Literature and Science in Europe, 1890-1950 (KU Leuven, Livestream)
Literature and Science in Europe, 1890-1950
10-11 February 2022 | Mgr. Sencie Institute, Arts Faculty
As part of the Literary Knowledge, 1890-1950: Modernisms and the Sciences in Europe project, this symposium seeks to address a simple question: what significant changes in the relation between science and literature in the modernist period (1890-1950) have either received too little attention, or have received a great deal of attention but require revision? The conference is to look at ‘literature’ and ‘science’ in a broad sense, charting practices and discourses in the sciences from the social sciences to the physical sciences, and approaching literature as writing aimed at a wide variety of audiences. It is also to pay special attention to whether (and if so, how) the rapid changes to the sciences in the modernist period led to corresponding alterations to the epistemic status of European literatures within the larger economy of knowledge production. In a series of plenary sessions with ample room for discussion invited speakers with expertise in a wide variety of European modernisms will be presenting. A provisional programme and the abstracts can be found below.
To attend a live-stream of the conference, please contact Adele.Guyton@kuleuven.be.
Thursday 10 Febr.
Introduction
11:00: Bart Van Den Bossche (KU Leuven): Welcome
11:15: Sascha Bru (KU Leuven) : The Science-Literature Complex, 1890-1950
12:00: Déjeuner
Session 1: Novel Changes
14:00: Introduction
14:10: Ken Hirschkop (University of Waterloo): From Physics to Carnival: the Repurposing of Substance and Function in Bakhtin’s Theory of the Novel
14:50: Thomas Klinkert (University of Zurich): The Novel as Instrument of Observation and Investigation: Nathalie Sarraute and Marcel Proust
15:30: Pause café
Session 2: Persistent Traditions
16:00: Introduction
16:10: Hugues Marchal (University of Basel): Breaking from a Broken Tradition: Scientific Poetry According to Les Nouvelles littéraires
16:50: Benedikt Hjartarson (University of Iceland): Tracing the Paradigm Shift: Natural Science, Esotericism and the Belatedness of the Avant-Garde
18:30: Dîner
Friday 11 Febr.
Session 3: (Un)certainties
11:00: Introduction
11:10: Nicolas Pethes (University of Cologne): Experimental Psychology of the Masses: The Construction of Negative and Positive Media Effects in the Discourse on Early Cinema
11:50: Michael H. Whitworth (University of Oxford): The Cultural Trajectory of Quantum Uncertainty
12:30: Mittagsimbiss
Session 4: (Pre)diction
14:00: Introduction
14:10: Stefan Willer (Humboldt University Berlin): Knowledge about Wishing around 1900
14:50: Tyrus Miller (University of California, Irvine): Conceptualizing the Possible: Wolfgang Paalen, Dyn, and the Scientific Imagination
15:40: Kaffeepause
Session 5: Roundtable Discussion and Closing Remarks
ABSTRACTS
Ken Hirschkop
From Physics to Carnival: the Repurposing of Substance and Function in Bakhtin’s Theory of the Novel
Ernst Cassirer’s Substance and Function (1912) drew the philosophical consequences of recent advances in physics, chemistry and mechanics. The distinction it drew – a distinction in the way we conceived of concepts (!) – would be reworked as the distinction between ‘mythical thinking’ and theoretical science in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms of the 1920s, a project that would draw the attention of many scholars in the Soviet Union, including V. N. Voloshinov and M. M. Bakhtin. Many of Bakhtin’s debts to Cassirer are well known, but less appreciated is how he used Cassirer’s philosophy to rework his theory of the novel in the 1930s. When he claimed that the rise of the novel coincided with the emergence of modern science in the 17th century, few thought it was more than a rhetorical flourish. Bakhtin, however, was dead serious. That the cultural antithesis of the novel is Cassirerean myth is explicit in the text ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (‘Слово в романе’). Less obvious is the positive analogy between Cassirerean theoretical science and the novel. But Bakhtin believes the novel is modern, or, in his words, ‘contemporary’, precisely because its author has the status of a function in Cassirer’s sense. The arguments of this function come from speech in everyday life; its values are what Bakhtin calls ‘images of language’ or ‘styles’. The point of the analogy is that functions are inexhaustible, orientated to the future and that theoretical science has a quasi-Messianic structure (in which the ‘thing-in-itself’ animates the search and remains permanently inaccessible). And the analogy is less far-fetched when you take into account Cassirer’s conviction that theoretical science was a privileged vehicle of human self-development and freedom. I’ll elaborate on this analogy and trace its development, which culminates in notes Bakhtin made in 1962-63, where Bakhtin condemns ‘official systems’ for being ‘substantial rather than functional systems’, letting the Cassirerean cat out of the bag.
Benedikt Hjartarson
Tracing the Paradigm Shift: Natural Science, Esotericism and the Belatedness of the Avant-Garde
The paper will explore the complex interface of aesthetic modernity, the natural sciences and new spiritual and religious currents, often linked to the notions of occultism and/or esotericism. The paper will present a series of hypotheses that aim at providing a theoretical and methodological framework suited for an analysis of the complex interconnections of scientific models, esoteric knowledge and new aesthetic practices in the tumultuous period from around 1890 to the early 1920s. Among currents to be discussed are Neo-Lamarckian and Monist models of biological evolution, psychophysics, non-Euclidian Geometry and Ether Physics, and finally pre-Freudian models of the subconscious that were developed within psychic research and parapsychology. Of specific importance for understanding the scientistic outlook that came to shape the aesthetics of modernism and the upcoming avant-garde in this period of rapid social change, disenchantment and paradigm shift is the role of the popular sciences. The paper will explore in what respect artists and authors of modernism and the avant-garde were informed by models of scientific thought that were rooted in older or outdated paradigms of scientific knowledge. It will furthermore explore in what respect outdated scientific models often tend to find an afterlife in aesthetic and esoteric discourse.
Thomas Klinkert
The Novel as Instrument of Observation and Investigation: Nathalie Sarraute and Marcel Proust
In the nineteenth century, the poetics of important novelists such as Balzac, Flaubert and Zola recurred to scientific principles and theorems, which were transformed into poetological metaphors. This occurs within the framework of a general belief in science and positivism, even though this belief is repeatedly relativised and ironically broken. In the language-sceptical twentieth century, the novel becomes the setting for radical formal innovations and experiments in a critical confrontation with the realist paradigm of the nineteenth century. In this process, the reference to science is refunctionalised. Paradoxically, the novel itself is supposed to be an instrument of quasi-scientific observation and investigation. This will be studied using the example of Nathalie Sarraute’s poetological texts and her writing practice, which will be considered against the backdrop of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.
Hugues Marchal
Breaking from a broken tradition: scientific poetry according to Les Nouvelles littéraires
At the beginning of the twentieth century, scientific poetry is established in France as a genre made paradoxical, even impossible, by two contradictory imperatives. On the one hand, the avant-gardes remain the heirs of a modernity which, from Romanticism onwards, was largely built on the rejection of the poetry of the Enlightenment and, in particular, of the science-fuelled work of Abbé Delille (1738-1813). The total disqualification of this author, perceived during his lifetime as a leading genius, fuels the conviction that true poetry cannot survive a dialogue with contemporary science. Once fruitful in the case of an ancient author like Lucretius, this dialogue has proven poisonous, the fate of Delille's work showing that modern scientific poetry can only produce a series of failures. On the other hand, these same avant-gardes recognise in scientific knowledge and its applications powerful agents that transform the conditions of thought and life, leading to swift mutations that poets can hardly ignore unless they cut themselves off from the march of the world (Apollinaire) and from the consciousness that the current time possesses of itself. In other words, any project of scientific poetry is simultaneously likely to be understood as the fulfilment of a programme imposed on modernity and as a move backwards, a return to a now long-gone tradition – so that there is a strong notion that the genre has to be tried anew and still cannot be new. This tension is exemplified in Pierre Guéguen's Jeux cosmiques (1929). Resolutely modernist in form, this collection of verse and prose dwells on topics found in recent physiology or physics, but it opens with a dedication to Paul Valéry which gives it a strong ironic value: these "essays of didactic fantasy", Guéguen warns, "attempt a return to the tradition of the great old poets and the most detestable French poets ". At the same time, Guéguen was one of the most influential critics of Les Nouvelles littéraires, artistiques et scientifiques, a weekly review of books founded in 1922 by Roger Martin du Gard, in which authors such as Valéry, Claudel, Jean Cassou and Abbé Brémond took part, and whose very title underlines an ambition to combine literary and scientific news. Based on an examination of the issues published during the 1920s and 30s and focusing on the poetry reviews signed by Guéguen and other contributors, I will try to show that the analysis of the conditions for the success or impossibility of a modern scientific poetry formed one of the most strikingly unsettled issue of the collective reflection carried out within a periodical still credited today for its "radically innovative character [...] in the treatment of literary news ".
