American Literature and Science PDF
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AMERICAN liTERATURE AND SCIENCE This page intentionally left blank AMERICAN LITERATURE SCIENCE AND Robert j. Scholnick Editor THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Copyright © 1992 by The University Press of Kentucky Paperback edition 2010 The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover as follows: American literature and science I Robert J. Scholnick, editor. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8131-1785-2 (alk. paper) 1. American literature-History and criticism. 2. Literature and science United States. 3. Science in literature. I. Scholnick, Robert J. PS169.S413A8 1992 810.9'356-dc20 92-373 ISBN 13-978-0-8131-9341-0 (pbk.: alk. paper) This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials. Manufactured in the United States of America. ~···,·~ Member of the Association of 'I&! • American University Presses Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 Permeable Boundaries: Literature and Science in America RoBERT J. ScHOLNICK 1 2 "This Brazen Serpent Is a Doctors Shop": Edward Taylor's Medical Vision CATHERINE RAINWATER 18 3 Benjamin Franklin: The Fusion of Science and Letters A. OWEN ALDRIOOE 39 4 Thomas Jefferson JosEPH W. SLADE 58 5 An Intrinsic Luminosity: Poe's Use of Platonic and Newtonian Optics WILLIAM J. ScHEICK 77 6 Fields of Investigation: Emerson and Natural History DAVID M. RoBINSON 94 7 Thoreau and Science RoBERT D. RICHARDSON, }R. 110 8 (Pseudo-) Scientific Humor juDITH YAROSS LEE 128 9 Traveling in Time with Mark Twain H. BRUCE FRANKLIN 157 10 Hart Crane and John Dos Passos JosEPH W. SLADE 172 11 Fields of Spacetime and the "I" in Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems STEVEN CARTER 194 12 "Unfurrowing the Mind's Plowshare": Fiction in a Cybernetic Age DAVID PoRUSH 209 13 Turbulence in Literature and Science: Questions of Influence N. KATHERINE HAYLES 229 Bibliography: American Literature and Science through 1989 ROBERT S. ScHOLNICK 251 Contributors 273 Index 275 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments I am especially grateful to the contributors to this volume for their patience, support, and many valuable suggestions, from inception to completion. My William and Mary colleagues Scott Donaldson, Elsa Nettles, Christopher MacGowan, Robert Gross, Carl Dolmetsch, and Thad Tate read portions of the manuscript and offered pointed and pertinent observations. The anonymous readers of the manuscript for the University Press of Kentucky showed me how to strengthen the project in many ways. My work on this and related studies has been supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, for which I am most grateful. I have benefited in many ways from the generous support for faculty scholarship from the College of William and Mary. Wanda Carter, who oversees the graduate studies office at William and Mary, took time to provide much,needed assistance. My son Jonathan graciously listened to my discussions of literature and science during several long automobile trips-and in more ways than one kept me awake with his comments. Joshua Scholnick, Amy Napier, and Mary Kate McMaster provided crucial assistance with the bibliography. As with all my projects, my wife, Sylvia Scholnick, combined the most searching criticism of my work with the most powerful love. This book is dedicated to my parents, Ruth and Allen Scholnick, and the blessed memory of my wife's parents, Ken and Berniece Huberman, who became my parents also. This page intentionally left blank 1 Permeable Boundaries: Literature and Science in America ROBERT j. SCHOLNICK Reaching back to the Puritan poet Edward Taylor and forward to the contemporary novelist Thomas Pynchon, this collection of original essays explores the relationship in American culture between literature and science. These two ways of knowing are often thought to be unrelated, if not actually antagonistic. Through analyses of the ways that such writers as Franklin, Jefferson, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Hart Crane, Dos Passos, and Charles Olson have understood the sciences and explored them in their work as essential and powerful methods of knowing and changing the world, these essays seek to comprehend how literature and science have evolved together in American culture. Over the more than three and a half centuries of American literature the modes of investigation that we now include under the heading "sci ence" have changed radically, as has "literature." Up through the begin ning of the nineteenth century, literature and science were understood as parts of a unitary endeavor, but by mid-century they had diverged. Science became the province of the professional, while concurrently poets, novel ists, and other imaginative writers asserted the autonomy of their art. Despite moving in different directions, science and literature have con tinued to speak with one another in ways that have helped to shape each. Focusing on the languages that writers have used to explore the inter penetrating realms of science and literature, this collection seeks to open for wider analysis a neglected dimension of American culture. We undertake this inquiry at a time when the familiar understanding of science as an objective, systematic, progressive, and transcultural means of investigating reality has come under increasing attack from several quarters. Historians have learned to approach science as only one among other social constructs, and so the subject has been opened to the sort of
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