Abstract
This chapter introduces a number of debates around the two cultures divide, with the primary argument being that a period of dynamic change in the sciences has produced an unprecedented self-critical turn in the novel. It defines the ‘third culture novel’ as a new strand of contemporary fiction which engages with the implications of the newest sciences in a number of ways. These include: researching and relaying information gleaned from scientific publications; challenging or promoting ideas presented by science writers; exploring the moral implications of these ideas; and testing the limits and capabilities of the novel in relation to scientific discourse. The introduction uses the work of Isabelle Stengers and Stephen Jay Gould to draw attention to the difference between the practices of science, and what happens to science when it is removed from those practices and becomes a subject that is being relayed or discussed in some way.
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Notes
- 1.
M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”, in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 269–422 (p. 292).
- 2.
Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”, 351.
- 3.
Notable exceptions to this trend include Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries (1997), David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999) and Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y (2007), novels which all draw relativizing conclusions from the discoveries of quantum mechanics, and which will be discussed further in the conclusion.
- 4.
Dominic Head, Ian McEwan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 5.
- 5.
David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (London: Penguin, 2010) provides some interesting comparisons in this context. Shields expresses frustration at what he terms the ‘predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless’ nature of literature that follows a fictional model (p. 118). He advocates the blurring of the lines between fiction and non-fiction in order to better represent the nature of the contemporary world. Shields is not particularly interested in scientific conceptions of reality, but he shares with third culture novel a desire to make literature more real, albeit through a different set of processes and priorities.
- 6.
Stefan Collini, “Introduction” to C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), para 4. ACLS Humanities ebook.
- 7.
John Cartwright and Brian Baker, Literature and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 265.
- 8.
Patricia Waugh, “Revising the Two Cultures Debate: Science, Literature, and Value”, in The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, ed. David Fuller and Patricia Waugh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 33–59 (p. 34).
- 9.
Brian Cox in The Guardian Weekend Magazine, 11 October 2014, p. 12.
- 10.
“Humanists UK”, https://humanism.org.uk/, accessed 19 November 2014.
- 11.
The phrase is taken from the title of Dawkins’ 2011 book which aims to inform youngsters of the scientifically observable facts underlying phenomena which have previously been explained in mythical terms. Dawkins also preaches about the wonder he finds in science in his 1998 book, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, whose title is intended to serve as a rebuff to Keats’s claim in his 1820 poem “Lamia” that science, under its commonly used title of the time ‘philosophy’, will destroy the ‘mysteries’ of the natural world.
- 12.
Alan Sokal, Beyond the Hoax (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xi.
- 13.
“IFL Science”, https://www.facebook.com/IFeakingLoveScience?hc_location=timeline, accessed 21 November 2014.
- 14.
Sharon Ruston, “Introduction” to Literature and Science, ed. Sharon Ruston (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 1–12 (p. 6).
- 15.
Patricia Waugh, “Science and Fiction in the 1990s”, in British Fiction of the 1990s, ed. Nick Bentley (London: Routledge, 2005), 57–77 (p. 62).
- 16.
Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate, The New Atheist Novel: Fiction Philosophy and Polemic After 9/11 (London: Continuum, 2010), 11.
- 17.
Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 25.
- 18.
Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending and Minding the Misconceived Gap Between Science and the Humanities (London: Vintage, 2004), 193.
- 19.
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (London: Abacus, 2001), 9, 88.
- 20.
Gould, 243.
- 21.
Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre”, trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 55–81 (p. 65).
- 22.
Richard Rorty, The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
- 23.
“Edge”, edge.org, accessed 25 November 2014.
- 24.
John Brockman, The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 21.
- 25.
Brockman, 19.
- 26.
Brockman, 25.
- 27.
Martin Willis, for example, referring to the Arnold/Huxley debate in the late nineteenth century, suggests that ‘from a twenty-first century perspective Huxley’s efforts to claim authority for science over literature seem entirely moot’. In Martin Willis, Literature and Science (London: Palgrave, 2015), 36.
- 28.
The quote is from Derrida’s De la Grammatologie, originally published in French in 1967. In her 1976 translation to English, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak chose the term ‘There is nothing outside of the text’ to capture Derrida’s meaning, even though the literal translation is closer to ‘there is no outside-text’. This slippage of meaning, despite being fitting when one considers the central tenets of Derrida’s thought, which stress the deferment and difference which characterize the operation of language, highlights the ways in which a certain strain of poststructuralism came to stand, in a way which was often over-simplified, for theory as a whole. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 158.
