Literatur- und Naturwissenschaften

In the Middle Ages and early modernity, celestial observation was frequently a subject for verbal rather than numerical and geometrical recording. These records can now be difficult to decode, since what they address is frequently obscured by formal conventions of genre, imagery, rhetoric, prosody, to name but a few. The volume collects essays exploring such configurations between literature and observation from Europe to China.

How, contributors ask, were verbal representations of celestial phenomena encoded and self-consciously placed vis-à-vis other systems of representation and knowledge? What kinds of data are represented, and what are the modes in which they are communicated? What interpretational problems arise when present-day disciplines like climatology, meteorology, geophysics, and astronomy, but also literary studies, try to access them? How were discourses on religion, law, anthropology, aesthetics, colonialism etc. linked, in and through their verbal presentation, with astronomical observation and knowledge? How did individual scholars, texts, and concepts travel between European and non-European cultures, both in space and in time, and which constructions of self and other arose in the process?

This volume establishes theoretical and methodological principles on the relationship between literature and science. It combines approaches from the fields of cultural semiotics, narratology, and the philosophy of science, and supplements the range of existing approaches toward the nexus of literature and knowledge with a new approach, that of interformation, informed by semiotic and narrative theory, and reflecting on the theory of physics.

Quantum mechanics and Brecht’s “epic theater” contemporaneously shattered the paradigm of detached observation. In two fields, assumptions were cast in doubt regarding the continuity and strict causality of the investigated processes and the singularity and identity of the observed objects. Brecht drew far-reaching aesthetic and ethical inferences from the reconceptualization of the atom and individual and their epistemological relationship.

This volume examines the significance of the analogy at the intersection between science and aesthetics around 1800. To do so, it analyzes the analogy’s mathematical and rhetorical origins in antiquity and uses them as a starting point to trace its return in modernity, where it built new bridges as a mediating figure between seemingly incompatible systems of difference.

The book examines the work of Daniel Kehlmann, Daniele del Giudice, and Michel Serres to show how writers’ reception of science has engendered a literary epistemology and history of science in the spirit of a poetica scientiae. This new approach subjects questions that science has kept unasked, open, or stifled to meticulous and often surprising ruminations, providing science with a corrective through poetics and hermeneutics.

The 18^th century witnessed diverse interactions between literature and natural science. Literary texts developed scientific themes, while scientific discourse employed literary techniques. Using representative case studies, this volume examines paradigms and transitions in the history of science (mechanics, geography, botany, chemistry/alchemy) and ways of writing and communicating (the Muses’ Almanac, didactic poetry, encyclopedias, etc.).

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, language and linguistic reflections were a central determinant of the discursive relationship between mathematics, physics, logic, and literature. The volume traces these constellations, examining linguistic, technical, and poetological texts to reveal the close connections between the language of literature, poetology, and scientific discourse.

Physics and Literature is a unique collaboration between physicists, literary scholars, and philosophers, the first collection of essays to examine together how science and literature, beneath their practical differences, share core dimensions – forms of questioning, thinking, discovering and communicating insights.This book advances an in-depth exploration of relations between physics and literature from both perspectives. It turns around the tendency to discuss relations between literature and science in one-sided and polarizing ways. The collection is the result of the inaugural conference of ELINAS, the Erlangen Center for Literature and Natural Science, an initiative dedicated to building bridges between literary and scientific research. ELINAS revitalizes discussion of science-literature interconnections with new topics, ideas and angles, by organizing genuine dialogue among participants across disciplinary lines.
The essays explore how scientific thought and practices are conditioned by narrative and genre, fiction, models and metaphors, and how science in turn feeds into the meaning-making of literary and philosophical texts. These interdisciplinary encounters enrich reflections on epistemology, cognition and aesthetics.

Issues and insights from the fields of brain research, quantum mechanics, and evolutionary theory have passed into novels, and physicists and biologists often use rhetorical metaphors to communicate and even evoke their discoveries. The essays in this volume examine natural scientific themes in literary texts – such as the novels of Richard Powers, Can Hue, and Raoul Schrott – and the use of rhetoric and metaphor in the natural sciences.

Physics and literature are two forms of knowing the world that are both complementary and contingent. Poetical-physical ways of writing and metaphors in physical theories are two sides of a coin. Interviews with Ulrike Draesner, Durs Grünbein, Michael Hampe, Jens Harder, Reinhard Jirgl, Thomas Lehr, Ulrich Woelk, and Juli Zeh enrich our knowledge of these two cultures through voices familiar with both sides.