3 Credits
Professor Calloway
MWF 11:50am-12:40 pm
Cross-listed with ENGL 390AX

Literature and science seem unlikely bedfellows: their respective departments sit safely across campus from each other, and some students major in one in order to avoid the other. But scientific theories and inventions, and scientists themselves, often crop up in Western imaginative literature— in fact, some of our most remarkable and historically significant literary works engage science. Conversely, many scientific developments, such as space travel, had to be imagined in fiction before scientists could begin to develop them.  In this class, we will consider several questions:

• What picture of science is painted in works of literature?  How does this picture change over historical time and from author to author? 
• Is it possible for literature to intervene in, or contribute to, the course of science?
• When a literary text demonstrates hostility to science, what kind of science is being challenged?  And is that challenge fair?  and
• How does the distinction between narrative and science begin to dissolve when science, too, tells us who we are and where we came from? 

We will read across several centuries and genres, beginning with selections from John Milton’s early modern epic, Paradise Lost, which forever reshapes the literary cosmos.  In the Victorian period we will read shorter stories that reckon with evolution and animal experimentation, as well as selections from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which (among other things) brilliantly characterizes the ideal experimental scientist. In considering science in twentieth-century fiction, we will devote significant energy to detective fiction and will watch one episode of a contemporary criminal investigation television show.

Texts may include:

• Milton, John.  Paradise Lost.  Dover Thrift Edition, 2005. 
• Wells, H.G.  The Island of Dr. Moreau.  Phoenix Pick, 2008.
• Eliot, George.  Middlemarch.  Oxford World Classics, 2008.
• Sayers, Dorothy.  Whose Body? CreateSpace, 2011.
• Lewis, C.S.  The Magician’s Nephew.  HarperCollins, 2000.
• James, P.D.  A Mind to Murder.  Touchstone, 2001.
• Stoppard, Tom  Arcadia.  Faber and Faber, 1994.
• Pratchett, Terry.  Hogfather.  Harper, 1999. 
• A course pack comprising:

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book 5
Donne, First and Second Anniversarie, “Valediction” (Course pack)
Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”; Blake’s “Newton”
Grant Allen: “The Missing Link”;
Tennyson In Memoriam, AHH