News

The 11th ESHS - European Society for the History of Science Conference, that will take place in Barcelona, between 4-7 September, will have a symposium devoted to Science, Technology, Arts, and Literature. 

Dialogues between Science, Technology, Arts and Literature

Science and technology have always used art and literature in several ways: as a source of information, ways of building, setting and wide spreading narratives and representations, as well as ideas and making them prevail. Narratives and representations that change according to the development of scientific and technological knowledge and the very heritage that it generates and is associated with. But they also change in accordance with the space and time in which they are produced, being (re)constructed, destroyed, replaced, adapted, or confronted depending on prevailing or emerging agendas, be they ideological, political, social, economic, cultural, ethnic, ageist, sexual or gender based.

But are we, the ones engaged with different forms of science and technology fully aware of this reality?  Literary and artistic contexts influence the construction of archaeological narratives and representations, throughout time? How have different literary and artistic contexts influenced the construction of scientific and technological narratives and representations over time? In what ways do these same narratives and representations contribute to underpin agendas (including scientific, personal, and institutional, public, and private), while breaking paradigms and prejudices (namely sexual, gender, ethnic, class and ageist)? What is the nature and scope of this ongoing dialogue between science, technology, art, and literature? How does this constant interweaving (i)materialise? Who dictates, feeds, and manages it? To what end(s)? And what about the creative freedom of the author, whether artistic or literary, where and how does it remain? How are narratives - written and iconographic - constructed from science and technology? How to make scientific knowledge reach different types of audiences? And what space do the new social realities - migratory, nomadic, etc. - occupy in this increasingly interwoven complex?

This is a vast set of questions to which we seek to answer during this session. We therefore invite scientists from different fields and geographies, historians of science and technology, as well as historians of women and gender, art and audiovisual historians, anthropologists, illustrators, and all those dedicated to the relationship between science, technology, art, and literature embodied in different media, education and instruction, from school textbooks to museums, through social networks and digital platforms, to join us.

Submission Information – Deadline: 20 December 2023

Please email acmartins@uevora.pt and edebeus01@qub.ac.uk with the following information:

• Name
• Affiliation
• Email
• Title of presentation
• Abstract (max 250 words)
• Short bio (max 50 words)
• Researcher identifier (ex. ORCID / ISNI/  VIAF / Other)
  • Obs.: In case of multiple contributors please enlist all the contributors’ information. The first name should be the corresponding contributor.

Conference Website

BSLS, CoSciLit and SLSAeu would like to announce that we will be making funding available to help delegates to attend the International Conference of Three Societies on Literature and Science through a reduction of costs. This will be available on request through the registration process to delegates whose proposals for papers or panels have been accepted, who are not in full-time employment and who have financial needs. Each application will be assessed on its merits in relation to the number of requests and the full amount of funding available.

Registration for the conference will open in January once all the proposals have been reviewed.

Leah Sidi, Sarah Kane's Theatre of Psychic Life: Theatre, Thought and Mental Suffering, (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, London, 2023). 211 pp. £85.00 Hb. £76.50 E-book. £76.50 Pdf. ISBN: 9781350283121

Leah Sidi’s Sarah Kane’s Theatre of Psychic Life: Theatre, Thought, and Mental Suffering offers a full-length study of Kane’s plays, both written during the 1990s. Sarah Kane is a British playwright who suffered from mental illness and committed suicide at the age of 28 in 1999. Many consider her work in the context of post-dramatic theatre and In-Yer-Face Theatre. Graham Saunders, Kane’s biographer, published a number of books on her life and work. His publications as an author include Love Me or Kill Me: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes in 2002, About Kane: The Playwright and the Work in 2009, and Sarah Kane in Context in 2010 (as an editor). While Saunders’s work offers a reference to Kane’s work, Leah Sidi 2023 moves the discussion forward and focuses critically on Kane’s plays, examining her dramatic experimentation and the ways in which she could dramatise the experience of inner psychic life. Sidi indicates that Sarah Kane’s Theatre of Psychic Life is “a book about mental distress and Sarah Kane’s theatre.” (Sidi, 2023:1), it addresses the intersection between theatre and psychiatric discourse in the UK during the 1990s.

In her survey, Sidi covers Kane’s major works, which include Blasted (1995), Phaedra’s Love (1996), Cleansed (1998), Crave (1998), and 4:48 Psychosis (1999). Sidi approaches Kane’s theatre from the perspective of Kane’s experience as an expert in both theatre and mental illness. In this, Sidi explains that Kane’s theatre is not an autobiographical work but rather informed by her experience of illness as well as theatre forms and the culture and political context of her time in the nineties. To understand the connection between Kane’s theatre and their cultural discourse narrative, Sidi offers a critical examination of the mental health system, policy, and care in community plays in the 1990s. Sidi utilises a cultural and historical lens to excavate Kane’s engagement with mental illness. Arguing that Kane wrote her plays in the period of the 1990s when the mental health system faced profound changes in terms of care and delivery, Sidi indicates that Kane experienced the mental health system as a playwright and a patient. As part of her theoretical and historical frame, Sidi uses Kane’s Phaedra’s Love as a parody of the issue of community care and as a political play of Kane’s work.

Sidi organises her analysis by themes instead of the chronological order of the plays. The five chapters discuss trauma from sexual abuse, psychosis, mental collapse, and desire and despair. Sidi dedicated the chapters of the book to moving from external representation to focusing on the internal depiction of psychic life on stage. In chapter one, she proposes to use the term ‘dramaturgy of psychic life’ to understand the relation between Kane’s drama and psychic life. Using the tool of theatre ‘experientialism’ and D. W. Winnicott’s psychoanalysis theories as a starting point for her analysis, Sidi explains her choice of the terms ‘psychic pain’ and ‘psyche’ to describe the interior theatrical experience that Kane’s plays provide to the audience. Sidi in chapter two moves to examine the internal collapse and how Kane incorporates it into the structure of her play Blasted. Utilising a feminist approach and trauma structure, Sidi argues the dramaturgy of Blasted embodies spatially a traumatised mind after abuse.

In Kane’s last three works, Kane tends to be more experimental in form, and her subject matter revolves around the inner mental space. Sidi starts gradually to excavate the internal reality of characters with Cleansed in chapter three. Drawing on the tradition of expressionist theatre, and more specifically Antonin Artaud, Georg Büchner, and August Strindberg, Sidi detects Kane’s style and her tendency to depict elements of the psychotic experience on stage. Utilising a cognitive neuroscience perspective, Sidi argues that in Cleansed, Kane’s style shows a movement to a more interior dramatic universe but is not attributed to a particular character. Sidi indicates that by this movement to the inner mind, Kane’s drama crates an analogous experience of the inner crisis for the audience through the sharing of elements of psychotic breakdown with them.

Since Kane’s last two plays tend to be more abstract and do not have an identifiable character but rather voices, Sidi’s approach in concluding her analysis in the last two chapters with them seems reasonable, especially given her aims of exploring the psychic life from external structural representation to the depiction of fragmented mind. Sidi views Crave and 4.48 Psychosis as more developed plays in terms of the depiction of psychic life. In Chapter 4, an examination of the intersection between a mind in crisis and the theatrical space is offered through the analysis of 4.48 Psychosis. Sidi argues in this play that Kane offered the audience an experiential space of mental suffering. Through examining theatrical space, Sidi concludes that Kane collapses the boundary between the audience and the dramatic space.

The fifth and final chapter focuses on the notion of desire in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis. In this chapter, Sidi went even further to think of what Kane’s last two plays demand from the spectator beyond the theatrical experience of psychic life. In this way, Sidi claims that Kane’s theatre moves even beyond representation and engagement of the audience to think about the contradiction of the complexity of the human psyche since Crave and 4.48 Psychosis offer both suicidal despair and desire and both represent desire in a queer landscape, which means that gender identities become fluid in the queering of desire and the desired other.

