Read more
The topic of "the two cultures" has been with us since the debates between Matthew Arnold and Thomas Huxley in the nineteenth century, and was renewed in the controversies between C.P. Snow and F.R. Leavis in the 1960s. More recently, Snow's notion of a possible "third culture" in which the literary and the scientific culture interact has been explored in new ways by theorists on both sides of the divide, seeking a terminology and set of procedures to investigate the common "cultural field".
The topics explored, using a range of European examples drawn from the period Romanticism to Post-Modernism, include the ideology of 'nature' which still informs both scientific and humanistic investigations and discussions; the creative process or serendipity in science and art; proper and improper analogies between the disciplines; modes of perception and experimental inquiry; the use of figures, images, and narrative forms in science;
List of contents
Frontmatter -- Introduction: The Third Culture - Negotiating the 'two cultures' -- Theoretical Approaches -- Has Nature a Future? -- Serendipity in Poetry and Physics -- Sense and Nonsense of Chaos Theory in Literary Studies -- Romanticism -- Goethe and the Language of Science -- The Aesthetics of Magnetism: Science, Philosophy and Poetry in the Dialogue Between Goethe and Schelling -- "Hollin's Liebeleben": Arnim's Transmutation of Science into Literature -- Novalis, Ritter and 'Experiment': A Tradition of 'Active Empiricism' -- The Death of The Poet: Coleridge and the Science of Logic -- Mont Blanc's Mysterious Voice: Shelley and Huttonian Earth Science -- Writing Medical Identities 1780-1820 -- Modernism and Post-Modernism -- Chemical Solutions: Scientific Paradigms in Nietzsche and Proust -- Beyond All Certainty: Wittgenstein and Turing: An Account of a Philosophical Dialogue on Skill and Technology -- Natural History: The Retro-Victorian Novel -- "The World Before Eyes": Calvin, Barthes and Science -- Bibliography -- Figures and Illustrations -- Notes on Contributors -- Index -- Backmatter
