Science and Literature: Science and the Literary Imagination
Session Coordinator: James Wynn
Dept. of English, University of Maryland
3101 Susquehanna Hall, College Park, MD 20742
jiwynn@hotmail.com

What's Love Got to Do with It?  A.R. Ammons, Leslie Scalapino and Chaotic Poetics

In this essay, I argue that contemporary American poets who turn to chaos theory in their work do so because it enables them to utilize the structural heterogeneity of free verse without relinquishing Romantic constructions of a private, inward, voice-based self.   I assert that chaos theory enables poets to mediate between two key antithetical impulses in contemporary poetry: the desire to re-affirm meta-narratives, including that of inward subjectivity, and a "postmodern" skepticism of epistemological certainty and referential closure.  Unlike the radical alterity of quantum mechanics, chaos theory, as a classical paradigm, enables poets like A.R. Ammons to preserve a strong "subjectivity effect" in his work while simultaneously engaging in what N. Katherine Hayles calls, in Chaos Bound, an "interrogation of globalized forms and rationalized structures" (290).  At the other end of what I assert is a shared continuum of chaotic poetics lies Leslie Scalapino, whose work challenges the ontological validity of those western binaries (mind/body, self/other, internal/ external) that Ammons seeks to complicate but not refute.  By examining the ways in which chaos theory functions very differently in the work of A.R. Ammons and Leslie Scalapino, this essay facilitates both a rigorous internalist reading of their respective work at the same time that it enables us to better interrogate the alignment of poets with particular aesthetic schools.

Jocelyn Emerson
Boston University
emersonj@bu.edu

New Paradigms, New Spaces: Nineteenth-Century Non-Euclidean Geometry and Charles Howard Hinton’s Fourth Dimension

In my paper, I explore the shift in mathematical thinking that was underway in the West from the end of the nineteenth century until around 1912. I propose that this shift in thought from Euclidean, three-dimensional plane geometry literally opened up a ‘new space’ for thought, and in popular writings that space took on the ‘shape’ of what Charles Howard Hinton and his followers called the fourth dimension. Many of Hinton's ‘scientific romances’ can be read as allegories for the development of a new way of viewing the world. The world that was revealed by this new way of seeing was a complex whole that was only accessible through a shifting multiplicity of fragmentary views. In my examination of Hinton’s early work, I use Ernst Cassirer’s work on language and myth as well as the reader-response theory of Wolfgang Iser. I argue that Hinton's writings form a set of ‘instructions’ to engender development higher space intuition within his readers. This higher space was seen as the infinitude of space and time; Hinton experimented with accessing it through empirical spatial awareness and what he described to William James as the study of fixed things via a moving consciousness.

Science Begotten: H.G. Wells, Evolution, and Fantasia

In H.G. Wells’ novel Star Begotten: A Biological Fantasia, Wells’ spins the tale of a man who becomes convinced that mankind is evolving into a superior race of aliens created by Martians using cosmic rays. Throughout the novel, Wells’ draws on theories of biological evolution for imagining social and historical evolution in humankind. He believes that biological evolution is a force for progress which will inevitably alter humankind into a more rational and, therefore, more moral social being.

Despite Wells’ confidence in the scientific basis for his claim, he still requires his literary whit to provide answers to questions which dog his hypothesis. What is the source of mutation? How do we know that the mutation will affect an advance in human society? The answers come from Mars. Martians using cosmic rays alter human chromosomes so that they will produce a breed of genetically superior humans. In this way, the Martians can perpetuate the technology and learning of their race which is dying out. By mixing science and fiction, Wells is able to present his reader with a vision of social advancement while at the same time dodging questions about the actual sources and mechanisms of social change.

James Wynn
University of Maryland
jiwynn@hotmail.com

The Threatened Limit Technology and the Abject

In my paper I discuss the roll of technology in both the repression and irruption of the abject in Cortazar’s short story “Las Babas del Diablo” and Nakata’s film Ring. In these texts the subject uses technology to rigorously define/defend its identity, but the subject’s uncertain relationship with this technology leaves her/him susceptible to the unnamable chaos of the abject.

To develop this idea, I use Zizek’s theory of postmodern technology. While modernist technology is characterized by an intimate connection between machine and operator the relationship becomes more opaque as technology advances. Rather than direct control over the machine’s rationality, the operator’s roll is reduced to one of “naïve trust.” Postmodern technology is such that there is no mastery of the machine but rather an assumption of authority.

I argue that the abject exploits this gap between operator and machine, using the “naïve faith” of the operator as means for a violent, fantastic irruption within the rigidly ordered space of the protagonist. Instead of a single, authoritative voice that supports the symbolic order, the machine’s return is uncertain, polymorphous and the subject loses the stable world of objects against which it defined itself.

Jillian Sayre
University of Texas, Austin
jilliansayre@mail.utexas.edu