Tyrus Miller
Conceptualizing the Possible: Wolfgang Paalen, Dyn, and the Scientific Imagination
In 1942 in Mexico, the Austrian surrealist painter Wolfgang Paalen broke with surrealism and founded the journal Dyn--named after the Greek word for "possible"--projecting a new direction for art. The theoretical and critical essays he contributed to the journal's six issues established him as a leading voice in art theory during World War II, while in the San Francisco area in the later 1940, Paalen, along with Gordon Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican, would seek to translate his ideas into visual form in a shared practice of "Dynaton" painting. My paper will explore Paalen's dialogue with the sciences in his articulation of the idea of the possible. The sciences from which he drew inspiration for his concept of the possible included quantum physics, pre-Columbian archeology, and gestalt psychology. I will also briefly discuss Paalen's criticisms of dialectical materialism as a scientistic and deterministic philosophy of matter contrary to the essential contingency of the possible, and consider the inspiration he derived from the work of Gaston Bachelard, who offered Paalen an apparent scientific justification for dynistically intended "deformations of the concept."
Nicolas Pethes
Experimental Psychology of the Masses: The Construction of Negative and Positive Media Effects in the Discourse on Early Cinema
In my talk, I will present critical perspectives on pre-World War I-cinema that point at harmful consequences of watching films not only for individual subjects but also for the audiences as (potentially nation wide) collective. Within this critical discourse, however, there are also voices that hint at potential positive uses of these collective effects, e.g. with respect to educational content or the formation of national unity. The latter idea refers to the contemporary theory of „Völkerpsychologie“ (people’s psychology) which was, among others, represented by experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. But Wundt was also the academic teacher of Hugo Münsterberg, who published the first theory of film in 1916, which was influenced by Gustave LeBons theory of „The Psychology of the Masses“ (1895). My talk will reconstruct this discursive network and demonstrate as to how the idea of influencing mass audiences was also connected to artistic attempts to represent the masses on the screen in early films and film scripts.
Michael H. Whitworth
The Cultural Trajectory of Quantum Uncertainty
In 1976, attempting a grand overview of why modernism is ‘our art,’ Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane wrote that it is, among other things, ‘the art consequent on Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle”.’ They were not the first critics to suggest a connection between modernism and the uncertainty principle, but their claim that modernism is ‘consequent’ on Heisenberg’s principle is a claim about causation that contradicts the facts. Heisenberg first articulated the uncertainty principle in 1927, too late to have influenced many of the canonical masterpieces of modernism. In 1956 Heisenberg vividly articulated the consequences of the uncertainty relation by saying that ‘we are not merely observers but also actors on the stage of life.’ This phrase became widely available to English-language commentators on modernism, but its cultural context was that of the Cold War, where the authority of physics had changed significantly.
This paper will sketch some of the post-1927 reception history of quantum mechanics in the domain of literary and cultural history, and the dissemination of quantum theory in English in non-technical and literary sources in the 1920s. It will ask how definitely we can identify pre-Heisenbergian versions of concepts such as uncertainty, indeterminacy, and complementarity which might be said to have had a causal impact.
Stefan Willer
Knowledge about Wishing around 1900
Wishes are mental drafts and mental processes, but they are also speech acts and cultural techniques. Furthermore, they are in a tense relationship with knowledge. In the period around 1900, there is a specific modernization of knowledge about wishing. This involves not only the question of how to explore human desire, but also the question of how knowledge can be initiated and driven or hindered and prevented by wishing. I will explore this set of questions in Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. Nietzsche provides a profound critique of 'desirability' ('Wünschbarkeit') and wishful thinking; Freud bases his interpretation of dreams, central to psychoanalysis, on the theorem of wish fulfillment. Starting from this apparent contrast, I would like to explore the extent to which desires and wishing function as epistemological boundary determinants in both. In an outlook, the poetic productivity of wishing in modern literature will be exemplified.