SubStance

Paulson, William R., 1955-
For a Cosmopolitical Philology: Lessons from Science Studies
SubStance - Issue 96 (Volume 30, Number 3), 2001, pp. 101-119

University of Wisconsin Press

William R. Paulson - For a Cosmopolitical Philology: Lessons from Science Studies - SubStance 30:3 SubStance 30.3 (2001) 101-119 For a Cosmopolitical Philology: Lessons from Science Studies William Paulson The gradual institutionalization of "literature and science" as an academic subspecialty should not obscure the fact that its raison d'être is by no means obvious or settled. This is not a criticism: one of the field's advantages, at a time when "interdisciplinarity" has become a mind-numbing administrative cliché, should be that of provoking new thought about fundamental questions by forcing its practitioners to confront both the problems and possibilities of its unlikely coupling. The present paper is an attempt to contribute to this project by answering the question "what can the literary disciplines learn from science studies?" One crucial reason for doing "literature and science," at least for those of us on the literary side, is to help literary studies -- or philology, as I prefer to say -- fit into a world where nonhuman things matter, not least because science and technology are restructuring the human parts of the world by acting on the nonhuman ones. As soon as we leave the terrain of literary formalism and want to consider contexts, we encounter science, its objects, and its effects. It is therefore worth trying to understand how science, technology, and the things they work on are connected to (and indeed form an integral part of)...