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Literature and science.

Michael H. Whitworth Michael H. Whitworth Faculty of English Language and Literature, Merton College Oxford
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.990
Published online: 28 September 2020

Though “literature and science” has denoted many distinct cultural debates and critical practices, the historicist investigation of literary-scientific relations is of particular interest because of its ambivalence toward theorization. Some accounts have suggested that the work of Bruno Latour supplies a necessary theoretical framework. An examination of the history of critical practice demonstrates that many concepts presently attributed to or associated with Latour have been longer established in the field. Early critical work, exemplified by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, tended to focus one-sidedly on the impact of science on literature. Later work, drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shifts, and on Mary Hesse’s and Max Black’s work on metaphor and analogy in science, identified the scope for a cultural influence on science. It was further bolstered by the “strong program” in the sociology of scientific knowledge, especially the work of Barry Barnes and David Bloor. It found ways of reading scientific texts for the traces of the cultural, and literary texts for traces of science; the method is implicitly modeled on psychoanalysis. Bruno Latour’s accounts of literary inscription, black boxing, and the problem of explanation have precedents in the critical practices of critics in the field of literature and science from the 1980s onward.

Gillian Beer
historicism
inscription
Bruno Latour
literature and science
science studies

The historicist study of the relations of literature and science is a critical practice that draws eclectically on a range of linguistic, literary, and cultural theory, and which has also been significantly informed by concepts and practices in the fields of history and philosophy of science, science and technology studies, and the sociology of scientific knowledge. These bodies of theory have crucially enabled it to overcome deeply ingrained cultural assumptions about the relative statuses of literary and scientific forms of knowledge, but its focus on historical frameworks and contingencies means that practitioners have not always fully articulated their working premises, preferring in many cases to build on the practices of their predecessors. As a field, it has been open to theory but ambivalent about theorization. Moreover, it exhibits significant internal divisions regarding methodology. In part these correspond to the periods under study, but there are also significant methodological divergences associated with North America and the United Kingdom. Although there is significant interaction between Anglophone critics as well as many exceptions to the rule, North American practice as exemplified by Configurations , the journal of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, takes a greater interest in contemporary culture, including developments such as posthumanism, visual cultures, digital humanities, programming languages, and video games; it is less interested than its British counterpart in historical literature and culture, as well as in the ways that the incorporation of science into a specifically literary discourse may transform it or call into question its authority. Since the early 21st century , the North American school has used the work of Bruno Latour to crystallize its methodological presuppositions. It is the contention of this article that although such theorization may bring methodological clarity and maintain an alignment between the field and the field of science studies, it does so at the cost of neglecting a wide range of ideas, methods, and practices that have proved fruitful in the past. However, by considering Latour and other theorists one may brings to the surface hidden theoretical assumptions in seemingly untheorized work. The present article considers a range of critical works, from 1980 to the present, but gives particular prominence to Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots ( 1983 ) because Beer’s practices have been widely influential.

The phrase “literature and science” signifies many things, not all of which are considered here. One is the use of quasi-scientific methodology in literary criticism, drawing on contemporary science and particularly on the fields of neurology, evolutionary theory, and evolutionary psychology. The possibility of literary criticism building on a supposedly scientific foundation has a long history—there are examples in the Victorian era and in the early 20th century , notably I. A. Richards. 1 Some of the authority of psychoanalytical and structuralist literary criticisms came from the scientific status of the specialist bodies of theory on which they drew. In that regard, critics such as Jonathan Gottschall, Brian Boyd, and Joseph Carroll are part of a longer tradition. 2 Critics of them have drawn attention to the reductiveness of the method, its dependence on a selective reading of the science it draws on, and to its uncritical trust in its authority, though as Alan Richardson has noted, critics sometimes conflate distinct practices such as evolutionary psychology and cognitive criticism. 3

The phrase “literature and science” also signifies a longer tradition of debate about the value of “culture” and its relation to scientific ideals of knowledge. If its rhetorical touchstones lie in the early 19th century —William Wordsworth’s line “We murder to dissect” from the poem “The Tables Turned” and John Keats’s phrase “Unweave a rainbow” from the poem “Lamia”—its canonical prose articulation came into being in the late 19th century in the debate between Matthew Arnold and T. H. Huxley. 4 It continues through the 20th century in a range of lectures and essays, reaching its most familiar form in C. P. Snow’s lecture and book The Two Cultures ( 1959 ). 5 Generally speaking, “literature,” “science,” “poetry,” and related terms are spoken of as ahistorical abstractions; history, if it figures at all, is present only in the form of a narrative of decline of one side or the other. Very often the debate is a coded displacement of another topic—religion for Arnold and Huxley, and social class for Snow. Methodologically, the tradition of debate has little to offer the historicist study of the two fields, but its texts are relevant insofar as they articulate a range of deeply ingrained beliefs about both and thereby represent a horizon of expectations in relation to which practitioners of historicist study need to articulate their work.

Though literature and science as quasi-scientific method and as cultural debate can be excluded on principle, there are other definitions that are not fully represented here for reasons of space. First, the field of literature and medicine has long overlapped in significant ways with literature and science, but also has distinct practices that cannot be covered here. Second, the place of technology in the field is even more vexed and unresolved, but the present article does not attempt to give a full account.

Early Practices, 1926–1978

The origins of the field can be traced to Carl Grabo’s A Newton Among Chemists ( 1930 ), a study of the place of science in the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and several works by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, including The Microscope and English Imagination ( 1935 ) and Newton Demands the Muse ( 1946 ). Behind both lay works of cultural history such as A. N. Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World ( 1926 ), which gave Grabo his title and which was also a point of reference for Nicolson, and the tradition of “the history of ideas,” as exemplified by Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being ( 1936 ). The terminology of Whitehead and the early literary critics has the flavor of its era, but certain conceptual tensions have persisted. On the one hand, the early critics often speak of systems of thought at a supra-individual level: an era’s “mentality” or “imagination” (as in “the 18th-century imagination”); such a conceptualization unites literature and science in a common field. On the other hand, critics found it necessary to speak in terms of the “impact” of science on literature, a relation that implicitly separates the two areas and that does so even when writers are granted the agency to “borrow” from science and to transform what they find. The primary questions of such early critics concerned how the concepts, images, aims, and technologies of a given science had significantly informed the literary texts of its era.

In 1978 , Nicolson’s former student, George Rousseau, wrote an account of the “state of the field,” which has also been read as an “obituary” for its early form, and which has become deeply embedded in the field’s self-conception. 6 Rousseau’s essay has become, at least symbolically, the point at which earlier critical practices and critical vocabularies were rejected. Rousseau divided the field between “philologists” and what he idiosyncratically called “theorists”: by theorists he meant historians of ideas who were aware of the historical changeability of definitions and who thus were reluctant to provide the monological glosses characteristic of the philological annotator; theorists were critics who advanced hypotheses about the evolution of an idea and who defended those hypotheses against alternative positions. 7 In saying this, Rousseau implied that the groundwork of philology was necessary but not sufficient, but he enabled an overreaction in which it was seen as unnecessary and antiquated.

From the late 1970s onward, practitioners in the field were concerned to move beyond the asymmetrical relation that dominated earlier work in which scientific influence dominated the literary and the cultural. Such a relation seemingly reproduces the dominance of science in contemporary European and North American society and so confirms the status of literature and the arts as being at best decorative. Practitioners were also concerned to elevate their work beyond the merely philological. In 1978 , there were already models for a future practice. Rousseau himself notes “The Darwinian Revolution and Literary Form” ( 1968 ) by A. Dwight Culler, where the notion of literary form lifts the perspective above that of the merely local annotation. George Levine has praised Stanley Hyman’s The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers ( 1962 ) as a study that was willing to engage in the literary analysis of scientific texts rather than treating them as transparent sources for ideas. Jacques Barzun’s Darwin, Marx, and Wagner ( 1958 ) and Morse Peckham’s Man’s Rage for Chaos ( 1965 ) have also been noted as significant antecedents. 8

The field’s engagement with literary theory and with history and philosophy of science arises from the problem of how to bring science within conceptual reach of the concepts and practices of literary criticism without dissolving it as a distinct object of attention. Here, as elsewhere in this article, “science” usually means in practice a particular science in the form it took in a particular era. However, in moving beyond the asymmetry of Nicolson’s practice, the method nevertheless needs to respect the real asymmetries of a given historical moment.

The Conceptual Resources of History and Philosophy of Science

The positions within the history and philosophy of science that have been most enthusiastically absorbed within the field emphasize the changing nature of scientific theory and practice, the importance of creativity in scientific endeavor, and the role of nonscientific materials within that creativity. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ( 1962 ) was a key reference point for many critics from the late 1970s onward. It created a new agenda for the philosophy of science, which. since 1945 , had been focused largely on ahistorical questions under the influence of Karl Popper. 9 Kuhn foregrounded moments of major theory change in science. While what he called “normal science” may work in an accumulative way within a “paradigm,” making small adjustments to its theoretical outlook, over the course of time scientists would become aware of anomalies in nature that did not fit the paradigm, and which could not be accounted for through minor adjustments. Such anomalies require a major overhaul of scientific theory—the “paradigm shift.” The scientist must learn “to see nature in a different way.” 10 Kuhn’s focus on moments of change was important, as was the implication that at such moments scientific theorization was open to nonscientific influences. So too was his endorsement of the belief that conceptual structures create “ways of seeing” that may enable discovery or, indeed, obstruct it. 11

Also influential in this regard was the idea of tacit knowledge developed by the philosopher Michael Polanyi in Personal Knowledge ( 1958 ). In the summary of critic N. Katherine Hayles, “tacit knowledge” is “in some sense known,” but “cannot be formulated explicitly.” It guides the scientist “to the interesting fact, the one datum or experiment out of thousands that will prove useful.” 12 It is learned “by doing science” rather than by learning the formalized rules of science. 13 The idea of tacit knowledge suggests that although much of science is carried out in a rational and logical way that conforms to the public image of the discipline, it is bounded by assumptions that are subscribed to without rational justification. It is at this boundary that cultural elements can enter into science.

Another significant source lay in philosophical and linguistic thinking about metaphor and analogy, and particularly the work of Max Black and Mary Hesse. In this regard, literary critics were required to break from a deeply embedded cultural distinction between the literal and the metaphorical in which the metaphorical utterance is viewed as a decorative supplement to a literal core of meaning. In this view, while the metaphorical formulation of an opinion or feeling may be rhetorically more persuasive, it is ultimately reducible to the literal. In such a view, in Black’s later summary, metaphors are “expendable if one disregards the incidental pleasures of stating figuratively what might just as well have been said literally.” 14 In opposition to this view, Black and others advanced a cognitive view of metaphors: humans, including scientists, think through metaphors, and although metaphors can inhibit understanding, they can also assist in the modeling of reality. Once the idea of cognitive metaphor has been accepted, the distinction between metaphor and analogy becomes relatively slight, and the terms are often used as near synonyms. Griffiths, however, notes that metaphor often implies that one conceptual domain is stable and provides a model for the comprehension of another that is inchoate, while analogy—at least in some forms—allows for thinking in which both domains are reconceptualized in relation to each other. 15

Mary Hesse’s Models and Analogies in Science ( 1963 , revised and expanded 1966 ) took as its starting point the early 20th-century debate about scientific theorization between the French physicist Pierre Duhem and his British counterpart, Norman Campbell. Duhem had contrasted national styles of theory-making, favoring the “abstract and systematic” French style, and had deplored the British taste for mechanical models. Campbell had defended models and analogies—though not necessarily the mechanical model—as being not merely a sort of scaffolding that was removed when the theories were constructed, but instead an “utterly essential part” of them. 16 Moreover, while theories in Duhem’s sense risked being “static museum piece[s],” models were dynamic and open to development. 17 While it would be simplistic to equate paradigm shifts with changes of models and of metaphors, it is clear that metaphors and analogies serve “to anchor paradigms.” 18 As Kuhn wrote in 1979 , “Theory change [. . .] is accompanied by a change in some of the relevant metaphors and in the corresponding parts of a network of similarities through which terms attach to nature.” 19

Kuhn notes that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions says very little about the role of “technological advance” or of “external social, economic, and intellectual conditions in the development of the sciences”: it is, like Hesse’s Models and Analogies , an internalist account of science. 20 Nevertheless, both works enabled the approach that historicist literature and science sought, in which nonscientific external elements play a role in science in the making. The “irrationality” of the external elements is of lesser importance than their being culturally embedded.

It is perhaps surprising to find that Michel Foucault played only an ancillary role in the theorization of literature and science. The Foucault of The Order of Things ( 1966 , translated into English in 1970 ) and The Archaeology of Knowledge ( 1969 , translated into English in 1972 ) is mentioned in passing, and often in endnotes, as, for example, “a necessary precondition” for work in the field. 21 In Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields ( 1976 ), a work of science studies that has been influential on literature and science, Donna Haraway identifies The Order of Things as being of “exceptional importance for understanding the structure of thought in apparently diverse but contemporary fields,” and Foucault’s ability to recognize analogies across fields introduced an investigatory process that was absent from Kuhn or Hesse. 22 That many critics in the 1980s relegated their discussions of Foucault to endnotes while engaging with historians of science more prominently in the main text suggests they wished to align their work with Anglophone traditions in the history of science. And although there are many similarities between the field in the 1980s and the critical practices of New Historicism in the same era, the sidelining of Foucault suggests that the aspects of his work most prominent in the 1980s—the social sciences rather than the natural sciences, the asylum and the prison, and a focus on subjectivity and state power—were imperfectly aligned with the concerns of literature and science. 23

Reading Science

Nicolson’s practice was to treat scientific works as transparent media, using them as windows onto ideas rather than as texts to be interpreted. From the late 1970s onward, practitioners in the field endeavored to maintain symmetry between the treatment of literature and of science by turning their attention to scientific texts. Such a practice was particularly fertile in relation to texts from the 19th century . As Beer explains, scientists in the 19th century “shared a literary, non-mathematical discourse which was readily available to readers without a scientific training. . . . Moreover, scientists themselves in their texts drew openly upon literary, historical and philosophical material as part of their arguments.” 24 The privileging of the written products of science is not without its problems: it leaves unresolved whether (and how) literary critics can read the material artifacts and nonlinguistic inscriptions of science. Moreover, it raises the question of whether science writing for nonspecialist audiences (“popular science writing”) provides an adequate substitute for technical and particularly mathematical works, and, if it does, under what circumstances and with what provisos. Although material artifacts and the nonlinguistic have grown in importance, the practice of reading scientific texts remains central to the field.

