La asignatura se desarrollará en los siguientes bloques de contenidos, a los que sigue la bibliografía primaria de lectura obligatoria para cada tema:
1. INTRODUCTION: Science as cultural discourse
Theoretical and transdisciplinary approaches: Metacritic of the “two cultures”
Relativism, representation and intertextuality
Literature and science as cultural products
Science as hermeneutic instrument
This unit presents the course by addressing and then transcending the idea of “two cultures”. It also engages in a discussion on the many different ways of connecting literature and science. It then focuses on science as a cultural discourse consisting of subsequent epistemes also shaping literature, which enables us to use science as a critical instrument of the literary text.
Readings:
E.A. Poe: “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”
H.G. Wells: “The Stolen Bacillus”
2. HUMAN AND POSTHUMAN: Biological reflections
1. The rhizome culture: decentered body and identity
2. Deconstruction of the human/non-human binomial
3. Literary revisions of ontological paradigms: from monster to cyborg
This unit analyzes the concept of “human” as given by different scientific approaches, from the rational, private, immutable and unique subject of the Enlightenment to the postmodern posthuman, mutable, public, multiple self. This unit also explores how modern science allows for an understanding of the human body and identity as decentered, unattached and undefined by a unique point of reference. Since the knowledge of the self involves the knowledge of the Other, the unit will survey some revisions of established paradigms of what “human” involves.
Readings: ONE of these novels to be chosen by the student:
F. Weldon: The Cloning of Joanna May
P.K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
M. Atwood: Oryx and Crake.
3. HERE AND NOW, RELATIVELY: Physics and space-time subjects
1. Quantum literature
2. Chrononauts as metaphors for transgression
3. Entropies and complex systems
This unit will first analyze how the “New Physics” of the early 20th century left its imprint on the literary authors of the period, how they understood and represented intellectual challenges such as the wavelike character of matter, the loss of the empiric object, the dissolution of the atom, etc. It then explores the figure of the time traveler or chrononaut to present the transgression involved in timetravelling, in resisting static notions of time and history and of the body as a unique space-time political locus. Finally, it engages in the idea of complex systems as seen in literary works.
Readings: ONE of these options to be chosen by the student:
R. Bradbury: “A Sound of Thunder” + U. K. Le Guin: “Schrodinger’s Cat”
T. Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49
M. Amis: Time’s Arrow
4. SCIENCE AND OTHERNESS: Knowledge and power
1.Deconstruction of Eurocentric and androcentric epistemological models
2. Science, nationalism and imperialism
3. Scientific construction of gender and ethnicity
4. Resistance to hegemonic discourses in speculative literature
This unit focuses on the ways thinking and knowing have involved class, gender, ethnic or imperial interests that have produced specific scientific results. This unit, more specifically, surveys how science has been used to construct ideas of otherness to sustain established power structures (people, nations, cultures, etc.), and how recent studies, like feminist and postcolonial science, deconstruct those hegemonic images.
Readings: ONE of these works to be chosen by the student:
