Arakawa and Gins, one may find adequate conditions for making visible, and perhaps resolving a central paradox in the thinking of Gilles Deleuze, who exhorts us to "forge alliances" across scientific percepts, philosophical concepts and artistic constructs, and yet denies the adequacy of metaphor specifically, and tropes generally, because of the taint of representation and transcendence. Drawing on my earlier work which emphasizes the "agency" of tropes (by reference to Peter Galison and Bruno Latour) I attempt to recuperate tropes from within a Deleuzean frame, through an analysis of of "terminological junctions" as "shocks of thought."

This article addresses the charge that the introduction of the electric light in the late nineteenth century increased disruptions to the human body's biological processes and interfered with the oscillating sleeping-waking cycle. By considering the nineteenth century research into the factors that motivate and disrupt sleep in concert with contemporary discussions of the physiology of street lighting, this article exposes how social and political forces shaped the impact of artificial light on sleep and, more perniciously, on bodily autonomy. As a close reading of artificial light in three influential dystopian novels building on these historical contexts demonstrates, dystopian fiction challenges the commonplace assumption that the advent of the electric light, or of widespread street lighting in public urban spaces, posed an immediate or inherent threat to sleep. Beginning with H. G. Wells's The Sleeper Awakes (1899), in which the eponymous sleeper emerges from a cataleptic trance into a future in which electric light and power are used to control the populace, representations of artificial light in early dystopian fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depict a nightmare of total illumination in which the state exerted its control over the individual. In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), constant artificial illumination plays a vital role in the chemical and behavioural conditioning undergone by individuals in a post-Fordian world. George Orwell intensifies this relationship between light and individual autonomy in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), where access to electric current (and thus light) is limited at certain times of the day, brownouts and electrical rationing occur intermittently, and total illumination is used to torture and reprogram individuals believed to have betrayed Big Brother.

Este artículo intenta reflexionar sobre los modos en que la ciencia y la tecnología ejercen su influencia sobre la literatura contemporánea, y cómo propician nuevas formas y estilos, aportan poderosas metáforas, y determinan y modifican los procesos de creación. La literatura  que abordase el presente con pretensión de “realismo científico” se aferraría excesivamente a las nociones reduccionistas proporcionadas por la “ciencia-mito” —la interpretación hipertélica tecno-comercial del conocimiento científico—, quedando despojada de su potencia especulativa y, por lo tanto, reduciendo su intensidad estética. El objetivo de este ensayo es resaltar la obra de algunos autores contemporáneos que van más allá del “realismo eliminativo” inspirado por la ciencia-mito y abren nuevos caminos de especulación en poesía y la narrativa.

Early in the twentieth century, Russia was experiencing a decadent period of cultural degeneration just as science was developing ways to identify medical conditions which supposedly reflected the health of the entire nation. Leonid Andreev, the leading literary figure of his time, stepped into the breach of this scientific discourse with literary works about degenerates. The spirited social debates on mental illness, morality and sexual deviance which resulted from these works became part of the ongoing battle over the definition and depiction of the irrational, complicated by Andreev’s own publicised bouts with neurasthenia.

This book examines the concept of pathology in Russia, the influence of European medical discourse, the development of Russian psychiatry, and the role that it had in popular culture, by investigating the life and works of Andreev. It engages the emergence of psychiatry and the role that art played in the development of this objective science.

The paper compares the manner in which early 19th-century modernism was translated by a poet, Dionysios Solomos, and a scientist, the military engineer Stamatis Voulgaris, first urban planner of modern Greece, during the administration of Ioannis Kapodistrias, time of intense nation-building. Comparison focuses on their spatial imageries (four-dimensional spatialities of speed and flows as opposed to Euclidean space), perceptions of nature, artistic influences, the fragmentation theme, contribution towards the infrastructural foundation of modern Greece, but also the critical incorporation of foreign loans and of the local tradition. An important premise is that Greek modernism was generated by an independent spirit feeding on the immensely captivating, age-long Mediterranean and Greek geographical unconscious, contacts, but also differences from the West.