As Stuart Peterfreund summarized in 1987 , “one begins by ‘reading’ science for the same concomitants of figurative effect that one has heretofore read literature for.” 25 Alongside that practice, however, one may read a scientific work for its explicit or implicit narrative and for a more impressionistic sense of its tone or atmosphere: Beer, in analyzing The Origin of Species alongside Darwin’s literary reading, foregrounds narratives of succession and restoration and notes how the theme of profusion is manifested in list-like sentences brimming with the names of species. 26 The impression of a natural world that is simultaneously teeming with new growth and threatened with a struggle for resources is interwoven by Beer with canonical literary texts, and also works of 19th-century political economy, most prominently those of Thomas Malthus.

At times the social and literary traces in scientific texts are prominent and easily spotted, at least by the critic who has been primed to look for them, but at other times they are subtler and require more sensitive and indeed tentative reconstruction. The same applies to the traces of science in literary texts: to move beyond texts that literally depict science or scientists necessitates a more subtle and historically informed attention. At times critics have drawn implicitly on a psychoanalytical model in which the scientific text is not fully conscious of its cultural debts and the literary text is not fully conscious of what it owes to science, and in which both require the delicate questioning of the analyst to bring the repressed material to light. Beer’s words on The Origin of Species are revealing in this regard: Darwin’s text “deliberately extends itself towards the boundaries of the literally unthinkable ” and Darwin never “raised into consciousness its imaginative and sociological implications.” 27 She goes on to say there is “ latent meaning ” present in The Origin , manifested in its moments of conceptual obscurity and in metaphors “whose peripheries remain undescribed.” 28 Later she writes of George Eliot’s Middlemarch as a novel “enriched by a sense of multiple latent relations which are permitted to remain latent.” 29 The references to the unthinkable, to elements that cannot be raised into consciousness, and to the latent content of the text suggest, without ever explicitly specifying, the presence of Freudian psychoanalysis and of Freud’s distinction between the latent and manifest content of a dream. Beer mentions Freud in Darwin’s Plots , but as a late 19th-century and early 20th-century thinker, not as a guide to methodology. While it is possible that Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious ( 1979 ) was influential in this regard, the only work by Jameson that Beer cites in Darwin’s Plots is Marxism and Form ( 1971 ); the resource on which Beer was most probably drawing was Pierre Macherey’s Pour une théorie de la production littéraire ( 1966 , translated as A Theory of Literary Production [ 1978 ]). Macherey provides the idea of the literary work having an “unconscious” which is not equivalent to the authorial unconscious. 30

The analogy between Beer’s mode of interpretation and Freud’s is not exact: if scientists and recognizable scientific terminology can appear conspicuously in a literary text, the censorship is malfunctioning. The latent content of the dream is sometimes fully manifest in a way that Freud’s unthinkable acts should not be. As Beer cautions early in her study, one need not “infer that Darwin is offering a single covert sub-text”: “Nor indeed should we take it for granted that there is an over and under text, or even a main plot and a sub-plot. The manifest and the latent are not fixed levels of text; they shift and change places according to who is reading and when.” 31 But even though the topography of “under” and “over” is complex in this version of psychoanalysis, the debts are plain, as are the benefits. Such a model removes the inhibiting effect of charges of misreading in which correctness is determined by a literary scholar’s idea of the correct scientific meaning of a text. It allows for literary writers’ mistakes to be recuperated as “creative misprision,” and deflects the objection that literary critics have conflated Newton with a derivative “Newtonianism,” or Darwinism with “Darwinisticism.” 32 The psychoanalytic model is not explicit: to reconstruct the theoretical affiliations of historicist practices in literature and science, one needs to read critical texts much as practitioners themselves read their scientific and literary texts, piecing together shards of discourse to conjecture the full structure.

Underlying this model of reading are particular theories and conceptions of language that go beyond the insistence that language is inescapably metaphorical. In Beer’s Darwin’s Plots , Jacques Derrida is most often invoked for his skepticism about the stabilizing effects of an origin within a structure, but he is also implicitly present in Beer’s characterization of Darwin’s language, and metaphorical language more generally, as vital and flexible: “[f]or his theory to work,” writes Beer, “Darwin needs the sense of free play, of ‘jeu’ as much, or even more, than he needs history.” 33 Throughout the study, Beer deploys a rich figurative vocabulary to characterize language and metaphor: words dilate, contract, and oscillate; some kinds of metaphors “thrive,” they stretch, they expand, and they are hard to control; over a long quotation, Darwin’s metaphor of the tree is seen to “grow, develop, change, extend, and finally complete itself”; metaphor in general is “polymorphic,” with the implication of being polymorphically perverse; “its energy needs the barriers which it seeks to break down.” 34 There is a theory of language implicit within these metaphors. Beer’s own figurative language surreptitiously energizes the concepts that she more formally states in the language of theory. Beer’s emphasis on vitality and instability is also a polemic against the culturally engrained figuration of scientific language as sharp, hard, and inflexible, a view that for literary criticism was codified in the New Critics’ contrast of the direct and denotative language of science with the indirect and conative language of poetry. 35 Although Beer also notes moments when Darwin’s writing stabilizes meaning, as a writer she invests less in her accounts of them.

A decade or so later, Susan Squier drew on the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern’s idea of the “domaining effect”: an idea or metaphor that means one thing in one domain will subtly shift its meaning when transplanted. Habits of thought “are always found in environments or contexts that have their own properties or characteristics.” Ideas “are always enunciated in an environment of other ideas, in contexts always occupied by other thoughts or images.” 36 The domaining effect presupposes linguistic flexibility, but also accounts for the newfound stability that a concept may acquire when transplanted into a new domain. One may helpfully combine Strathern’s account of domaining with Richard Rorty’s account of how a pragmatist philosopher would explain the apparent “hardness” of scientific facts: when an experimental test confirms or disproves a hypothesis, “[t]he hardness of fact [. . .] is simply the hardness of the previous agreements within a community about the consequences of a certain event.” 37 In Strathern’s terms, some domains will create semantic rigidity while others will allow for flexibility. It is clear from Rorty’s account that the semantic effects are due not to an intrinsic property of the domain, but to social agreements surrounding its employment in specific professional environments.

The Social Dimension

While a synthesis of the work of Hesse, Black, Kuhn, and Foucault provided the primary guidelines for literature and science study in the decade following 1978 , the direction the synthesis took was guided by newer work in the field of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) in which the prominent theorists were David Bloor, Barry Barnes, and Harry Collins. Until around 1970 , the sociology of knowledge had accepted the Popperian division between the proper domain of philosophy of science, a focus on the validation of scientific results, and of sociology, a focus on the origins of scientific ideas. 38 Moreover, it had taken an asymmetrical approach to truth and error, recognizing social and ideological factors only as the causes of error in science. Under the influence of Kuhn, sociologists recognized that there was a social element in the validation of results. The so-called strong program in the sociology of knowledge emerged around 1973 and went further, seeing all aspects of science as being open to cultural and ideological influences. 39 The four main principles of the strong program were concisely outlined by David Bloor. First, the sociology of knowledge had to locate “causes of belief.” Second, “no exception must be made for those beliefs held by the investigator who pursues the programme”; in investigating beliefs, the strong program was to be “impartial with respect to truth and falsity.” Third, it had to “explain its own emergence and conclusions: it must be reflexive.” Fourth, and most distinctively, “Not only must true and false beliefs be explained, but the same sort of causes must generate both classes of belief. This may be called the symmetry requirement.” 40

Bloor’s demand for symmetry has much in common with the symmetry that studies in literature and science sought to achieve as they moved away from the practices of Nicolson’s generation of scholars. Although in the field of literature and science the demand for symmetry was primarily motivated by a need to defend literary writers as active thinkers, not the passive recipients of science, and to defend literature as a form of knowledge in its own right, there is a strong similarity. Insofar as literature, from the point of view of science, may seem to entertain unscientific ways of thinking or even fundamentally consist of them, it stands for the “false beliefs” that are contrasted with science; and insofar as science, from the point of view of literature, may seem to present a reductive or limited view of the world, the positions are reversed.

The consequences of the demands for impartiality and symmetry are many and extend beyond the binary of science and literature. Opening up false beliefs for investigation allows for a consideration of sciences that appeared to become dead ends in the history of science but that were significant in their own moment; and it allows for a consideration of disciplines that were never fully accepted as science, even though in some cases they organized themselves in conventionally institutionalized ways, and for a consideration of the boundary work that excluded them. It allows for the consideration of, for example, neo-Lamarckism in early 20th-century biology, the persistence of the “ether” as an epistemic object in physics, psychical research, and the persistence of the idea of alchemy in early 20th-century physics. The strong program was also attractive to critics working on more canonical scientific ideas: both Beer’s Darwin’s Plots and Levine’s Darwin and the Novelists cite Barry Barnes’s Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory ( 1974 ). 41

By opening science to “external” influences, SSK allowed space for the research program that Rousseau had tentatively suggested in 1978 : a search for the ways in which “imaginative literature shapes science.” 42 The consequent difficulty was that of modeling the ways that literature and science could be simultaneously interconnected and yet distinct. From the late 1960s onward, historian Robert M. Young had hypothesized a “common intellectual context” for literature, science, theology, and other disciplines. The notion of a “common context” or “one culture” was vital in one phase of growth but, as Alice Jenkins has suggested, it is possible that the one culture was never a “historical reality” but an “imagined utopia.” 43 Although some critics have dismissed Beer and Levine for adhering to a simplistic one culture model, their own methodological reflections and critical practices speak of something more complex. 44 The metaphor of traffic between distinct disciplines is more productive, allowing practitioners to conceive of one-way and two-way traffic, of temporary obstructions and diversions, and of unequal flows in each direction. 45 Nevertheless, because of the preference for symmetry, “bidirectional flow is almost always seen as more prestigious and more defensible than unidirectionality.” 46

Weighing the Importance of Latour

Since 2016 , several overviews of the field have given a central place to science studies and have equated science studies with the work of Bruno Latour. 47 The focus on science studies underplays the continuing significance of longer-established intellectual resources deriving from the history and philosophy of science; the equation of science studies with Latour neglects the influence of the longer tradition of science studies that began with the establishment of the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh in 1964 , from which grew the strong program. In the field of literature and science, the most often-cited works by Latour begin with Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts ( 1979 ), coauthored with Steve Woolgar, an anthropological study of a biological research laboratory undertaken from 1975 to 1977 , written as if the personnel were an unfamiliar tribe whose belief systems were unknown to the anthropologist observer. In a 1986 reprint, the word “social” was removed from the subtitle. 48 Latour’s The Pasteurization of France (French 1984 ; translated into English in 1988 ) took as its focus a historical scientific revolution, that is, Louis Pasteur’s transformation of medicine and hygiene into a science; methodologically, it focused on the texts of three scientific journals and it expanded the range of “actors,” “agents,” and “actants” to be broader than the usual humanist ideal, to include nonhuman, collective, and figurative entities. 49 Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society ( 1987 ) offered a more theoretical overview of method and crystallized a “performative” notion of scientific fact, according to which the factuality of a fact was secured by its being accepted and used by later scientists. Latour’s work was given great prominence in the first and second issues of Configurations , the journal of the predominantly North American organization called the Society for Literature and Science. 50 Although there have been dissenting voices in Configurations and elsewhere, these issues sent out a strong message about methodology. 51

The opening chapter of Laboratory Life presents scientists as “compulsive and almost manic writers,” as “a strange tribe who spend the greatest part of their day coding, marking, altering, correcting, reading, and writing.” 52 To the anthropologist persona of the opening chapter, the notion of “inscription” makes sense of what had at first been a confusing environment: “It seemed as if there might be an essential similarity between the inscription capabilities of apparatus, the manic passion for marking, coding, and filing, and the literary skills of writing, persuasion, and discussion”; the laboratory “began to take on the appearance of a system of literary inscription.” 53 The phrase about literary inscription has often been quoted in the context of literature and science studies, and to quote it in such contexts is to subtly alter its meaning through a domaining effect. Though Latour is interested in texts—necessarily so in The Pasteurization of France —and in treating material elements as if they were texts (seeing a copy of an English dictionary, Laboratory Life draws an analogy with racks of chemical samples that “might be called material dictionaries”), the respects in which his texts are literary is open to question. Published scientific papers certainly have their own tacit rules of form and style, as do informal scientific communications, but they are not those of literature in the sense of fiction, poetry, or drama. One can acknowledge the insufficiency of purely formalist attempts to define the literary while still being able to recognize the formal differences between scientific and literary inscription. Surprisingly, though, critics quoting the phrase from Laboratory Life do not usually note the problem with the term “literary.”

