Chemistry and Literature

Catalog description

This pedagogically innovative course will be team taught by an instructor from the English department and one from the Chemistry department. Both instructors will be present in the classroom throughout the semester, providing joint presentations and leading discussions. The integration of humanities and natural sciences domain content will encourage students from humanities and natural science backgrounds, as well as other interested students, to take the course and learn how to integrate these two domains of knowledge in their education and their lives after leaving Penn State. This course teaches both basic concepts of chemistry and their cultural elaboration in literature, and it models a critical assessment of the implications of chemistry and literature emerging from a shared cultural field, rather than autonomously from two separate cultures. The course seeks to provide students with a nuanced understanding of how literature and science inform each other and negotiate cultural, religious, and political tensions. Understanding the origin and development of these ideas, perspectives, and discoveries is an essential component of science and scientific achievement, but too often our methods of teaching science focus almost exclusively on teaching facts and theories at the expense of the historical discovery, creation, and development of those facts and theories. This courses teaches both the scientific facts and theories and the contexts of their production in order to sharpen students' abilities at critical evaluation of facts. The literary and scientific focus will vary from class to class, but may include writings by literary authors such as Mary Shelley, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Bram Stoker, H. G. Wells, Garrett Serviss, Aldous Huxley, Roald Hoffmann, Carl Djerassi, Don DeLillo, William Butler Yeats, Arthur Machen, D.H. Lawrence, A. E. Waite, Aleister Crowley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Camille Flammarion, and Rachel Carson, and scientific texts by scientists such as T.H. Huxley, William Crookes, William Ramsay, Frederick Soddy, Ernest Rutherford, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, Henri Bequerel, J.J. Thomson, Niels Bohr, and Marie Curie. Key concepts of environmental chemistry. The specific focus of this class will vary from class to class, but all sections will spend approximately 40% of the class on units specifically devoted to key concepts in basic chemistry, 40% of the class on literary interpretations of and influences upon concepts in chemistry in specific historical periods, and 20% of the class on significant methods of theorizing the boundaries between and interrelationships of science and culture., and on the concept of the "culture of science." However, these subjects will be interwoven throughout the semester. Indeed, the pedagogy of the course depends upon the literature and the science not being neatly separated from each other. Instead, students will learn up-to-date science while exploring the origins, development, and cultural dimensions of that science, and will learn to integrate their understanding of the domains of science and the humanities through the course. The course will be offered once every year with approximately 20-35 seats per offering.