Special Evolutionary Issue of the online journal Politics and Culture. Edited by Joseph Carroll.

http://politicsandculture.org/2010/04/28/contents-2/

27 essays organized under five headings: (1) The Evolutionary Turn in Psychology and the Humanities; (2) Politics and Ethics; (3) Religion; (4) Literature; and (5) music.

Also, a symposium on the question "How is art biological," with commentaries by seven scholars and with responses from various contributors to each of the commentaries.

This chapter explores the pursuit of knowledge in Pullman’s His Dark Materials, with a particular focus on scientific enquiry. This form of understanding represents a key epistemology in the series, although by no means the only one: other forms of knowledge – philosophical, poetic, sexual and so on – are also crucial to the narrative and often add nuance to the portrayals of science readers encounter. I explore the shifting ground Pullman covers, firstly by surveying the world of science in His Dark Materials; then by considering the key scientist figures (professional and amateur) in the trilogy and finally, by analysing the characterisation of Lyra and Will as natural enquirers. I suggest that the increasing importance of ‘connectedness’ can usefully be related to recent moves by some scientists to attempt a ‘theory of everything’.

Published in C. Butler and T. Halsdorf (eds.) Philip Pullman: a New Casebook (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) 58-75

La questione antropologica è sicuramente uno dei temi più dibattuti all'interno degli studi filosofici attorno all'opera di Primo Levi. L'obbiettivo del presente contributo è quello di offrire una lettura darwiniana del modo in cui lo scrittore torinese ha definito il complesso rapporto tra umano e non-umano. A mio parere, analizzare il pensiero antropologico di Levi a partire dalle tesi psicologico-evoluzioniste esposte da Darwin in The Descent of Man permette infatti di risolvere le contraddizioni e le aporie in cui sembrano cadere alcune interpretazioni post-umaniste e umaniste. L'ipotesi di un Primo Levi 'lettore di The Descent of Man' verrà qui indagata sia dal punto di vista filologico sia da quello argomentativo e concettuale.

While New Materialism and Object Oriented Ontology have provided frameworks to consider human relationships to nonhuman beings and objects in the twenty-first century, scientists and authors explored similar ethical dilemmas brought about by the newly identified presence of microorganisms in what had previously been imagined as a human world at the turn of the twentieth century. This essay considers Mark Twain's later fiction alongside contemporaneous American bacteriologist, Herbert W. Conn. Already invested in undermining human exceptionalism through scalar differences in his Mysterious Stranger manuscripts (1897-1908), Twain adapts Conn's bacteriology to experiment with microbial ethics in Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes (1905). While Conn uses microbes to assert scientific mastery and professional authority, Twain uses them to experiment with ethical structures on inhuman scales. This essay argues that the failures of Twain's imaginative experiment dramatize the practical challenges to radically inclusive ethical structures proposed by New Materialists and others.

Unlike nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, which tends to fixate on the past, the haunted and the ghostly, early weird fiction probes the very boundaries of reality - the laws and limits of time, space and matter. Here, unimaginable terrors lurk in hitherto unknown mirror dimensions, calamities in ultra-space threaten to wipe clean all evidence of our universe and experiments in non-Euclidean geometry lead to sickening consequences.

In twelve speculative tales of our universe's mathematics and physics gone awry, this new anthology presents an abundance of curiosities - and terrors - with stories from Jorge Luis Borges, Miriam Allen deFord, Frank Belknap Long and Algernon Blackwood

Abstract Over the past forty years or so, the evolutionary human sciences have gradually developed a good working model of human nature. That model includes basic emotions and basic motives such as survival, mating, parenting, favoring kin, and acting as members of a social group. Cognitive and social adaptations include the capacity for envisioning the perspectives of other people. Meaning in fiction can be located in the interplay of perspectives among authors, characters, and readers.