Setting aside the problematic term, it is clear why Latour’s interest in inscription makes his work significant in the field of literature and science but, at around the time that Laboratory Life was published, practitioners were assembling their own toolkit of concepts. It is true that the role of metaphor in theory formation, as highlighted by Black, Hesse, and others, is primarily cognitive and does not imply inscription, but any evidence-based historical study necessarily depends on written evidence of figurative language. Darwin’s Plots , as an exemplar of practice, makes use not only of the multiple editions of The Origin of Species that appeared in Darwin’s lifetime, but also of his letters and notebooks. As Devin Griffiths notes, “Darwin is the central figure of Literature and Science because his writing was his science.” 54 And to the extent that Latour’s interest in inscription also includes reading—in the opening vignettes of Laboratory Life , “Julius” comes in to the office “eating an apple and perusing a copy of Nature ”—it is clear that, by the mid-1980s, the field was systematically focused on investigating what scientists read and in analyzing it. 55 The practical work of tracking a scientist’s reading may seem philological in the pejorative sense, but it provides an essential foundation for the more imaginative parts of the analytical process. The innovation in Laboratory Life comes first in its recognition that inscription is present in contemporary science, and second, in its suggestion that the kinds of inscription generated by laboratory computers may be as worthy of the name as the writing in a scientist’s notebook or a paper in a scholarly journal.

The claim “that scientific facts are constructed and not discovered” is, according to T. Hugh Crawford, one of the most productive elements in Laboratory Life . 56 Mark Morrisson accords with this view, though he focuses on Science in Action where Latour gives an account of the “black box” view of science: a fact or a machine has been black boxed when, “no matter how controversial their history, how complex their inner workings, how large the commercial or academic networks that hold them in place, only their input and output count.” 57 Latour’s approach, by contrast, is to uncover the workings of the black box and to emphasize science “in the making” or “in action.” Nicolson and others working in the History of Ideas tradition could rightly be criticized for black boxing ideas from science, focusing only the outputs—completed ideas—and then considering literary representations and responses. But in 1962 , Kuhn’s emphasis on paradigm shifts had reminded scholars that theories are actively constructed. In Darwin’s Plots , a great deal of Beer’s discussion concerns Darwin’s struggle to frame his theory in the right way and to balance different intellectual and ideological claims; she repeatedly characterizes his theory as shifting and unsettled. It is true that her focus is on the making of a scientific theory, while Crawford draws attention to the construction of facts. But Beer also analyzes the adjectives with which Darwin modified “fact”—facts were often “wonderful” or “extraordinary”—and the wider cultural discourse on fact. The latter yields conclusions that suggest that Science in Action and Darwin’s Plots share common roots in the pre-Latourian science studies of the 1970s: as Beer notes, “In their use of the word fact they [the Victorians] often combine the idea of performance with that of observation. Fact is deed as much as object, the thing done as much as the thing categorised.” Moreover, facts are performed through acts of rhetorical assertion: “The word ‘fact’ authenticates.” 58 Although Latour, with concepts such as black boxing, has devised more sophisticated tools for discussing method in literature and science, if the field is seen as primarily a historicist critical practice, then it is clear that “inscription” and “science in the making” were established within that practice before Latour’s conceptualizations of them were widely known.

Although Latour’s work is often identified with science studies, his thinking has diverged from SSK. In this regard, in the field of literature and science, his work has seemed to offer an escape route from several related dead ends or polarized binaries. Although in the 1980s the field focused on science in the making in the sense of theory formation, it had little to say about the day-to-day experience of science as an activity. Its emphasis was on science as knowledge, not science as practice. Moreover, it had little to say about the materiality of science, whether understood to be the built and socially organized spaces in which scientific activity takes place or the materiality of scientific experiments, instruments, and samples. It is widely recognized that around 1989 , there was a material turn in the history of science: chapters by Simon Shaffer and J. A. Bennett in the collection The Uses of Experiment ( 1989 ) have been seen as prominent early examples. 59 The material turn may also be understood as a pragmatic turn or turn to practice. Closely connected to the material turn is a spatial one that takes as its objects such things as the laboratory, the museum, the field (as in scientific “field work”), and the garden. 60 The material and pragmatic turns in science studies may seem to displace metaphor as a central concern of the field of literature and science. One possible response is to conceive of the field branching away from science studies, retaining its concern with figurative conceptualization as a necessary point of connection between literature and science. However, it is also possible to see a continuing role for metaphor in a newly material account of science. 61

In 1992 , Andrew Pickering, noting the emerging interest in scientific practice, argued that SSK’s focus on science as knowledge had reached a conceptual impasse. SSK saw the “technical culture of science” as a “single conceptual network,” and insofar as it was interested in science as practice, it saw practice “as the creative extension of the conceptual net to fit new circumstances.” Moreover, it saw practice as guided by interest, in the sense of factional “interests.” 62 In Pickering’s summary, SSK’s account of science is “thin, idealized, and reductive”; it lacks the “conceptual apparatus” to capture “the richness of doing science, the dense work of building instruments, planning, running, and interpreting experiments, elaborating theory, negotiating with laboratory managements, journals, grant-giving agencies, and so on.” 63 It may achieve conceptual closure in its explanations, but it does so at the cost of terrible reductiveness. Joseph Rouse, developing Pickering’s argument, identifies a structural problem with sociological explanation: scientific knowledge, the thing to be explained, must be sharply differentiated from the social, the factor that explains it. 64 This binary reproduces the science’s inaugurating binary division of the world into observer and observed, science and nature; these conceptual dichotomies “guarantee the very hegemony of the natural sciences” that SSK wishes to dispute. 65 Latour—and Actor-Network Theory more generally—promise an escape from a deadlocked binary opposition in which scientific knowledge is either given by nature or “dictated by society.” 66

Surveying this argument, James Bono notes that the position taken by Pickering and Rouse is by no means the only one possible: for example, Peter Dear has argued persuasively for a “sociocultural” history of science. Moreover, in a move analogous to the present argument, Bono notes that Latour was far from the first to contest the foundational binaries within science studies. 67 However, if literature and science is conceived as a historicist critical practice, it can be seen that the most widely imitated practitioners have, when confronted by binaries of realism and social constructivism, found ways of negotiating between them, which keep in play the claims of both. The negotiation is to be found not in the conceptual apparatus of any particular body of theory, but in the critical writing itself at the level of the sentence, the paragraph, and above. It is found in an agile movement between particular phrases, situated in their complex social and discursive networks, and reflexive considerations of method. Pickering’s criticism of conceptual closure parallels the concerns of many literature and science practitioners. A significant criticism of Nicolson’s work is that, by settling literature on a scientific base, she excludes “other simultaneous significations” and “over-stabilize[s]” the reading, even when praising “innovation and disturbance.” 68 One procedure for resisting such stabilization is to introduce points of reference beyond the binary of literature and science: a “third element” that creates instabilities in the binary. Jenkins gives the example of Laura Otis using imperial discourse in relation to 19th-century biology and literature; the present author, writing about spacetime in modernism and in post-Einsteinian popular science writing, turned to global telegraph systems and the discourse around simultaneity that accompanied them. 69 The introduction of the third element does not in itself guarantee destabilization: it is equally possible for it to be recruited as the factor that monocausally “explains” both the science and the literature. The avoidance of such reductiveness requires careful conceptualization of relations between the elements, but also involves care in the writing. Even in full-length monographs, the spirit of essayism is an important one to the discipline in the sense of a form of writing that is tentative, exploratory, and provisional.

This article has considered only three concepts strongly associated with Latour: literary inscription, black boxing, and the problem of explanation. Many others may be examined in a similar way, with the aim of distinguishing what is truly original in his work and what has precedents in earlier theory and practice in the field. His notion of “technoscience” would be high on the list. 70 So too would his extension of agency to nonhuman actants, a move that shines an interesting light on the field’s unresolved relation to conventional humanist notions of agency.

One unfortunate and unintended effect of George Rousseau’s 1978 “State of the Field” essay is that, in rejecting the works of the philologists and even of Nicolson, it inaugurated a dynamic of supersession in which each new generation of critics ritually rejects the methodologies and conceptual tools of the previous one. The present article has not been innocent of the practice in relation to Nicolson; it is easy to caricature her work and it deserves a more sympathetic revaluation. The tendency to identify a valid method with Latour’s work is a symptom of this dynamic. To restrict the conceptual toolbox of the field and to dismiss older practices as unsophisticated is to impoverish its possibilities. Practitioners in the field need to recognize the critical concepts that are implicit in apparently untheorized moves and that are embodied in the writing, though never explicitly named. Practitioners achieve what they have done by standing on the shoulders of giants, by surveying the full range of past critical practices rather than simply looking out for the next wave.

Discussion of the Literature

A student-oriented introduction to critical work in the field is presented by Willis and another is presented by Morrisson, with a chronological focus on modernism. 71

Rousseau’s 1978 survey of the field inaugurated a subgenre of reflective survey: following him, in 1987 Peterfreund identified the importance of figurative language as crucial to the resurgence of the discipline while Bono, in 2010 , highlighted the turn to the performative and the material, as well as the growing importance of Bruno Latour. 72 In 1981 , Rousseau performed a similar service for literature and medicine. Since then, work in that field has tended to focus on narrative in clinical case reports and case histories, and on trying to recover the perspective of patients from documents dominated by clinicians. 73 In 2017 and 2018 , under the general title “The State of the Unions,” special editions of the journals Configurations and Journal of Literature and Science surveyed the field from a range of viewpoints from both sides of the Atlantic. 74 Though in the early 1980s works on literature and technology were less theoretically reflective than those on literature and science, the theoretical perspectives of Donna Haraway—particularly her “Manifesto for Cyborgs” and her collection of essays Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature —and of Friedrich Kittler have been highly influential; works by Armstrong and Goody have developed the field in a more theoretically reflexive direction. 75

Beer’s 1989 survey is particularly strong on questions of influence and interchange, and Jenkins’s 2016 discussion of method gives significant space to the “one culture” and “two-way traffic” models. 76 Levine’s personal reflections on the growth of the field give an account from the perspective of someone trained in mid- 20th-century close reading and also reflect on the unavoidability, even in historicist work, of making scientific truth claims. 77 Levine’s “Why Science Isn’t Literature” valuably reflects on the importance of differences. 78

On metaphor, Ortony’s collection of essays is still valuable; Lakoff and Johnson’s work has been less influential in the field than may be expected; Whitworth and Bono note the difficulty with its argument that metaphors are grounded in the body. 79 Griffiths focuses on analogy as distinct from metaphor, differentiating formal and harmonic analogies. 80

Given that the science in literature and the literature in science are often visible only in fleeting glimpses, questions of validity and evidence recur: Lance Schachterle provided some valuable practical criteria in 1987 , as did N. Katherine Hayles in 1991 . 81

The relations of history of science with science studies have been constantly changing: Daston gives a very clear account that is in part a response to Jasanoff. 82 There have been dissenting voices in relation to Latour from several perspectives. 83 For the debates between sociology of scientific knowledge and Latourian Actor-Network Theory, Pickering’s collection of essays is crucial, though best approached through essays by Rouse and Bono. 84 The role of feminist studies of science has provided the field of literature and science with a significant social point of reference. Work by Keller and Harding was especially influential in the 1980s and 1990s. 85

Introduction: Connectivities Between Literature and Science in the Twenty-First Century

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The original version of this chapter was revised. The correction to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_12

This introductory chapter situates the book in current discussions in the fields of literature and science studies and twenty-first-century fiction. It introduces the notion of ‘connectivities,’ understood to capture actual states as well as possibilities for connection, and distinguishes it from, respectively, the concepts of ‘two cultures’ and ‘networks’ to allow fresh and unburdened views on representations of science in contemporary fiction. Setting out the organisation of this volume in two main sections, the chapter explains the governing ideas of ‘human connectivities’ and ‘temporal connectivities’ and locates these in contemporary criticism, including conceptualisations of returns to realism and ethics, unbroken interest in the past and the future, and renegotiations of the traditionally speculative views of science fiction and its relations to mainstream literature.

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Heidegger and Modern Science: Responding to Ontological Communication in the Anthropocene Epoch

Mapping hubris: vonnegut’s cat’s cradle and odysseus’ apologoi.

Introduction

Science and technology more than ever govern human lives. While it has become a commonplace observation that the twenty-first century is marked by scientific and technological change on an unprecedented scale, it remains a challenge to map the implications for contemporary fictional representations. The present volume tackles a specific part of this challenge, addressing scientific and literary innovations as well as continuities and returns. Twenty-first-century writing in the field of literature and science obviously stands in a long tradition of writers and scholars that “have reflected on, reimagined, and challenged the sciences for over two millennia” (Sielke 2015 , 12), and the topic of science and/in fiction shows no signs of decline as the third millennium progresses, neither in terms of artistic production nor as an area of critical enquiry. In contemporary drama, for example, science has been seen to become “the hottest topic in theatre today, so much so that it’s identifiable as a millennial phenomenon on the English-speaking stage” (Rocamora 2000 , 50). Likewise, there has been a wave of popular films about scientists over the last years, including screen works such as A Beautiful Mind (2001), Proof (2005), Ramanujan (2014), The Imitation Game (2014), A Theory of Everything (2014), The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015), and Hidden Figures (2016). In prose fiction, the “science novel” (see Schaffeld 2016 ) has attracted significant attention and branched out into a variety of topical interests and genres, running the gamut from popular science, speculative fiction, and apocalyptic disaster narratives to new realist and historical novels, including ‘brain memoirs’ (see Tougaw 2017 , 2018 ) and ‘neuronovels’ (see Roth 2009 ), ‘cli-fi’ (see Johns-Putra 2016 ; Trexler 2015 ; Schneider-Mayerson 2017 ), and the field of ‘posthuman’ fiction, including, most recently, ‘AI narratives.’ Footnote 1 In addition, the impact of digitalisation across all media and genres and on twenty-first-century culture in general affects modes of artistic and knowledge production and reception.

