Literature and Science

Catalog description

This course tracks the imaginative potentials, social repercussions, and interdisciplinary mixing of literature and science since the emergence of empiricism in the sixteenth century. Well before literature and science divided into "two cultures." they supplied a fruitful crossover for ideas about how and why the world works and how we gain new knowledge. Even with the development of modern disciplines, literature plays an important role in cultural assessments of scientific discovery and education. Students will read a selection of works from literary as well as scientific writers, analyzing texts and historical contexts and producing written arguments within an interdisciplinary framework.