Literature and science look at our world and ourselves in different ways.?How do they differ, how do they relate, what has each offered or what can each offer the other? How have their methods overlapped, diverged, conflicted, cross-fertilised? Among the questions we may consider: How has literature seen science and depicted scientists? How has science (cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, for example) helped, or how could it help, explain literature? How have creative writers used science? Are literary works experiments? How have scientists used literary strategies or examples? Can we mine literature for data about human nature? Are the subjectivity of the reading experience and the objectivity of scientific explanation inevitably opposed? How do novelists who are also scientists and scientists who are also novelists throw light on these questions?

Or to look at the course another way, we begin with mathematics, the foundation of science, then move through the hard sciences, physics, chemistry and biology, to the soft science of psychology. You don’t need a background in any of these any more than you do in literature.
 
And we consider human nature as explained or explored by biology, psychology, pseudo-science, and by literature in general and science fiction in particular.
 
This is not a course in science fiction, but will include science fiction works from the nineteenth century (Flatland and H.G. Wells) to the twentieth (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the original of Bladerunner).
 
We look at three plays, two utterly different plays about quantum uncertainty (Frayn’s Copenhagen and Stoppard’s Hapgood) and Stoppard’s very different play, Arcadia, a tragiccomic romance about scientific and literary investigation, and the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries.
 
We study two major literary writers who were also scientists, and whose science informs their work in different ways: Vladimir Nabokov, a lepidopterist or butterfly specialist (we look at poems, memoirs and stories in the class anthology), and The Periodic Table, a haunting memoir by Primo Levi, a chemist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
 
We also confront controversies about research, technology and social consequences, and about the animal-human-machine interface, nuclear weapons and genetic engineering.
 

Semester: 2    Lecture Time: M W 12
 

Reading/Texts:
Edwin Abbott, Flatland
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Michael Frayn, Copenhagen
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
Tom Stoppard, Plays 5.
 

There will also be a class anthology of readings (especially Richard Dawkins, Vladimir Nabokov, Oliver Sacks) and terms.

Lecturers:
Convenor
University Distinguished Professor Brian Boyd (English) has been regarded for decades as the world’s leading Nabokov scholar. His most recent books are On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction (Harvard, 2009), and his co-edited Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader (Columbia, 2010). He is writing a biography of leading philosopher of science Karl Popper.
 

Lecturer
Associate Professor Cather Simpson (Chemistry/Physics/Science) works on biophotonics, at the interface of physics, chemistry and biology. She has taught courses in Science and Society.
 

Assessment:
Coursework 50% (tutorial performance 10%, two 1500-word essays 40%), two-hour exam 50%.