If the representation of science in novels, films, plays, and poetry does not show any signs of decline, neither does the field of literature and science studies. Recent scholarly publications predominantly focus on a single genre and a single scientific discipline, as a look at books published in the first half of the year 2018 reveals: Rachel Crossland’s Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence , Nina Engelhardt’s Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics , John Fitch’s The Poetry of Knowledge and the ‘Two Cultures,’ Lianne Habinek’s The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience , Jenni Halpin’s Contemporary Physics Plays: Making Time to Know Responsibility , Andrea K. Henderson’s Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture , and Michael Tondre’s The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender . Unlike these books, this volume does not focus on any one particular genre or branch of science (e.g. physics, biology, or mathematics), yet, it shares with various publications a special concern with Victorian and modernist cultures and a focus on a specific time period—in our case, the ‘now.’ Thus, the volume breaks new ground with its focus on twenty-first-century representations of science, as well as by offering a comparatively rare combination of contributions covering diverse scientific disciplines and different genres. Addressing novelistic fiction, poetry, film, and drama, and engaging with topics such as genetics, chemical weapons research, quantum physics, psychopharmacology, biotechnology, and digital technologies, this volume avoids delimiting the complexity of the field or the vagueness that investigations into the contemporary necessarily entail (see Boxall 2013 , 3; Hoydis 2015 , 5; Lea 2017 , 2).

The organisation of ten case studies in two sections, ‘Human Connectivities—Speculations and (Corpo)Realities’ and ‘Temporal Connectivities—(Neo-)Victorian to (Neo-)Modernist,’ reflects that the contributions in this volume approach representations of science from two main angles: in view of the place of the human in a web of relations (human connectivities) and regarding links between the twenty-first century and historical periods (temporal connectivities). We introduce the term ‘connectivity’ specifically to liberate thinking about literature and science from the rather tired metaphor of ‘two cultures,’ the only slightly less tired derivatives ‘three cultures’ or ‘one culture,’ as well as from the increasingly popular all-embracing concept of ‘networks.’ Connectivity, as we understand it, does not emphasise boundaries, disciplinary cultures, or institutional settings but is relational and encompasses realities as well as potentialities: as in popular and technical usage, we take ‘connectivity’ to mean both the quality and state of being connected and the capability of “being connective or connected” (“connectivity,” Merriam-Webster). Referring to an actual state as well as to possibility, the use of ‘connectivities’ pays tribute to the both real and speculative aspects of representations of science in twenty-first-century fiction. As we develop below, the term evokes globality and technology as the central means of experiencing connections in the present day and age, yet equally allows for the incorporation of historical and ethical dimensions. First, however, we examine how using the concept of ‘connectivities’ to grasp the relationship between science and literature offers a way to bracket questions of linear influence and direct connections, as well as to break open (for lack of a better term) the ‘network’ paradigm which often seems to suggest a systemic view.

In the twenty-first century, the term ‘network’ and its derivatives are seemingly everywhere, from talk about the Internet, social networks such as Facebook, and Manuel Castells’s notion of the ‘network society’ as a society relying on the fundamental unit of networks that are based on flow of information in electronic forms and function on a global scale (see 2000 , 60–1). Next to organisational networks and digital networking technologies, the term has undergone influential reconfiguration in Actor—Network Theory (ANT), most closely related to the name Bruno Latour. Latour acknowledges the infelicity of the term in ANT, not least because what is meant to designate a method is frequently confused with a thing, for example a technical network. “Network is a concept, not a thing out there,” Latour explains, and admits, “The word network is so ambiguous that we should have abandoned it long ago” (Latour 2005 , 131; 130). As a more fitting term to describe the work, movement, and change that the method entails, he offers ‘worknet’ but deems a change in terminology impractical (see 143; 132). This collection avoids the “terribly confusing” and “pretty horrible” (142) word ‘network’ with its competing meanings in common usage and ANT, and instead proposes to focus on ‘connectivity,’ which includes real and potential connections, local as well as global ones, and can involve merely two entities or an entire system.

If Latour has failed to eradicate confusions between ‘network’ as a method and the World Wide Web (Latour 2005 , 143), the field of literature and science has not completely shaken off the influence and repercussions of the “two cultures debate”—and it is perhaps unlikely that it will ever fully transcend the binary divisions it stipulates. However, ever since C.P. Snow first introduced the idea of the humanities and the sciences as two separate spheres or cultures in 1959, scholars have attempted to reconceptualise the relationship and highlight communalities, cross-overs, and cross-fertilisation between disciplines. And some of these attempts have gone a long way to inspiring fruitful interdisciplinary debates. Jerome Kagan, for example, examines the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities as “three cultures” and explores their interrelated struggles to “impose distinct meaning networks on their important concepts and […] compete with each other for dominance” (Kagan 2009 , 6). Meanwhile, prominent proponents of the ‘one culture’ model, such as George Levine, do not negate important differences between the disciplines but rather “attempt to consider ways in which literature and science might indeed be embraced in the same discourse, ways in which they have been so embraced” (Levine 1987 , 3). As Levine emphasises: “The ‘one culture’ is not a unified science and literature” (4; original emphasis). Rather, as he goes on to explain, it is one culture in the following two senses: first, any developments and events in science affect everything else, including literature, and, second, both participate in a similar manner in “the culture at large—in the intellectual, moral, aesthetic, social, economic, and political communities which both generate and take their shape from them” (5–6). His is thus not an argument for collapsing the distinctiveness of science and literature into one indiscriminate ‘culture,’ but for identifying points of discursive convergence. And in this respect, Levine points out, “it is important to consider precisely how they do, why they do, whether the convergence is fortuitous, whether it can lead to important illuminations, to something like real dialogue, to genuine ‘influence’” (4). This collection of essays is less concerned with dialogic ‘influence’—all texts explicitly represent and thus are obviously ‘influenced’ by scientific topics and practices—and we are similarly cautious about presupposing a ‘convergence’ of science and literature. Instead, the notion of ‘connectivity’ brackets the debate of however many culture(s) we should use as theoretical frames of investigation and allows for a looser, and thus more permissible, idea of actual and possible connections of science and literature.

The idea of connectivities is particularly important in the area of globalisation: “Most frequently, in the twenty-first century, discussions of globalization emerge from the perception of an unprecedented critical mass of interconnectedness across the world. Equally, seminal descriptions of globalization suggest that many of the key terms hinge on the belief in a growing escalation of this interconnectedness” (Childs and Green 2013 , 1; original emphasis). The immense critical interest in globalisation and research into contemporary culture has found expression in a renewed focus on cosmopolitanism (Leggett and Venezia 2015 ; Schoene 2009 ; Shaw 2017 ) and theoretical concepts such as the planetary (Heise 2008 ) and cosmodernism (Moraru 2011 , 2016 ). These are all linked by an inherent concern with the globe and a sense of connectedness through shared ethical responsibility. This understanding of ethical connectivity differs from the technical-spatial connectivities offered by forms of (data or human) travel and communication. Accordingly, in a recent study of contemporary fiction, Daniel Lea contrasts “the Internet’s architecture of connectivity” which reveals “its limitations as a tool of connection” (Lea 2017 , 21) with another kind, namely “the duty of care that comes with humanness” (20). Christian Moraru’s notion of cosmodernism similarly proposes the period after 1989 to be characterised by relationality, or what he calls “being-in-relation, with another” (Moraru 2011 , 2). Such relationality is manifested in fictional narratives as an identity that is always created in relation to a wider context, surpassing the geopolitical and cultural limits of the USA, Moraru’s area of focus. Cosmodernism’s inherent ethical investment marks its disparity, or rather its onwards progression, from postmodernism—implicitly understood as a more socially disengaged, merely aesthetic practice—and offers a “rationale and vehicle for a new togetherness, for a solidarity across political, ethnic, racial, religious and other boundaries” (5).

The concept of connectivity is also commonly evoked to refer to a technological environment that can now be taken for granted as a, more or less, global phenomenon: the Internet, which offers greater than ever access to scientific ‘knowledge,’ connections, and circulation. Not least, and importantly for ethical considerations, significant parts of interactions between humans take place in the digital world and some may even turn out to involve human as well as non-human interlocutors. Literary texts probe how such new connectivities shape twenty-first-century narrations of the human and humanity and their relations to reality. In his introduction to twenty-first-century fiction, Peter Boxall stresses the role of technology in questioning who we are: “The destabilisation of the category of the human is also fuelled over this time by developments in technology—in biotechnology as well as in computing and information technology—developments which of course fed into the philosophical and theoretical environment” (Boxall 2013 , 88). Considering literary engagements with new technological forms and global relations, Boxall notes that texts contrast these with specific, material environments: “There is, in the fiction of the new century […] a strikingly new attention to the nature of our reality—its materiality, its relation to touch, to narrative and to visuality” (10). Daniel Lea similarly identifies materiality as one of the recurrent concerns in the twenty-first century:

Interpreted in the broadest sense of the relationships between the physical stuff of the world and the individuals with whom it comes into contact, materiality is a strikingly recurrent concern of these novelists. This is perhaps most evidently articulated in response to the liquefaction and virtualisation of social relations that has rendered the physical dimension so abstract in the digital age. On what levels of communication does the physical heft of touch operate in a world where interaction is increasingly mediated by technology? (Lea 2017 , 18)

The craving for materiality and reality that scholars detect in twenty-first-century fiction is also discernible in a shift from postmodernist playfulness to a new seriousness and realism, a currently widely discussed change in narratology and related fields. In 1998, Charles Altieri noted: “all the instruments agree that ‘postmodernism’ is no longer a vital concept for the arts” (Altieri 1998 , 1). Similarly, four years later Linda Hutcheon challenged theorists to find new descriptive terms for twenty-first-century writing, after firmly declaring postmodernism to be “over” (Hutcheon 2002 , 166), even though, she admitted, “its discursive strategies and its ideological critique continue to live on—as do those of modernism” (181). And this observation still holds true over a decade later, as the readings in this volume demonstrate. The pressures of the twenty-first century induce a turn away from playful experimentation with style and form, the proliferation of possibilities and worlds, and the questioning of objective truth, reason, and morality: many writers and other artists in the new millennium feel a need to move away from postmodernism and towards regaining sincerity and authenticity (see Hoydis 2019 ; Lea 2017 ; Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010 , 2011 ). Where David Shields asks to respond to this “reality hunger” ( 2010 ), in his commonly evoked ‘manifesto’ of the same title, with ‘more authentic’ literary forms such as life writing or the essay, Boxall summarises for fiction more broadly: “one can see the emergence of new kinds of realism, a new set of formal mechanisms with which to capture the real, as it offers itself as the material substrate of our being in the world” (Boxall 2013 , 10). This newly realist writing engages with the factual, the material, and the immediacy of things without merely returning to the style of classic nineteenth-century realism. Footnote 2 Rather, as Ulka Anjaria argues, realist fiction contains an “inbuilt paradox”—claiming allegiance to reality as well as to the ‘unreal,’ imaginative nature of fiction—that ensures that “21st-century realism is not a finished mode, but one perennially in progress” (Anjaria 2017 ) and thus constitutes an apt approach to explore the unfolding millennium.

Anjaria also helpfully examines the interrelations of notions of realism and connectivity. Twenty-first-century realism sheds new light, so she claims, on the question: “What is the relationship of literature to a world defined both by connectivity and fragmentation?” (Anjaria 2017 ). That is, a world characterised by the constant possibility of connecting with each other online and the disconnection of actual, physical lives. Meanwhile literary critic James Wood deplores a proliferation of relations and connectivities in literature that, so he argues, do not realistically represent reality and result in unconvincing stories abounding with seemingly coincidental but connected events: “what above all makes these stories unconvincing is precisely their very profusion, their relatedness. […] Yet it is the relatedness of these stories that their writers seem most to cherish, and to propose as an absolute value. An endless web is all they need for meaning” (Wood 2000 ). Wood contrasts connectedness with reality, humanity, and life, arguing that connectivity plasters over a lack of humanity and realism: “since the characters in these novels are not really alive, not fully human, their connectedness can only be insisted on,” rather than convincingly be shown (Wood 2000 ). Critical of Wood’s view and his celebration of nineteenth-century representations of character, Anjaria proposes twenty-first-century realism to be

not postmodernist, because it is receptive to the real conditions of the world it tries to represent, nor is it naively or nostalgically realist, because rather than hold a stable set of values as a response to the world, it refuses the formal closure characteristic of 19th-century realism in order to represent a reality constantly in flux. (Anjaria 2017 )

The concept of connectivity can help us grasp this state of taking account of connections to the real and, on the other hand, exploring possibilities and likelihoods, which means staying open to and cultivating the capacity for connectivity; both aspects are of particular relevance for representations of science in contemporary narratives.

The discussion of a possible return to or the reworking of realism leads to another key concept in this collection, temporal connectivities, particularly between the twenty-first century and the Victorian period or literary modernism of the early twentieth century. While Anglophone literature on both sides of the Atlantic has a strong long-standing tradition of historical fiction, Britain has seen a particular boom of the genre over the past two decades: successful examples, to name but a few, include the works of Hilary Mantel and a general upsurge of Neo-Victorian and Neo-Edwardian novels and TV series such as Sherlock Holmes , Penny Dreadful , Ripper Street , Downton Abbey , and Mr. Selfridge . Neo-Victorian scholar Marie-Louise Kohlke suggests that the popularity of the genre is based “less on its historical accuracy than in its receptivity to ‘reverse projections’ of contemporary consciousness” ( 2015 , 12), echoing a general function of historical fiction as a dual means of escape from and response to the contemporary (see also Miller 2011 ). Once more it appears that it is primarily the resurging concern with the ethical that reasserts itself in new fictions set in the past. Identifying temporality and “a fresh commitment to what we might call the reality of history” as one of the main topical and aesthetic concerns in twenty-first-century literature, Peter Boxall notes how this trend is explicitly linked to “a new sense of a responsibility to material historical forces that constrain or shape the fictional imagination” ( 2013 , 41–2; original emphasis).

