Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge by Peter Swirski (review)

452 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Irish disturbance was not due to the Catholic Association, he argued, but to the fact that >there is one law for the rich, and another for the poor.= While supporting Catholic emancipation as less dangerous to the English than the alternative, he opposed the repeal of the Act of Union because England=s >deplorable misgovernment= had not prepared the Irish for the responsible exercise of political freedom. O=Connell, he thought, might be given a place in the project of political realignment that would give more power to the Radicals. (O=Connell thought that his fortunes lay elsewhere.) By 1846 the famine prompted Mill to write forty-three articles in the Morning Chronicle. Here he argued for an economic program which involved the reclamation of the wastelands and settlement of a peasant proprietary on the lands reclaimed as >a measure of social reform and moral regeneration.= Emigration, he said, was no answer to the famine partly because the Irish lacked the >individual hardihood, resource and self-reliance= necessary to thrive in a young country and partly because he believed that England bore a great moral stain for her treatment of Ireland that would not be addressed by embracing a policy of mass emigration. In the early years Mill offered economic and moral regeneration to shrink the economic muscle of the elite. Kinzer argues that when Mill ultimately calls for fixity of tenure in his 1868 pamphlet England and Ireland he is not departing from the moderation evidenced in various editions of the Principles of Political Economy between 1848 and 1865. Rather, Mill=s position evidences a >moral sensibility observable during the preceding two decades.= Kinzer suggests that >What made Mill a potentially combustible force on the Irish land question was his inveterate moral edginess.= The exodus from Ireland was a judgment on England, a >disgrace= which might call for >heroic remedies,= including, in the abstract, fixity of tenure. By 1868 Fenianism provided a new sense of urgency. Mill believed that despair rather than wickedness had driven the Fenians, even though he did not believe that separation from England was in Ireland=s interest. The one thing Ireland might gain from separation was the conversion of peasant farmers into peasant proprietors. This, Mill said, could be done within the Union. Now he advocated fixity of tenure, not just in theory, but in practice. This extreme measure was justified morally because England could not govern Ireland without the consent of the Irish people. The last opportunity to win Irish consent, Mill thought, had arrived. Kinzer demonstrates the continuity in Mill=s developing view of Ireland, driven consistently not by an imperialist creed but by a moral compass. This is a detailed and rich study by an eminent Mill scholar that makes an important contribution to our understanding of the Irish Question in the nineteenth century. (LORI LOEB) Peter Swirski. Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge humanities 453 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 McGill-Queen=s University Press 2000. xviii, 184. $60.00, $24.95 Peter Swirski=s book is difficult to review as a book B it=s really more a series of separate essays: Edgar Allan Poe=s >Purloined Letter= read via game theory; Poe=s Eureka taken as a straightforward work of serious philosophy; an interesting introduction to and interpretation of Polish writer Stanislaw Lem=s novel The Invincible; and a chapter extolling the utopian potential of self-motivated artificially intelligent computer-authors, or, to use Swirski=s neologism, >computhors.= (This last section, >The Future History of Biterature,= is only tangentially related to the other chapters, arising out of a markedly uncritical extrapolation of certain literalizations of Lem=s speculatively fictive ideas.) Between Literature and Science is thus more accurately described as an arbitrarily connected series of >explorations= in aesthetics, cognitive science, and, to a lesser extent, literary knowledge, announced in its subtitle. Swirski begins by critiquing the cliché of a vast epistemological distance separating >The Two Cultures.= But by the final chapter it is clear that Swirski, far...