In this seminar course, we will closely read four of Cormac McCarthy’s novels: Child of God, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, and The Road.
We will explore these four novels by Cormac McCarthy, engaging in close reading of the texts and exploring their aesthetic, ethical and metaphysical dimensions. Issues covered include:
• violence and the problem of evil
• the role of frontier mythology in American self-identity
• nature, naturalism and science as they relate to the metaphysics of fictional worlds and characters situated within them
• determinism and free will
• the relationship between a literary style and its content.
At the end of the course, you will have a greater understanding of the work of one of the major figures in contemporary literature and how his literary concerns reflect broader currents in contemporary literature, the history of American literature, and the wider cultural sphere. You will be better able to engage in the transferable skills of close reading and critical thinking, thus complementing your core courses in English and contributing to your general Arts education. You will also have learned how to turn your experience of a collective and discursive engagement with works of literature into lucid, persuasive and independent arguments, both verbal and written.

In this Science-Fiction Prototyping article, I present an imaginative forward look at how artificial intelligence and virtual environments might change the nature of future education. The discussion is intended to be a somewhat speculative and thought provoking journey into what may be possible. At its root, it imagines a future time when the technological singularity has been reached, and machine intelligence and interaction is equal or surpasses that of people. I do this by means of a fictional reflection on how life might be in the future, a set of four small vignettes and a discussion of the factual research inspiring these views.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt setze sich als Schriftsteller intensiv mit den moder-nen Naturwissenschaften auseinander. Das Bild der Naturwissenschaften, wie es uns aus Dürrenmatts Werk entgegentritt, ist ambivalent. Es gibt Aspekte, die der Autor bejaht und sowohl poetologisch wie literarisch transponiert. Es gibt Aspekte, die er ablehnt, die er überzeichnet, um im Kontrast das Eigentümliche literarischer Weltdarstellung klarer zu fassen. Die Landkarte dieser Aneignung/Abgrenzung möchte der folgende Beitrag skizzieren.

This book examines literary representations of human and non-human animality in British Romanticism, a period in which scientific, political, and industrial revolutions radically transformed the status of the human and redefined the concept of species. Its novel approach lies in its focus on the role that aesthetic taste played in the Romantic understanding of the animal. Concentrating on the discourses of the sublime, the beautiful, and the ugly, Heymans argues that the Romantics’ aesthetic views of animality influenced and were influenced by their moral, scientific, political, and theological judgment. He shows how feelings of environmental alienation and disgust played a positive moral role in animal rights poetry, why ugliness presented such a major problem for Romantic-period scientists and theologians, and how in political writings the violent yet awe-inspiring power of exotic species came to symbolize the beauty and terror of the French Revolution. Linking the works of Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Byron, the Shelleys, Erasmus Darwin, and William Paley to the theories of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, this book reveals the importance of animality in the Romantic imagination as well as the crucial role of the aesthetic in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conceptions of species. Its wide-ranging investigation of the problematic relationship between beauty, truth, morality, and biology brings an original and fascinating perspective to the fields of ecocriticism, animal studies, and literature and science studies.

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415507301/


CONTENTS


Introduction: The Aesthetics of Species


Part 1

1. The Environmental Ethics of Alienation: The Ecological Sublime
2. Green Masochism: Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
3. Hunting for Pleasure: Wordsworth’s Ecofeminism


Part 2

4. Humans and Other Moving Things: Wordsworth Visits London (with Deleuze and Guattari)
5. The Cute and the Cruel: Taste, Animality and Sexual Violence in Burke and Blake
6. A Problem of Waste Management: Frankenstein and the Visual Order of Things


Part 3

7. Revelation, Reason, Ridicule: The Scientific Sublime
8. A Taste of God: Natural Theology and the Aesthetics of Intelligent Design
9. Beauty with a Past: Evolutionary Aesthetics in Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature""