Heart and Science: Forms of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century

Catalog description

C. P. Snow influentially argued in 1959 that a rift of methods and values divides scientists from literary intellectuals. But it didn’t always look that way. In this course, we will trace the mutual influences of science and literature in the nineteenth century. What kinds of knowledge does Romantic and Victorian literature make? Attending to representations of small scales of interiority as well as vast living systems, we will consider when and how novels and poems enfold the knowledge practices of ethics, biology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. We will also evaluate the consequences of recent accounts of the novel as information, and of critical efforts to forge methods for interdisciplinary scholarship.