While there is consensus on these emerging topics and discussions across recent studies, a focus on how they relate to science in fiction is still missing. This volume addresses this gap. It ties in with studies of twenty-first-century fiction, but resolves one of the typically lamented issues, the obvious problem of dealing with a very wide, heterogeneous and yet hard to categorise field, by narrowing it down to fictions engaging with a topic included in all recent collections: science.

Considering the above, we might ask how the current engagement with the Victorian and modernist periods relates to fictional representations of science and is juxtaposed with the typically speculative view of science fiction, the genre that carries the connection between science and literature in its very name. Damien Walter identifies an emerging genre that is “not science fiction [… or] realism, but hovers in the unsettling zone in between” (Walter 2014 ) and proposes to use the term “transrealism,” as established by Rudy Rucker in the early 1980s. Transrealist texts, so Walter explains, are firmly rooted in reality while introducing a single fantastic idea: this does not allow for the comforts of confirming a stable reality or offering escapism but creates the disconcerting sense that “reality is at best constructed, at worst non-existent” (Walter 2014 ). Where Walter maintains that science fiction and mainstream literature “are increasingly hard to separate” (Walter 2014 ), science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson makes the related argument that wild speculations about scientific and technological inventions that characterised his genre in the early twentieth century are no longer possible today, as our lives are so saturated by science and technology that any speculation turns out to be reality already:

I think I do science fiction because I feel like if you’re going to write realism about our time, science fiction is simply the best genre to do it in. This is because we’re living in a big science fiction novel now that we all co-write together. […] You write science fiction and you’re actually writing about the reality that we’re truly in, and that’s what novels ought to do. (Robinson 2015 )

These being perspicuous observations, Robinson also reflects on the relation of science fiction to the ethical: “‘Science’ implies the world of fact and what we all agree on seems to be true in the natural world. ‘Fiction’ implies values and meanings, the stories we tell to make sense of things.” Robinson points out that it can seem impossible to simultaneously describe the facts of the world as it is and to imagine how it ought to be. Yet, as Robinson continues, “here is a genre that claims to be a kind of ‘fact-values’ reconciliation, a bridge between the two. Can it be? Well, no, not really—but it can try” (Robinson 2015 ). A number of contributions in this volume examine how literary representations of science identify connectivities between facts and values and try to balance ethical responsibilities to the real and to the imaginary. More generally speaking, the ten chapters in this collection ask how, why, and to what effects fictional writing about science returns to realist modes and to the past, and examine how twenty-first-century novels, poetry, film, and drama engage with tensions between facts and values, realism and speculation, views of the past and visions of the future.

In Part I, ‘Human Connectivities—Speculations and (Corpo)Realities,’ five chapters engage with the place of the human in a web of relations and a reorientation of fiction’s allegiances to reality and speculation. The authors examine the role of science and technology in questioning and redefining the human from various angles, including consequences of the biomedical sciences, genetic modifications, and new technologies that redefine reading practices. The first two chapters note a shift from focusing on immaterial mental states to exploring effects of science and technology on the material brain, and analyse literary explorations of ways in which science and technology shape human subjectivity, what has been considered its corporeal ‘seat’ in the brain, and our understanding of relations between them. Natalie Roxburgh’s “The Rise of Psychopharmacological Fiction” studies representations of drugs and medications during and after ‘the decade of the brain’ when attention shifted from the subjective experience of the mind to the physical structure of the brain. Roxburgh compares postmodernist novels with those written in a style of new realism, thus engaging on the level of form with a shift in focus from subjective experience to objective materiality, concluding that recent psychopharmacological novels employ and reflect a move towards more realist modes of representation. Roxburgh further uses these texts to explore the idea that science and technology in the twenty-first-century “risk society” (Ulrich Beck) can be grasped with the logic of the pharmakon that is both remedy and poison. Chapter 3 by Julius Greve, “Neuropathologies: Cognition, Technology, and the Network Paradigm in Scott Bakker’s Neuropath and Dave Eggers’s The Circle ,” asks about the place of cognition and technology in contemporary fiction and argues for “a conceptual shift from psycho- to neuropathology.” A main reason he identifies for such a shift is the “convergence of today’s technologies of cognition and the network paradigm”: the sense that ‘everything is connected’ that is intricately interwoven with the use of technology. Examining two popular fictional explorations of cognition and technology, Greve’s chapter engages with the threats and opportunities of connectivities in the twenty-first century.

The next two contributions turn to the role of scientific theories and new technologies on narrative design and reading practices. Both interrogate the potential role of new media to frame new narratives. Chapter 4 , “New Science, New Stories: Quantum Physics as a Narrative Trope in Contemporary Fiction” by Kanta Dihal, focuses on how texts use theories in quantum physics to challenge the concept of identity and open new possibilities of narration, focalisation, plot, and structure. Comparing printed texts with the iOS app Arcadia (2015) by Iain Pears, Dihal speculates that the new media provide opportunities for further narrative innovations. Where this chapter concludes that the potential of new media, for example for interactive narratives, has not been fully explored in narratives engaging with quantum physics, the following contribution examines the close connections of technology and changing reading practices in digital poetry. In Chapter 5 , “Digital Technologies and Concrete Poetry: Word, Algorithm, Body,” Paola Carbone discusses digital poems that reconfigure the main features of concrete poetry and draw attention to reading as an active, sensual process. Identifying a new focus on the physicality of text and on the inclusion of the human body in digital poetry, Carbone’s contribution shows not only that technology disconnects us from material reality when it “recede[s] behind the computer screen” (Lea 2017 , 19) but that it can also create new connectivities between body and text.

The final chapter in this section, Pia Balsmeier’s “Towards a Posthumanist Conceptualization of Society: Biotechnology in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation ,” refocuses human connectivities explicitly onto the notion of the ‘human’ and its ontological and ethical limits by exploring the role of biotechnology in the conceptualisation of collective identity as a (post)human(ist) society. Following a careful mapping of different currents in thinking about the posthuman, Balsmeier focuses on fictional texts from North America that explore how the most widespread form of biotechnology, namely genetically modified food, affects human identities. Analysing novels by Atwood and Ozeki, Balsmeier examines how anthropocentric and essentialist views on identity, race, gender, and family can be overcome by more valuable connectivities based on elective affiliations.

Part II, “Temporal Connectivities—(Neo-)Victorian to (Neo-)Modernist,” continues the concern with ethical issues and scientific progress, yet the examples discussed here share a strong link to history rather than to speculative futures. Chapters 7 and 8 both engage with the pervasive, ongoing fascination with the Victorian age, with the lives and discoveries of nineteenth-century scientists, and the impact of the era’s gendered and racialised politics on the contemporary imagination. First, Paul Hamann traces genealogies of genetics in two British science novels, Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman , employing these examples to identify the historicising of scientific knowledge and practice as a new trend in the history of the novel. He argues that the foregrounding of scientific historical difference in Mawer’s and Byatt’s texts reflects the central tenet of twentieth-century philosophy of science that scientific epistemology is historically specific. At the same time, Hamann uncovers the novels’ engagements with past genetic practice as a critique of genetics in the twenty-first century. Exploring the literary forms through which the two novels historicise genetic science, this chapter adds an original perspective to the question of how the aesthetics of texts informs and is informed by their investigation of scientific epistemology. This is followed by Elizabeth Gilbert’s analysis of British writer Frances Hardinge’s genre-poaching young adult novel The Lie Tree , a fusion of Gothic, Neo-Victorian, fantasy, and detective fiction. Set just a few years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species , the narrative details the female protagonist’s struggle for scientific knowledge and truth against the confines of gender stereotypes and popular pseudo- or anti-scientific beliefs.

While these two contributions testify to lasting legacies of the Victorian era in current representations of science, modernism and the violent ruptures of the early twentieth century up to the Second World War provide a rival source of imagination and raise, if anything, even more haunting ethical questions. Moving from prose fiction to film, in Chapter 9 , Norbert Schaffeld analyses Matthew Brown’s 2015 The Man Who Knew Infinity from a postcolonial vantage point. This maths film, indicative of the current popularity of biopics and other forms of life writing, explores a commonly fictionalised phase in the history of mathematics, focusing on the encounter of two scientific ‘geniuses,’ Cambridge professor G.H. Hardy and the self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, and the latter’s tragically short life. The film’s postcolonial stance, Schaffeld argues, makes use of temporal connectivities by reinvesting the spatio-temporal frame of early twentieth-century academic culture with today’s problems of racism and institutional exclusion. It furthermore poses questions about the genre and truth claims of contemporary historical fiction.

Similarly set in the early twentieth century is Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day , the example under scrutiny in Chapter 10 . Simon de Bourcier’s analysis of Pynchon’s complex text focuses on its entangled relationship with both modernism and postmodernism, presenting a twenty-first-century aesthetic fusion that is as yet hard to fully grasp. De Bourcier suggests that the novel’s narrative aesthetics conforms, in fact, to Vermeulen and van den Akker’s concept of metamodernism. In his reading of central scenes and the author’s engagement with the technological and ideological contexts of modernism, Futurism, and Fascism, de Bourcier employs Slavoj Žižek’s opposition between modernist absence and the ‘obscene object’ of postmodernity, as well as theorisations of technology by Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Kittler.

The final chapter, “Identity, Memory, and Technoscientific Ethics: Limits, Edges, and Borders in The Forbidden Zone ,” tackles the realm of contemporary stagings of the history and ethics of science. Ellen Moll applies theories by feminist technoscience philosophers Karen Barad, Katie King, and Donna Haraway to the 2012 play The Forbidden Zone by Duncan Macmillan and Katie Mitchell. Her reading shows how the play employs experimental theatrical techniques, including live cinema, to explore the ethical-political ramifications of chemical weapons research and its relationship to sexism and other forms of oppression. Focusing on the lives of historical figures Clara Immerwahr and her granddaughter Claire Haber, the play presents science as firmly tied to the notion of a modernity defined by apocalypse, forcing the audience, as Moll suggests, into an awareness of what Katie King termed “pastpresents,” an examination of the mutually constructing nature of past and present.

The ongoing representations of science, scientists, and scientific practice with which the ten chapters in this volume engage are indicative of the fact that new developments in science and technology continue to change our life-world, the way humans interact with each other, and how they understand themselves and their place among other beings and in the world. This collection investigates what concepts, forms, and topical issues have emerged in the past few decades—not claiming to offer a complete survey, but discussing examples which suggest narrative modes and themes that we believe are of wider significance and likely to shape engagement with literature and science and the field of twenty-first-century fiction in the future. Thus, this volume is a starting point; each of the areas addressed here calls for further study: the impact of technology, digitalisation, and new media on prose, poetry, and drama, posthumanism, genetics, pharmacology, neuropathology, and, as always, the relation of science (histories) to intersectional identity politics. While not aiming for comprehensiveness—not in text selection, choice of authors, kinds of science, or in regard to aesthetic developments—it bears testimony to the unquestionable “centrality of science as knowledge, as practice and as a strong symbol of modernity” (James and Bud 2018 , 386). Examining the new forms that this central interest in science takes at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the volume investigates what we could call the ‘connective value’ or the value of connectivities between different aspects of twenty-first-century experience, imagination, and writing. Not least, the case studies in this collection demonstrate what Michelle Antoinette describes as “the connective medium of art itself as a vital key in forging connection” (Antoinette 2014 , 23)—they reveal how fiction can forge connections between ideas, human beings, and their realities and potentialities in times past, in the present, and in times to come.

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Chapter 1 was previously published as non-open access. It has now been changed to open access under a CC BY 4.0 license and the copyright holder has been updated to “The Author(s).”

See, for example, the ‘Global AI Narratives’ Project at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, UK, led by Stephen Cave and Sarah Dillon (2018–).

While this ‘reality hunger’ is associated with a re-emerging desire for authenticity as a rejection of falsity and ‘fake news,’ Frederic Jameson rightly reminds us of the problem of defining what is actually meant by a ‘return’ to realism, that is, to what realism is supposed to be opposed here, for example, romance, modernism, idealism, or fantasy (see Jameson 2015 , 2). See also Birke and Butter ( 2013 ) on the renewed critical interest in realism in contemporary art and culture and debates on what is perceived as realist work.

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Engelhardt, N., Hoydis, J. (2019). Introduction: Connectivities Between Literature and Science in the Twenty-First Century. In: Engelhardt, N., Hoydis, J. (eds) Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_1

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Zapf, Hubert. 2013. “Cultural Ecology, Literature, and Life Writing”. In: Alfred Hornung and Zhao Baisheng (eds.). Ecology and Life Writing . Heidelberg: Winter. 3–25. Search in Google Scholar

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Literature and Science 1

Science Essay

Learn How to Write an A+ Science Essay

11 min read

What Is a Science Essay?

A science essay is an academic paper focusing on a scientific topic from physics, chemistry, biology, or any other scientific field.

Science essays are mostly expository. That is, they require you to explain your chosen topic in detail. However, they can also be descriptive and exploratory.

A descriptive science essay aims to describe a certain scientific phenomenon according to established knowledge.

On the other hand, the exploratory science essay requires you to go beyond the current theories and explore new interpretations.

So before you set out to write your essay, always check out the instructions given by your instructor. Whether a science essay is expository or exploratory must be clear from the start. Or, if you face any difficulty, you can take help from a science essay writer as well.

Moreover, check out this video to understand scientific writing in detail.

Now that you know what it is, let's look at the steps you need to take to write a science essay.

Paper Due? Why Suffer? That's our Job!

How To Write a Science Essay?

