“Literature and Science: A Reciprocal Exchange?”

NeMLA convention (April 7-11 2010) in Montreal, Quebec

This panel seeks to take account of the humanities’ recent engagement with the sciences, an engagement that puts aside the hermeneutics of suspicion in favor of the appropriation and transformation of scientific knowledge. Beyond science studies and its demystification of objectivity, fields such as affect theory and ecocriticism, temporality studies and new media philosophy, biopolitics and animal studies bring the methodologies of literary studies to scientific objects and scientific methodologies to literary objects. This panel will consider the terms of these engagements. What are the points of convergence between literary and scientific theories? What does literary theory have to offer to the sciences in return? What conditions have brought us to the sciences? What does this engagement signal about our shared intellectual and political moment? How does the transfer across disciplinary boundaries transform these heuristics? What are the politics of this appropriation? In the shift from culture to nature, from the subject to the population, from memory to futurity, what has happened to the literary? Does literature matter and, if so, how? This panel welcomes papers on any topic of relevance to the question of science and literature.

Please submit a 250-word abstract to rebekah.c.sheldon@gmail.com.

Deadline:  September 30, 2009