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  • Science and Modernism: A Panel
  • Jessica Burstein

The truth may not set us free, but it does make for lively arguments. The following three papers were given at the 1995 Modern Language Association panel, “Science and Modernism.” Although the panelists did not consult each other in advance, the dialogue that emerges among these papers is remarkable. Both Christopher Herbert and George Levine bring Karl Pearson, the turn-of-the-century mathematician, eugenicist, and one of the “inventors” of modern statistics, into a controversy about the degree to which scientists taint their inquiry, and vice versa. Levine and Herbert both point out that Pearson’s negotiation of indeterminancy and his mapping out of the constructedness of normativity presages the much later critiques of Michel Foucault and French post-structuralism; the implication is that we still have much to learn from historical inquiry into the intellectual milieu of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Susan Squier’s anatomy of the embryo in modern literature outlines another mode of knowing—what are the means whereby science infects literature with truth claims, and literature infects science with the shapes of belief? The general question is how we negotiate the question of contagion in the hot zone of inquiry, be it science or literature.

Interdisciplinarity always brings methodological controversy to the foreground. How a gestalt from one discipline comes to know the gestalt next door is a major concern of historical criticism. Transmission, how information and structures migrate or are transmitted from some discrete body or field, from one walled-in area to another, whether those walls are made of protein or concrete, will always be most important to interdisciplinary studies.

I want especially to thank Robert Caserio, who originally convened the panel, and the Division on Late-Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century English Literature for assembling the panel and giving me the opportunity to chair it, and to present these papers.

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