Sarah Kane’s Theatre of Psychic Life is a book about the private, the historical, the social, and the political. Adapting a style of moving from a political and exterior depiction of psychic life, such as in Phaedra’s Love and Blasted, to a more interior and personal one, such as in Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, Sidi provides a comprehensive study of Kane’s drama and mental illness. Sidi, in her book, takes the discourse of mental illness and community care in the 1990s as communicable discourse through theatrical special representation. The reading of Kane’s theatre as a theatre of psychic life offers a dramatic approach that demands the audience's full engagement. Leah Sidi’s Sarah Kane’s Theatre of Psychic Life: Theatre, Thought, and Mental Suffering offers a comprehensive introduction to Kane’s theatre and the depiction of the experience of mental illness and will be a valuable source for students and academicians in the field of theatre as well as those in medical humanities studies.

Wansah AlShammari, University of Hail

Literature and Science in History: Japanese Reception and Reflection

An online conference event organised by Japan Women’s University, Tokyo, Japan, and the Commission on Science and Literature (DHST/IUHPST)

Saturday 2 March 2024 (12:30-18:30)

How does the study of historical scientific and literary connections contribute towards Japanese scholarly reception of anglophone literature? And how do Japanese literary and critical texts reflect these interrelated scientific and literary influences? This one-day conference, organized by Japan Women’s University (JWU), Tokyo, and the Commission on Science and Literature (CoSciLit), aims to consider these questions and to discuss the opportunities that the field of science and literature affords literary scholarship in Japan. The event brings together research by leading Japanese scholars of anglophone literature and concludes with an online address by CoSciLit Global President Professor John Holmes.

To register your (online or in person) attendance please go to:  https://rb.gy/x1m18

The Journal of Literature and Science is looking for reviewers to review various articles published in the last year to 18 months in the field of literature and science. Please see below for available articles, or write to Michelle Geric to suggest a relevant article for review.

Reviews should be 750 words long. For more details, please follow the link: https://www.literatureandscience.org/ or contact me at gericm@westminster.ac.uk to register your interest.

The JLS and the British Society for Literature and Science would like to announce the 2023 prize for the best new essay by an early career scholar on a topic within the field of literature and science.

Essays should be currently unpublished and not under consideration by another journal. They should be approx. 8,000 words long, inclusive of references, and should be sent by email to both Jordan Kistler, Communications Officer of the BSLS (jordan.kistler@strath.ac.uk), and Martin Willis, Editor of the JLS (willism8@cardiff.ac.uk), by 5pm on Wednesday, 31st January, 2024. The prize is open to BSLS members who are postgraduate students or have completed a doctorate within three years of the submission date. (To join BSLS, go to http://www.bsls.ac.uk/join-us/).

The prize will be judged jointly by representatives of the BSLS and JLS. The winning essay will be announced on the BSLS website and published in the JLS. The winner will also receive a prize of £100. Read previous prize-winning essays in the JLS: www.literatureandscience.org

Natalie Berkman, OuLiPo and the Mathematics of Literature (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022) xiv 326 pp. £51.85 ebook. £51.85 Pb. ISBN: 9781789977806

In OuLiPo and the Mathematics of Literature, Natalie Berkman traces the origins of Oulipo and its connections to the history of mathematics. She explores the influence of mathematics on Oulipo, an avant-garde movement which produces experimental literature and art, and through close readings and genetic criticism, Berkman challenges C. P. Snow’s ‘two-culture distinction’. In a lecture on the two cultures, Snow differentiated between the Humanities and the Sciences, arguing that there is a ‘gulf of mutual incomprehension’ separating the two disciplines (6). Snow’s 1959 lecture was given just before the inception of Oulipo in 1960, and Berkman points out that Oulipo is an ‘interdisciplinary endeavour’ because of its engagement in ‘mathematical thought’ (269). This kind of thought, as Berkman defines it, is used in literature and mathematics when ‘recognizing abstract patterns and making generalizations’ (18).

In the introduction to the text, Berkman poses three general questions which are central to her thesis. These questions are underpinned by Berkman’s critique of the two cultures debate:

‘1. Given the ludic nature of Oulipo and its tendency toward humor, is it wise to take the members at face value when they declare an explicit mathematical project? In other words, is Oulipo’s use of mathematics a serious scientific exploration of language and literature or rather a symbolic, metaphorical reference to another discipline?

2. If Oulipo’s use of mathematics is indeed to be taken seriously, is it feasible? Mathematical language is a formal, non-natural language and seems incompatible with literary language. How then does Oulipo propose to write literature with mathematics?

3. If Oulipo is using mathematics to write, the resulting texts are meant to be read by a reader who may have little to no formal mathematical training. What can literature teach such a reader about mathematics or rather, about mathematical thought?’ (16).

In an attempt to answer these questions, Berkman explores mathematical thought through Oulipo’s pedagogical methodologies. Methods, such as the constraint, are aimed at teaching the reader different reading strategies. The mathematics within Oulipian productions is difficult, and Oulipians do not excessively simplify it, but its aims are to encourage active reading which is intended to be beneficial to learning, not just about mathematics, but also the structures of language.

In terms of the wider context, Berkman’s text is part of the Modern French Identities series, which includes studies on Modernism (Volume 50) and Camus (Volume 38). Berkman notes some texts in the wider field of Oulipo studies, such as Philip Terry’s edited volume The Penguin book of Oulipo (2019) and Dennis Duncan’s The Oulipo and Modern Thought (2019). In the introduction, Berkman evaluates the ‘State of the Field’, which is a good structural tool with which to discuss ‘constrained’ literature. These type of texts contain a constraint, which is a ‘rigorously defined rule for composition: sometimes a generative device that produces a text through an easily applied procedure; sometimes, it is rather a challenge that incites textual production on the part of an author’ (11).  This section of the book also reveals Berkman’s major point in her thesis that Oulipo is ‘more relevant than ever’ in the age of Digital Humanities (13).

From the start of the text, Berkman explores the entanglement, or spiralled nature, of mathematics and literature. She chooses lesser-known, but important, mathematicians and writers to illustrate her point that mathematics and literature have intertwined histories. For example, although Berkman goes back to Euclid and famous Greek mathematics in Chapter One on ‘Set Theory’, she does not mention either Newton or Leibniz, two major and well-known figures in Western mathematics. This omission is partly due to the focus being on the (mostly) French group of mathematicians called Bourbaki, who are explored in depth so much so that the research does not suffer for these omissions. The author’s ideas are well developed, and the text represents knowledge of different areas of mathematics, as the variety of mathematical fields in the chapter titles show. However, although part of the Modern French Identities series, for a non-French speaker, the text’s untranslated French quotations come as a limitation; at times I felt like I was missing too much information. This may have been an Oulipian strategy, because it stresses the activity of the reader, and there is an essence of constraint here, which is produced by the French rather than the mathematical language. Yet, I’m not sure that Berkman’s monograph is a conscious attempt at constraint, or meaning to be self-reflexive in that way. It is, rather, an academic study intended for Anglo-French readers, as the rest of the Modern Identities series is. Another limitation is that there is not much engagement with other avant-garde movements, but Berkman reproduces quite beautiful Oulipo art, and these images complement the experimental, or potential, writing in a visual way, adding to the understanding of how the languages of mathematics and art combine.

At the end of the text, Berkman lists the aims of her research. One aim was to show that the ‘value of Oulipo’s production is not purely literary’ (270). She qualifies this aim by directing us to the relevance of mathematical literature to Digital Humanities, and to the contribution of literature, particularly, Oulipo, to mathematical thought. This engagement, Berkman argues, can help to ‘bridge the gap’ between Humanities and STEM fields (21). The obscurity of Oulipo, even in universities (perhaps less so in French universities), makes the ultimate aim of bridging of the two cultures seem optimistic, but the cultures have narrowed since Snow’s lecture. This monograph has demonstrated that mathematical thought and literary language can and do combine and mutually enhance each other. The text, finally, plays a part in narrowing the gap between the two cultures by providing examples of how Oulipian and mathematical histories intertwine, explaining that Oulipo is a major French iteration of experimental interdisciplinary work. With the rise of interdisciplinary research, particularly in the Humanities, it is important to consider how the understanding of different disciplines can contribute to knowledge, and this is what this monograph successfully does.

Elizabeth Trafford, Keele University