Beyond the Two Cultures: Essays on Science, Technology, and Literature ed. by Joseph W. Slade and Judith Yaross Lee (review)

Book Reviews117 inaccessible archives in the Soviet Union. With the advent of glasnost there is a hope that the Ukrainian language will be allowed free development along with more freedom for the Ukrainian republic. The story of Ukrainian may still have a happy ending. DRAGAN MILIVOJEVIC University of Oklahoma JOSEPH W. SLADE and JUDITH YAROSS LEE, eds. Beyond the Two Cultures: Essays on Science, Technology, and Literature. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990. 308 p. In his 1959 Rede Lecture reprinted as The Two Cultures, C. P. Snow declared that "I believe the intellectual life ofthe whole ofwestern society is increasingly being split into two polar groups. . . . Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists" (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1959, 3-4). In the intervening decades a number ofboth "literary intellectuals" and scientists have decried Snow's polarity as being oversimplified and damaging, but the two cultures remain a powerful metaphor for different ways of viewing our world. In Beyond the Two Cultures Slade and Lee have collected fourteen diverse and thought-provoking essays originally delivered at the Conference on Science, Technology, and Literature at Long Island University in 1983. All ofthe essays were rewritten for this volume. The rationale of the conference informs the book, namely that science, technology, and literature intersect in at least three distinct but overlapping ways: 1) language is humankind's primal technology; 2) both science and technology generate their own texts; 3) literature reflects and shapes the psychological, social, political, and economic ramifications of science and technology (ix). The collection is broken into three major sections—"The Texts of Nature," "Quests for Paradigms," and "Literary Responses to Science and Technology." The first section is introduced by Marcia S. Yaross who discusses biological experiments with hydra organisms in which "heads" and "tails" are surgically grafted to the "wrong" ends, and yet the cells ofthe hydra soon " 'know' where they are relative to the extremities" (20). This "positional information," Yaross argues, has many textual implications, for "we find it impossible to describe these and other biological phenomena without borrowing terms from the study of literature." In the following essays Jeremy Campbell "demonstrates the unavoidable uncertainty that accompanies 'codebreaking' activities in both science and literature" (21), Stephen J. Weininger "illustrates how the simplifying assumptions underlying chemistry and physics have become metaphors," and Frederick Amrine "presents the work ofindividuals who take a holistic approach to nature, emphasizing aesthetics in a manner more commonly associated with the world of literature" (22). The second section begins with an essay by Judith Yaross Lee in which she discusses, following Thomas Kuhn, how "paradigms not only determine how sciences interpret what they see, but also influence what they look for and where they look for it in the first place" (75). The essays in this section 118Rocky Mountain Review by Linda S. Bergmann, Edmund Dehnert, and John Callahan "find new interactions among the disciplines by defining them more broadly. Foremost is the symbiosis of paradigm and literature: because paradigms shape perception and understanding, they also shape technical values and literary form" (76). The third section, by far the largest, contains four sub-sections—"Newtonian Mechanics and the Romantic Rebellion," "The Metaphorical Allure ofModern Physics," "Imaginative Responses to Mechanization," and "Scientists and Inventors as Literary Heroes." While all of the essays in these sections are interesting, among the more thought-provoking are Eric Zencey's "Entropy as Root Metaphor," and Lisa M. Steinman's " ? Poet's Handbook of Science': Technology and Modern American Poetics." Zencey argues that "the history of the idea of entropy is a history not only ofthe scientific development of an idea, but also of the application of that idea in fields far removed from thermodynamics and information theory. It is a history of a root metaphor in search ofstructural corroboration" (191). Steinman focuses on William Carlos Williams' and Marianne Moore's attempts to achieve a poetry that rested on an assumed analogy between technology and language and the difficulties that arose from that attempt, which, she claims, remain unresolved. This collection contains a number ofnoteworthy essays which move beyond the "two cultures" myth. Such a volume would certainly be of value in a Science, Technology, and Society course or...