- 29.
Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1968), 39.
- 30.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), 387.
- 31.
Michael Greaney, Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory: The Novel from Structuralism to Postmodernism (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 160.
- 32.
Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, “Towards a Speculative Philosophy”, in The Speculative Turn: Continental and Material Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 1–18 (p. 3).
- 33.
Patricia Waugh, “Science and Fiction in the 1990s”, 58.
- 34.
Jonathan Franzen, “Why Bother?”, in How to Be Alone (London: Harper Perennial, 2002), 55–97 (pp. 65–66).
- 35.
Jonathan Franzen quoted in The Telegraph, 29 January 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9047981/Jonathan-Franzen-e-books-are-damaging-society.html, accessed 8 November 2014.
- 36.
For a balanced and detailed study of this complex cultural phenomenon, see William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1996).
- 37.
Peter Childs, Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970, second edition (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 13.
- 38.
Dominic Head, The State of the Novel: Britain and Beyond (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 9, 12.
- 39.
Jago Morrison, Contemporary Fiction (London: Routledge, 2003), 5. Taylor and Francis e-Library. Richard Bradford, The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 247.
- 40.
Rod Mengham, An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 1.
- 41.
Martin Willis, Literature and Science (London: Palgrave, 2015), 32, 52.
- 42.
Daniel Cordle, States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism and United States Fiction and Prose (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 2. A valuable and thorough bibliography of ‘primary and critical texts, which interrogate cultural interactions with science, from the early modern period onwards’ can be found on the web pages of the University of South Wales’ Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science, http://literatureandscience.research.southwales.ac.uk/bibliography/bibliography/, last accessed 27 April 2015.
- 43.
Michael H. Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1, 3. Gillian Beer has made a similar argument, suggesting that ‘the new physics was just as modernist as literary fiction’, resulting mainly from the fact that scientific paradigms became destabilized in the period and had to be rethought. Gillian Beer, in Martin Willis, Literature and Science, 123.
- 44.
See her Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) and her edited collection entitled Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
- 45.
Sharon Ruston, “Introduction” to Literature and Science, 11.
- 46.
For Levine, ‘science is as social as literature […] it is in large part culturally defined’. George Levine, “Epilogue”, in One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, ed. George Levine (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 339–342 (p. 339).
- 47.
E. S. Shaffer, “Introduction: The Third Culture—Negotiating the ‘Two Cultures”, in The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor S. Shaffer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), 1–12, (pp. 2, 6).
- 48.
Chapter 3 on the postneuronovel will outline this criticism in detail.
- 49.
T. J. Lustig and James Peacock, “Introduction”, in Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome, ed. T. J. Lustig and James Peacock (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1–16 (p. 9). MyiLibrary eBook.
Bibliography
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Bradford, Richard. 2007. The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bradley, Arthur, and Andrew Tate. 2010. The New Atheist Novel: Fiction Philosophy and Polemic After 9/11. London: Continuum.
Brockman, John. 1995. The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. 2011. Towards a Speculative Philosophy. In The Speculative Turn: Continental and Material Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, 1–18. Melbourne: re.press.
Cartwright, John, and Brian Baker. 2005. Literature and Science: Social Impact and Interaction. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.
Childs, Peter. 2012. Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970, second edition. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cordle, Daniel. 2008. States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism and United States Fiction and Prose. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Cox, Brian. 2014. The Guardian Weekend Magazine, October 11.
Derrida, Jacques. 1980. The Law of Genre. Trans. Avital Ronell. Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1: 55–81.
Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Edge. 2014. https://www.edge.org/. Accessed 25 November 2014.
Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage.
Franzen, Jonathan. 2002. How to Be Alone. London: Harper Perennial.
Franzen, Jonathan. 2012. The Telegraph, January 29. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/9047981/Jonathan-Franzen-e-books-are-damaging-society.html. Accessed 8 November 2014.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 2004. The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending and Minding the Misconceived Gap Between Science and the Humanities. London: Vintage.
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Wilson, Edward O. 2001. Consilience. London: Abacus.
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Holland, R. (2019). Introduction. In: Contemporary Fiction and Science from Amis to McEwan. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16375-4_1
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