Writing a science essay is not as complex as it may seem. All you need to do is follow the right steps to create an impressive piece of work that meets the assigned criteria.

Here's what you need to do:

Choose Your Topic

A good topic forms the foundation for an engaging and well-written essay. Therefore, you should ensure that you pick something interesting or relevant to your field of study.

To choose a good topic, you can brainstorm ideas relating to the subject matter. You may also find inspiration from other science essays or articles about the same topic.

Conduct Research

Once you have chosen your topic, start researching it thoroughly to develop a strong argument or discussion in your essay.

Make sure you use reliable sources and cite them properly . You should also make notes while conducting your research so that you can reference them easily when writing the essay. Or, you can get expert assistance from an essay writing service to manage your citations.

Create an Outline

A good essay outline helps to organize the ideas in your paper. It serves as a guide throughout the writing process and ensures you don’t miss out on important points.

An outline makes it easier to write a well-structured paper that flows logically. It should be detailed enough to guide you through the entire writing process.

However, your outline should be flexible, and it's sometimes better to change it along the way to improve your structure.

Start Writing

Once you have a good outline, start writing the essay by following your plan.

The first step in writing any essay is to draft it. This means putting your thoughts down on paper in a rough form without worrying about grammar or spelling mistakes.

So begin your essay by introducing the topic, then carefully explain it using evidence and examples to support your argument.

Don't worry if your first draft isn't perfect - it's just the starting point!

Proofread & Edit

After finishing your first draft, take time to proofread and edit it for grammar and spelling mistakes.

Proofreading is the process of checking for grammatical mistakes. It should be done after you have finished writing your essay.

Editing, on the other hand, involves reviewing the structure and organization of your essay and its content. It should be done before you submit your final work.

Both proofreading and editing are essential for producing a high-quality essay. Make sure to give yourself enough time to do them properly!

After revising the essay, you should format it according to the guidelines given by your instructor. This could involve using a specific font size, page margins, or citation style.

Most science essays are written in Times New Roman font with 12-point size and double spacing. The margins should be 1 inch on all sides, and the text should be justified.

In addition, you must cite your sources properly using a recognized citation style such as APA , Chicago , or Harvard . Make sure to follow the guidelines closely so that your essay looks professional.

Following these steps will help you create an informative and well-structured science essay that meets the given criteria.

Tough Essay Due? Hire Tough Writers!

How to Structure a Science Essay?

A basic science essay structure includes an introduction, body, and conclusion.

Let's look at each of these briefly.

Introduction

Your essay introduction should introduce your topic and provide a brief overview of what you will discuss in the essay. It should also state your thesis or main argument.

For instance, a thesis statement for a science essay could be,

"The human body is capable of incredible feats, as evidenced by the many athletes who have competed in the Olympic games."

The body of your essay will contain the bulk of your argument or discussion. It should be divided into paragraphs, each discussing a different point.

For instance, imagine you were writing about sports and the human body.

Your first paragraph can discuss the physical capabilities of the human body.

The second paragraph may be about the physical benefits of competing in sports.

Similarly, in the third paragraph, you can present one or two case studies of specific athletes to support your point.

Once you have explained all your points in the body, it’s time to conclude the essay.

Your essay conclusion should summarize the main points of your essay and leave the reader with a sense of closure.

In the conclusion, you reiterate your thesis and sum up your arguments. You can also suggest implications or potential applications of the ideas discussed in the essay.

By following this structure, you will create a well-organized essay.

Check out a few example essays to see this structure in practice.

Science Essay Examples

A great way to get inspired when writing a science essay is to look at other examples of successful essays written by others.

Here are some examples that will give you an idea of how to write your essay.

Science Essay About Genetics - Science Essay Example

Environmental Science Essay Example | PDF Sample

The Science of Nanotechnology

Science, Non-Science, and Pseudo-Science

The Science Of Science Education

Science in our Daily Lives

Short Science Essay Example

Let’s take a look at a short science essay:

Want to read more essay examples? Here, you can find more science essay examples to learn from.

How to Choose the Right Science Essay Topic

Choosing the right science essay topic is a critical first step in crafting a compelling and engaging essay. Here's a concise guide on how to make this decision wisely:

Consider Your Interests: Start by reflecting on your personal interests within the realm of science. Selecting a topic that genuinely fascinates you will make the research and writing process more enjoyable and motivated.
Relevance to the Course: Ensure that your chosen topic aligns with your course or assignment requirements. Read the assignment guidelines carefully to understand the scope and focus expected by your instructor.
Current Trends and Issues: Stay updated with the latest scientific developments and trends. Opting for a topic that addresses contemporary issues not only makes your essay relevant but also demonstrates your awareness of current events in the field.
Narrow Down the Scope: Science is vast, so narrow your topic to a manageable scope. Instead of a broad subject like "Climate Change," consider a more specific angle like "The Impact of Melting Arctic Ice on Global Sea Levels."
Available Resources: Ensure that there are sufficient credible sources and research materials available for your chosen topic. A lack of resources can hinder your research efforts.
Discuss with Your Instructor: If you're uncertain about your topic choice, don't hesitate to consult your instructor or professor. They can provide valuable guidance and may even suggest specific topics based on your academic goals.

Science Essay Topics

Choosing an appropriate topic for a science essay is one of the first steps in writing a successful paper.

Here are a few science essay topics to get you started:

How space exploration affects our daily lives?
How has technology changed our understanding of medicine?
Are there ethical considerations to consider when conducting scientific research?
How does climate change affect the biodiversity of different parts of the world?
How can artificial intelligence be used in medicine?
What impact have vaccines had on global health?
What is the future of renewable energy?
How do we ensure that genetically modified organisms are safe for humans and the environment?
The influence of social media on human behavior: A social science perspective
What are the potential risks and benefits of stem cell therapy?

Important science topics can cover anything from space exploration to chemistry and biology. So you can choose any topic according to your interests!

Need more topics? We have gathered 100+ science essay topics to help you find a great topic!

Continue reading to find some tips to help you write a successful science essay.

Science Essay Writing Tips

Once you have chosen a topic and looked at examples, it's time to start writing the science essay.

Here are some key tips for a successful essay:

Research thoroughly

Make sure you do extensive research before you begin writing your paper. This will ensure that the facts and figures you include are accurate and supported by reliable sources.

Use clear language

Avoid using jargon or overly technical language when writing your essay. Plain language is easier to understand and more engaging for readers.

Referencing

Always provide references for any information you include in your essay. This will demonstrate that you acknowledge other people's work and show that the evidence you use is credible.

Make sure to follow the basic structure of an essay and organize your thoughts into clear sections. This will improve the flow and make your essay easier to read.

Ask someone to proofread

It’s also a good idea to get someone else to proofread your work as they may spot mistakes that you have missed.

These few tips will help ensure that your science essay is well-written and informative!

You've learned the steps to writing a successful science essay and looked at some examples and topics to get you started.

Make sure you thoroughly research, use clear language, structure your thoughts, and proofread your essay. With these tips, you’re sure to write a great science essay!

Do you still need expert help writing a science essay? Our science essay writing service is here to help. With our team of professional writers, you can rest assured that your essay will be written to the highest standards.

Contact our essay service now to get started!

Also, do not forget to try our essay typer tool for quick and cost-free aid with your essays!

Write Essay Within 60 Seconds!

Betty is a freelance writer and researcher. She has a Masters in literature and enjoys providing writing services to her clients. Betty is an avid reader and loves learning new things. She has provided writing services to clients from all academic levels and related academic fields.

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Keep reading

How Does Writing Fit Into the ‘Science of Reading’?

In one sense, the national conversation about what it will take to make sure all children become strong readers has been wildly successful: States are passing legislation supporting evidence-based teaching approaches , and school districts are rushing to supply training. Publishers are under pressure to drop older materials . And for the first time in years, an instructional issue—reading—is headlining education media coverage.

In the middle of all that, though, the focus on the “science of reading” has elided its twin component in literacy instruction: writing.

Writing is intrinsically important for all students to learn—after all, it is the primary way beyond speech that humans communicate. But more than that, research suggests that teaching students to write in an integrated fashion with reading is not only efficient, it’s effective.

Yet writing is often underplayed in the elementary grades. Too often, it is separated from schools’ reading block. Writing is not assessed as frequently as reading, and principals, worried about reading-exam scores, direct teachers to focus on one often at the expense of the other. Finally, beyond the English/language arts block, kids often aren’t asked to do much writing in early grades.

“Sometimes, in an early-literacy classroom, you’ll hear a teacher say, ‘It’s time to pick up your pencils,’” said Wiley Blevins, an author and literacy consultant who provides training in schools. “But your pencils should be in your hand almost the entire morning.”

Strikingly, many of the critiques that reading researchers have made against the “balanced literacy” approach that has held sway in schools for decades could equally apply to writing instruction: Foundational writing skills—like phonics and language structure—have not generally been taught systematically or explicitly.

And like the “find the main idea” strategies commonly taught in reading comprehension, writing instruction has tended to focus on content-neutral tasks, rather than deepening students’ connections to the content they learn.

Education Week wants to bring more attention to these connections in the stories that make up this special collection . But first, we want to delve deeper into the case for including writing in every step of the elementary curriculum.

Why has writing been missing from the reading conversation?

Much like the body of knowledge on how children learn to read words, it is also settled science that reading and writing draw on shared knowledge, even though they have traditionally been segmented in instruction.

“The body of research is substantial in both number of studies and quality of studies. There’s no question that reading and writing share a lot of real estate, they depend on a lot of the same knowledge and skills,” said Timothy Shanahan, an emeritus professor of education at the University of Illinois Chicago. “Pick your spot: text structure, vocabulary, sound-symbol relationships, ‘world knowledge.’”

The reasons for the bifurcation in reading and writing are legion. One is that the two fields have typically been studied separately. (Researchers studying writing usually didn’t examine whether a writing intervention, for instance, also aided students’ reading abilities—and vice versa.)

Some scholars also finger the dominance of the federally commissioned National Reading Panel report, which in 2000 outlined key instructional components of learning to read. The review didn’t examine the connection of writing to reading.

Looking even further back yields insights, too. Penmanship and spelling were historically the only parts of writing that were taught, and when writing reappeared in the latter half of the 20th century, it tended to focus on “process writing,” emphasizing personal experience and story generation over other genres. Only when the Common Core State Standards appeared in 2010 did the emphasis shift to writing about nonfiction texts and across subjects—the idea that students should be writing about what they’ve learned.

And finally, teaching writing is hard. Few studies document what preparation teachers receive to teach writing, but in surveys, many teachers say they received little training in their college education courses. That’s probably why only a little over half of teachers, in one 2016 survey, said that they enjoyed teaching writing.

Writing should begin in the early grades

These factors all work against what is probably the most important conclusion from the research over the last few decades: Students in the early-elementary grades need lots of varied opportunities to write.

“Students need support in their writing,” said Dana Robertson, an associate professor of reading and literacy education at the school of education at Virginia Tech who also studies how instructional change takes root in schools. “They need to be taught explicitly the skills and strategies of writing and they need to see the connections of reading, writing, and knowledge development.”

While research supports some fundamental tenets of writing instruction—that it should be structured, for instance, and involve drafting and revising—it hasn’t yet pointed to a specific teaching recipe that works best.

One of the challenges, the researchers note, is that while reading curricula have improved over the years, they still don’t typically provide many supports for students—or teachers, for that matter—for writing. Teachers often have to supplement with additions that don’t always mesh well with their core, grade-level content instruction.

“We have a lot of activities in writing we know are good,” Shanahan said. “We don’t really have a yearlong elementary-school-level curriculum in writing. That just doesn’t exist the way it does in reading.”

Nevertheless, practitioners like Blevins work writing into every reading lesson, even in the earliest grades. And all the components that make up a solid reading program can be enhanced through writing activities.

4 Key Things to Know About How Reading and Writing Interlock

Want a quick summary of what research tells us about the instructional connections between reading and writing?

1. Reading and writing are intimately connected.

Research on the connections began in the early 1980s and has grown more robust with time.

Among the newest and most important additions are three research syntheses conducted by Steve Graham, a professor at the University of Arizona, and his research partners. One of them examined whether writing instruction also led to improvements in students’ reading ability; a second examined the inverse question. Both found significant positive effects for reading and writing.

A third meta-analysis gets one step closer to classroom instruction. Graham and partners examined 47 studies of instructional programs that balanced both reading and writing—no program could feature more than 60 percent of one or the other. The results showed generally positive effects on both reading and writing measures.

2. Writing matters even at the earliest grades, when students are learning to read.

Studies show that the prewriting students do in early education carries meaningful signals about their decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension later on. Reading experts say that students should be supported in writing almost as soon as they begin reading, and evidence suggests that both spelling and handwriting are connected to the ability to connect speech to print and to oral language development.

3. Like reading, writing must be taught explicitly.

Writing is a complex task that demands much of students’ cognitive resources. Researchers generally agree that writing must be explicitly taught—rather than left up to students to “figure out” the rules on their own.

There isn’t as much research about how precisely to do this. One 2019 review, in fact, found significant overlap among the dozen writing programs studied, and concluded that all showed signs of boosting learning. Debates abound about the amount of structure students need and in what sequence, such as whether they need to master sentence construction before moving onto paragraphs and lengthier texts.

But in general, students should be guided on how to construct sentences and paragraphs, and they should have access to models and exemplars, the research suggests. They also need to understand the iterative nature of writing, including how to draft and revise.

A number of different writing frameworks incorporating various degrees of structure and modeling are available, though most of them have not been studied empirically.

4. Writing can help students learn content—and make sense of it.

Much of reading comprehension depends on helping students absorb “world knowledge”—think arts, ancient cultures, literature, and science—so that they can make sense of increasingly sophisticated texts and ideas as their reading improves. Writing can enhance students’ content learning, too, and should be emphasized rather than taking a back seat to the more commonly taught stories and personal reflections.

Graham and colleagues conducted another meta-analysis of nearly 60 studies looking at this idea of “writing to learn” in mathematics, science, and social studies. The studies included a mix of higher-order assignments, like analyses and argumentative writing, and lower-level ones, like summarizing and explaining. The study found that across all three disciplines, writing about the content improved student learning.

If students are doing work on phonemic awareness—the ability to recognize sounds—they shouldn’t merely manipulate sounds orally; they can put them on the page using letters. If students are learning how to decode, they can also encode—record written letters and words while they say the sounds out loud.

And students can write as they begin learning about language structure. When Blevins’ students are mainly working with decodable texts with controlled vocabularies, writing can support their knowledge about how texts and narratives work: how sentences are put together and how they can be pulled apart and reconstructed. Teachers can prompt them in these tasks, asking them to rephrase a sentence as a question, split up two sentences, or combine them.

“Young kids are writing these mile-long sentences that become second nature. We set a higher bar, and they are fully capable of doing it. We can demystify a bit some of that complex text if we develop early on how to talk about sentences—how they’re created, how they’re joined,” Blevins said. “There are all these things you can do that are helpful to develop an understanding of how sentences work and to get lots of practice.”

As students progress through the elementary grades, this structured work grows more sophisticated. They need to be taught both sentence and paragraph structure , and they need to learn how different writing purposes and genres—narrative, persuasive, analytical—demand different approaches. Most of all, the research indicates, students need opportunities to write at length often.

Using writing to support students’ exploration of content

Reading is far more than foundational skills, of course. It means introducing students to rich content and the specialized vocabulary in each discipline and then ensuring that they read, discuss, analyze, and write about those ideas. The work to systematically build students’ knowledge begins in the early grades and progresses throughout their K-12 experience.

Here again, available evidence suggests that writing can be a useful tool to help students explore, deepen, and draw connections in this content. With the proper supports, writing can be a method for students to retell and analyze what they’ve learned in discussions of content and literature throughout the school day —in addition to their creative writing.

This “writing to learn” approach need not wait for students to master foundational skills. In the K-2 grades especially, much content is learned through teacher read-alouds and conversation that include more complex vocabulary and ideas than the texts students are capable of reading. But that should not preclude students from writing about this content, experts say.

“We do a read-aloud or a media piece and we write about what we learned. It’s just a part of how you’re responding, or sharing, what you’ve learned across texts; it’s not a separate thing from reading,” Blevins said. “If I am doing read-alouds on a concept—on animal habitats, for example—my decodable texts will be on animals. And students are able to include some of these more sophisticated ideas and language in their writing, because we’ve elevated the conversations around these texts.”

In this set of stories , Education Week examines the connections between elementary-level reading and writing in three areas— encoding , language and text structure , and content-area learning . But there are so many more examples.

Please write us to share yours when you’ve finished.

Want to read more about the research that informed this story? Here’s a bibliography to start you off.

Berninger V. W., Abbott, R. D., Abbott, S. P., Graham S., & Richards T. (2002). Writing and reading: Connections between language by hand and language by eye. J ournal of Learning Disabilities. Special Issue: The Language of Written Language, 35(1), 39–56 Berninger, Virginia, Robert D. Abbott, Janine Jones, Beverly J. Wolf, Laura Gould, Marci Anderson-Younstrom, Shirley Shimada, Kenn Apel. (2006) “Early development of language by hand: composing, reading, listening, and speaking connections; three letter-writing modes; and fast mapping in spelling.” Developmental Neuropsychology, 29(1), pp. 61-92 Cabell, Sonia Q, Laura S. Tortorelli, and Hope K. Gerde (2013). “How Do I Write…? Scaffolding Preschoolers’ Early Writing Skills.” The Reading Teacher, 66(8), pp. 650-659. Gerde, H.K., Bingham, G.E. & Wasik, B.A. (2012). “Writing in Early Childhood Classrooms: Guidance for Best Practices.” Early Childhood Education Journal 40, 351–359 (2012) Gilbert, Jennifer, and Steve Graham. (2010). “Teaching Writing to Elementary Students in Grades 4–6: A National Survey.” The Elementary School Journal 110(44) Graham, Steve, et al. (2017). “Effectiveness of Literacy Programs Balancing Reading and Writing Instruction: A Meta-Analysis.” Reading Research Quarterly, 53(3) pp. 279–304 Graham, Steve, and Michael Hebert. (2011). “Writing to Read: A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Writing and Writing Instruction on Reading.” Harvard Educational Review (2011) 81(4): 710–744. Graham, Steve. (2020). “The Sciences of Reading and Writing Must Become More Fully Integrated.” Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1) pp. S35–S44 Graham, Steve, Sharlene A. Kiuhara, and Meade MacKay. (2020).”The Effects of Writing on Learning in Science, Social Studies, and Mathematics: A Meta-Analysis.” Review of Educational Research April 2020, Vol 90, No. 2, pp. 179–226 Shanahan, Timothy. “History of Writing and Reading Connections.” in Shanahan, Timothy. (2016). “Relationships between reading and writing development.” In C. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (2nd ed., pp. 194–207). New York, NY: Guilford. Slavin, Robert, Lake, C., Inns, A., Baye, A., Dachet, D., & Haslam, J. (2019). “A quantitative synthesis of research on writing approaches in grades 2 to 12.” London: Education Endowment Foundation. Troia, Gary. (2014). Evidence-based practices for writing instruction (Document No. IC-5). Retrieved from University of Florida, Collaboration for Effective Educator, Development, Accountability, and Reform Center website: http://ceedar.education.ufl.edu/tools/innovation-configuration/ Troia, Gary, and Steve Graham. (2016).“Common Core Writing and Language Standards and Aligned State Assessments: A National Survey of Teacher Beliefs and Attitudes.” Reading and Writing 29(9).

A version of this article appeared in the January 25, 2023 edition of Education Week as How Does Writing Fit Into the ‘Science of Reading’?

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Essay on Science for Students and Children

500+ words essay on science.

Essay on science: As we look back in our ancient times we see so much development in the world. The world is full of gadgets and machinery . Machinery does everything in our surroundings. How did it get possible? How did we become so modern? It was all possible with the help of science. Science has played a major role in the development of our society. Furthermore, Science has made our lives easier and carefree.

Science in our Daily Lives

As I have mentioned earlier Science has got many changes in our lives. First of all, transportation is easier now. With the help of Science it now easier to travel long distances . Moreover, the time of traveling is also reduced. Various high-speed vehicles are available these days. These vehicles have totally changed. The phase of our society. Science upgraded steam engines to electric engines. In earlier times people were traveling with cycles. But now everybody travels on motorcycles and cars. This saves time and effort. And this is all possible with the help of Science.

Secondly, Science made us reach to the moon. But we never stopped there. It also gave us a glance at Mars. This is one of the greatest achievements. This was only possible with Science. These days Scientists make many satellites . Because of which we are using high-speed Internet. These satellites revolve around the earth every day and night. Even without making us aware of it. Science is the backbone of our society. Science gave us so much in our present time. Due to this, the teacher in our schools teaches Science from an early age.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Science as a Subject

In class 1 only a student has Science as a subject. This only tells us about the importance of Science. Science taught us about Our Solar System. The Solar System consists of 9 planets and the Sun. Most Noteworthy was that it also tells us about the origin of our planet. Above all, we cannot deny that Science helps us in shaping our future. But not only it tells us about our future, but it also tells us about our past.

When the student reaches class 6, Science gets divided into three more subcategories. These subcategories were Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. First of all, Physics taught us about the machines. Physics is an interesting subject. It is a logical subject.

Furthermore, the second subject was Chemistry . Chemistry is a subject that deals with an element found inside the earth. Even more, it helps in making various products. Products like medicine and cosmetics etc. result in human benefits.

Last but not least, the subject of Biology . Biology is a subject that teaches us about our Human body. It tells us about its various parts. Furthermore, it even teaches the students about cells. Cells are present in human blood. Science is so advanced that it did let us know even that.

Leading Scientists in the field of Science

Finally, many scientists like Thomas Edison , Sir Isaac Newton were born in this world. They have done great Inventions. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. If he did not invent that we would stay in dark. Because of this Thomas Edison’s name marks in history.

Another famous Scientist was Sir Isaac Newton . Sir Isaac Newton told us about Gravity. With the help of this, we were able to discover many other theories.

In India Scientists A..P.J Abdul was there. He contributed much towards our space research and defense forces. He made many advanced missiles. These Scientists did great work and we will always remember them.

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21 May 2024

Pay researchers to spot errors in published papers

Malte Elson 0

Malte Elson is an associate professor of the psychology of digitalization at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

You have full access to this article via your institution.

In 2023, Google awarded a total of US$10 million to researchers who found vulnerabilities in its products. Why? Because allowing errors to go undetected could be much costlier. Data breaches could lead to refund claims, reduced customer trust or legal liability.

It’s not just private technology companies that invest in such ‘bug bounty’ programmes. Between 2016 and 2021, the US Department of Defense awarded more than US$650,000 to people who found weaknesses in its networks .

Just as many industries devote hefty funding to incentivizing people to find and report bugs and glitches, so the science community should reward the detection and correction of errors in the scientific literature. In our industry, too, the costs of undetected errors are staggering.

Retractions are increasing, but not enough

That’s why I have joined with meta-scientist Ian Hussey at the University of Bern and psychologist Ruben Arslan at Leipzig University in Germany to pilot a bug-bounty programme for science, funded by the University of Bern. Our project, Estimating the Reliability and Robustness of Research (ERROR), pays specialists to check highly cited published papers, starting with the social and behavioural sciences (see go.nature.com/4bmlvkj ). Our reviewers are paid a base rate of up to 1,000 Swiss francs (around US$1,100) for each paper they check, and a bonus for any errors they find. The bigger the error, the greater the reward — up to a maximum of 2,500 francs.

Authors who let us scrutinize their papers are compensated, too: 250 francs to cover the work needed to prepare files or answer reviewer queries, and a bonus 250 francs if no errors (or only minor ones) are found in their work.

ERROR launched in February and will run for at least four years. So far, we have sent out almost 60 invitations, and 13 sets of authors have agreed to have their papers assessed. One review has been completed , revealing minor errors.

I hope that the project will demonstrate the value of systematic processes to detect errors in published research. I am convinced that such systems are needed, because current checks are insufficient.

Structure peer review to make it more robust

Unpaid peer reviewers are overburdened , and have little incentive to painstakingly examine survey responses, comb through lists of DNA sequences or cell lines, or go through computer code line by line. Mistakes frequently slip through. And researchers have little to gain personally from sifting through published papers looking for errors. There is no financial compensation for highlighting errors , and doing so can see people marked out as troublemakers.

Yet failing to keep abreast of this issue comes at a huge cost. Imagine a single PhD student building their work on an erroneous finding. In Switzerland, their cumulative salary alone will run to six figures. Flawed research that is translated into health care, policymaking or engineering can harm people. And there are opportunity costs — for every grant awarded to a project unknowingly building on errors, another project is not pursued.

Like technology companies, stakeholders in science must realize that making error detection and correction part of the scientific landscape is a sound investment.

Funders, for instance, have a vested interest in ensuring that the money that they distribute as grants is not wasted. Publishers stand to improve their reputations by ensuring that some of their resources are spent on quality management. And, by supporting these endeavours, scientific associations could help to foster a culture in which acknowledgement of errors is considered normal — or even commendable — and not a mark of shame.

How ‘research impact bonds’ could transform science funding

I know that ERROR is a bold experiment. Some researchers might have qualms. I’ve been asked whether reviewers might exaggerate the gravity of errors in pursuit of a large bug bounty, or attempt to smear a colleague they dislike. It’s possible, but hyperbole would be a gamble, given that all reviewer reports are published on our website and are not anonymized. And we guard against exaggeration. A ‘recommender’ from among ERROR’s staff and advisory board members — none of whom receive a bounty — acts as an intermediary, weighing up reviewer findings and author responses before deciding on the payout.

Another fair criticism is that ERROR’s paper selection will be biased. The ERROR team picks papers that are highly cited and checks them only if the authors agree to it. Authors who suspect their work might not withstand scrutiny could be less likely to opt in. But selecting papers at random would introduce a different bias, because we would be able to assess only those for which some minimal amount of data and code was freely available. And we’d spend precious resources checking some low-impact papers that only a few people build research on.

My goal is not to prove that a bug-bounty programme is the best mechanism for correcting errors, or that it is applicable to all science. Rather, I want to start a conversation about the need for dedicated investment in error detection and correction. There are alternatives to bug bounties — for instance, making error detection its own viable career path and hiring full-time scientific staff to check each institute’s papers. Of course, care would be needed to ensure that such schemes benefited researchers around the world equally.

Scholars can’t expect errors to go away by themselves. Science can be self-correcting — but only if we invest in making it so.

Nature 629 , 730 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01465-y

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The author declares no competing interests.

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What I’ve Learned From My Students’ College Essays

The genre is often maligned for being formulaic and melodramatic, but it’s more important than you think.

An illustration of a high school student with blue hair, dreaming of what to write in their college essay.

By Nell Freudenberger

Most high school seniors approach the college essay with dread. Either their upbringing hasn’t supplied them with several hundred words of adversity, or worse, they’re afraid that packaging the genuine trauma they’ve experienced is the only way to secure their future. The college counselor at the Brooklyn high school where I’m a writing tutor advises against trauma porn. “Keep it brief , ” she says, “and show how you rose above it.”

I started volunteering in New York City schools in my 20s, before I had kids of my own. At the time, I liked hanging out with teenagers, whom I sometimes had more interesting conversations with than I did my peers. Often I worked with students who spoke English as a second language or who used slang in their writing, and at first I was hung up on grammar. Should I correct any deviation from “standard English” to appeal to some Wizard of Oz behind the curtains of a college admissions office? Or should I encourage students to write the way they speak, in pursuit of an authentic voice, that most elusive of literary qualities?

In fact, I was missing the point. One of many lessons the students have taught me is to let the story dictate the voice of the essay. A few years ago, I worked with a boy who claimed to have nothing to write about. His life had been ordinary, he said; nothing had happened to him. I asked if he wanted to try writing about a family member, his favorite school subject, a summer job? He glanced at his phone, his posture and expression suggesting that he’d rather be anywhere but in front of a computer with me. “Hobbies?” I suggested, without much hope. He gave me a shy glance. “I like to box,” he said.

I’ve had this experience with reluctant writers again and again — when a topic clicks with a student, an essay can unfurl spontaneously. Of course the primary goal of a college essay is to help its author get an education that leads to a career. Changes in testing policies and financial aid have made applying to college more confusing than ever, but essays have remained basically the same. I would argue that they’re much more than an onerous task or rote exercise, and that unlike standardized tests they are infinitely variable and sometimes beautiful. College essays also provide an opportunity to learn precision, clarity and the process of working toward the truth through multiple revisions.

When a topic clicks with a student, an essay can unfurl spontaneously.

Even if writing doesn’t end up being fundamental to their future professions, students learn to choose language carefully and to be suspicious of the first words that come to mind. Especially now, as college students shoulder so much of the country’s ethical responsibility for war with their protest movement, essay writing teaches prospective students an increasingly urgent lesson: that choosing their own words over ready-made phrases is the only reliable way to ensure they’re thinking for themselves.

Teenagers are ideal writers for several reasons. They’re usually free of preconceptions about writing, and they tend not to use self-consciously ‘‘literary’’ language. They’re allergic to hypocrisy and are generally unfiltered: They overshare, ask personal questions and call you out for microaggressions as well as less egregious (but still mortifying) verbal errors, such as referring to weed as ‘‘pot.’’ Most important, they have yet to put down their best stories in a finished form.

I can imagine an essay taking a risk and distinguishing itself formally — a poem or a one-act play — but most kids use a more straightforward model: a hook followed by a narrative built around “small moments” that lead to a concluding lesson or aspiration for the future. I never get tired of working with students on these essays because each one is different, and the short, rigid form sometimes makes an emotional story even more powerful. Before I read Javier Zamora’s wrenching “Solito,” I worked with a student who had been transported by a coyote into the U.S. and was reunited with his mother in the parking lot of a big-box store. I don’t remember whether this essay focused on specific skills or coping mechanisms that he gained from his ordeal. I remember only the bliss of the parent-and-child reunion in that uninspiring setting. If I were making a case to an admissions officer, I would suggest that simply being able to convey that experience demonstrates the kind of resilience that any college should admire.

The essays that have stayed with me over the years don’t follow a pattern. There are some narratives on very predictable topics — living up to the expectations of immigrant parents, or suffering from depression in 2020 — that are moving because of the attention with which the student describes the experience. One girl determined to become an engineer while watching her father build furniture from scraps after work; a boy, grieving for his mother during lockdown, began taking pictures of the sky.

If, as Lorrie Moore said, “a short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage,” what is a college essay? Every once in a while I sit down next to a student and start reading, and I have to suppress my excitement, because there on the Google Doc in front of me is a real writer’s voice. One of the first students I ever worked with wrote about falling in love with another girl in dance class, the absolute magic of watching her move and the terror in the conflict between her feelings and the instruction of her religious middle school. She made me think that college essays are less like love than limerence: one-sided, obsessive, idiosyncratic but profound, the first draft of the most personal story their writers will ever tell.

Nell Freudenberger’s novel “The Limits” was published by Knopf last month. She volunteers through the PEN America Writers in the Schools program.

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Victorians and Victorian Literature Abroad—Special Issue Call For Papers

Victorian globetrotters were of different shapes and types, be they men or women of letters, scientists (such as geologists and plant collectors), artists, photographers, diplomats, military officers or soldiers, merchants or traders, medics, missionaries, or simply leisure tourists. Diverse as they were, they crossed national boundaries and travelled to far-off places worldwide. Victorian writings recorded their footprints and grasp of the world outside their homeland also break the geographical and cultural barriers. Among the best-known are Charles Dickens’s American Notes and Pictures of Italy , John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice , Charles Darwin’s Voyages , R. L. Stevenson’s In the South Seas , Harriet Martineau’s Retrospect of Western Travel , Isabella L. Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan , just to name a few. Publishers such as John Murray, renowned for travel books, and periodicals such as Punch produced a prodigious amount of works related to other countries. Significantly, the many fictional narratives, personal diaries, travelogues, and journalistic publications have been inscribed with rich biographical and historical contexts, vigorous imaginativeness, and opportunities for cultural exchanges past and present. Readers are lured to travel to the “Victorian” world and to consider the numerous encounters with “abroad.” Meanwhile, Victorian Literature’s rich spatial and temporal distinctions also allow for extensions and afterlives in forms such as translation, adaptation and recreation in other countries or foreign languages. Victorian scholarship has thus attracted new critical focus in recent years. This special issue seeks contributions relating to the history and depictions of Victorian authors regarding travel, appraisals and revisiting from global perspectives, including how they are being received or taught outside the UK.

The Special Issue No. 59 of Sun Yat-Sen Journal of Humanities , to be published July 2025 (Submission deadline 28 February 2025), invites scholarly essays to explore Victorians and Victorian Literature Abroad. Topics may include but are not limited to:

Victorian Literary Writers who Travelled Abroad and their Writings

Victorians Abroad and their Writings (Travelogues, Tales, Correspondences, Diaries, Memoirs)

Travels and Travellers in the Victorian Novel

Travel Writings and Illustrations in Victorian Periodicals

Victorian Women’s Travel Writings

Scientists, Medics, Missionaries, their Works, Reflections, and Impacts

Reception of Victorian Literature by Other Countries or Cultures Then/ After

Imperial Gaze, Cultural Interventions, Conflicts and Assimilations

Time Traveller, Armchair Traveller, Imaginative Traveller

Literary or Commercial Travel Writings

Teaching Victorian Literature Outside British Isles

Translations, Adaptations, Recreations in Other Countries or Foreign Languages.

New Critical or Theoretical Focus, Pedagogical Approaches, Virtual Reality

Manuscripts should be between 7500—10,000 words and follow The MLA Manual of Style. Please submit one electronic copy, a 500-word abstract (as an attachment in Word), a short biography and contact information to [email protected] and cc to the guest editors:

Professor Shu-Fang Lai, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan; [email protected]

Professor Fumie Tamai, Faculty of Global Communications, Doshisha University, Japan; [email protected]

For more details about the journal, see https://rpb17.nsysu.edu.tw/app/index.php

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Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning

Jonathan Lambert

A close-up of a woman's hand writing in a notebook.

If you're like many digitally savvy Americans, it has likely been a while since you've spent much time writing by hand.

The laborious process of tracing out our thoughts, letter by letter, on the page is becoming a relic of the past in our screen-dominated world, where text messages and thumb-typed grocery lists have replaced handwritten letters and sticky notes. Electronic keyboards offer obvious efficiency benefits that have undoubtedly boosted our productivity — imagine having to write all your emails longhand.

To keep up, many schools are introducing computers as early as preschool, meaning some kids may learn the basics of typing before writing by hand.

But giving up this slower, more tactile way of expressing ourselves may come at a significant cost, according to a growing body of research that's uncovering the surprising cognitive benefits of taking pen to paper, or even stylus to iPad — for both children and adults.

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In kids, studies show that tracing out ABCs, as opposed to typing them, leads to better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to better conceptual understanding of material.

"There's actually some very important things going on during the embodied experience of writing by hand," says Ramesh Balasubramaniam , a neuroscientist at the University of California, Merced. "It has important cognitive benefits."

While those benefits have long been recognized by some (for instance, many authors, including Jennifer Egan and Neil Gaiman , draft their stories by hand to stoke creativity), scientists have only recently started investigating why writing by hand has these effects.

A slew of recent brain imaging research suggests handwriting's power stems from the relative complexity of the process and how it forces different brain systems to work together to reproduce the shapes of letters in our heads onto the page.

Your brain on handwriting

Both handwriting and typing involve moving our hands and fingers to create words on a page. But handwriting, it turns out, requires a lot more fine-tuned coordination between the motor and visual systems. This seems to more deeply engage the brain in ways that support learning.

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"Handwriting is probably among the most complex motor skills that the brain is capable of," says Marieke Longcamp , a cognitive neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille Université.

Gripping a pen nimbly enough to write is a complicated task, as it requires your brain to continuously monitor the pressure that each finger exerts on the pen. Then, your motor system has to delicately modify that pressure to re-create each letter of the words in your head on the page.

"Your fingers have to each do something different to produce a recognizable letter," says Sophia Vinci-Booher , an educational neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. Adding to the complexity, your visual system must continuously process that letter as it's formed. With each stroke, your brain compares the unfolding script with mental models of the letters and words, making adjustments to fingers in real time to create the letters' shapes, says Vinci-Booher.

That's not true for typing.

To type "tap" your fingers don't have to trace out the form of the letters — they just make three relatively simple and uniform movements. In comparison, it takes a lot more brainpower, as well as cross-talk between brain areas, to write than type.

Recent brain imaging studies bolster this idea. A study published in January found that when students write by hand, brain areas involved in motor and visual information processing " sync up " with areas crucial to memory formation, firing at frequencies associated with learning.

"We don't see that [synchronized activity] in typewriting at all," says Audrey van der Meer , a psychologist and study co-author at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She suggests that writing by hand is a neurobiologically richer process and that this richness may confer some cognitive benefits.

Other experts agree. "There seems to be something fundamental about engaging your body to produce these shapes," says Robert Wiley , a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "It lets you make associations between your body and what you're seeing and hearing," he says, which might give the mind more footholds for accessing a given concept or idea.

Those extra footholds are especially important for learning in kids, but they may give adults a leg up too. Wiley and others worry that ditching handwriting for typing could have serious consequences for how we all learn and think.

What might be lost as handwriting wanes

The clearest consequence of screens and keyboards replacing pen and paper might be on kids' ability to learn the building blocks of literacy — letters.

"Letter recognition in early childhood is actually one of the best predictors of later reading and math attainment," says Vinci-Booher. Her work suggests the process of learning to write letters by hand is crucial for learning to read them.

"When kids write letters, they're just messy," she says. As kids practice writing "A," each iteration is different, and that variability helps solidify their conceptual understanding of the letter.

Research suggests kids learn to recognize letters better when seeing variable handwritten examples, compared with uniform typed examples.

This helps develop areas of the brain used during reading in older children and adults, Vinci-Booher found.

"This could be one of the ways that early experiences actually translate to long-term life outcomes," she says. "These visually demanding, fine motor actions bake in neural communication patterns that are really important for learning later on."

Ditching handwriting instruction could mean that those skills don't get developed as well, which could impair kids' ability to learn down the road.

"If young children are not receiving any handwriting training, which is very good brain stimulation, then their brains simply won't reach their full potential," says van der Meer. "It's scary to think of the potential consequences."

Many states are trying to avoid these risks by mandating cursive instruction. This year, California started requiring elementary school students to learn cursive , and similar bills are moving through state legislatures in several states, including Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and Wisconsin. (So far, evidence suggests that it's the writing by hand that matters, not whether it's print or cursive.)

Slowing down and processing information

For adults, one of the main benefits of writing by hand is that it simply forces us to slow down.

During a meeting or lecture, it's possible to type what you're hearing verbatim. But often, "you're not actually processing that information — you're just typing in the blind," says van der Meer. "If you take notes by hand, you can't write everything down," she says.

The relative slowness of the medium forces you to process the information, writing key words or phrases and using drawing or arrows to work through ideas, she says. "You make the information your own," she says, which helps it stick in the brain.

Such connections and integration are still possible when typing, but they need to be made more intentionally. And sometimes, efficiency wins out. "When you're writing a long essay, it's obviously much more practical to use a keyboard," says van der Meer.

Still, given our long history of using our hands to mark meaning in the world, some scientists worry about the more diffuse consequences of offloading our thinking to computers.

"We're foisting a lot of our knowledge, extending our cognition, to other devices, so it's only natural that we've started using these other agents to do our writing for us," says Balasubramaniam.

It's possible that this might free up our minds to do other kinds of hard thinking, he says. Or we might be sacrificing a fundamental process that's crucial for the kinds of immersive cognitive experiences that enable us to learn and think at our full potential.

Balasubramaniam stresses, however, that we don't have to ditch digital tools to harness the power of handwriting. So far, research suggests that scribbling with a stylus on a screen activates the same brain pathways as etching ink on paper. It's the movement that counts, he says, not its final form.

Jonathan Lambert is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who covers science, health and policy.

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Early Practices, 1926–1978

The Conceptual Resources of History and Philosophy of Science

Reading Science

The Social Dimension

Weighing the Importance of Latour

Discussion of the Literature

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Literature and Science 1

Learn How to Write an A+ Science Essay

What Is a Science Essay?

How To Write a Science Essay?

Choose Your Topic

Conduct Research

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How to Structure a Science Essay?

Science Essay Examples

Short Science Essay Example

How to Choose the Right Science Essay Topic

Science Essay Topics

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How Does Writing Fit Into the ‘Science of Reading’?

Why has writing been missing from the reading conversation?

Writing should begin in the early grades

4 Key Things to Know About How Reading and Writing Interlock

Using writing to support students’ exploration of content

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Essay on Science for Students and Children

Science in our Daily Lives

Science as a Subject

Leading Scientists in the field of Science

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