Better Stories about Science?

Abstract

My contribution will address aspects of 'Literature and Science Studies' as interdisciplinary practice, and its focus will be on practical aspects. I shall present considerations that have made it possible to articulate research perspectives of interdisciplinary relevance, as a basis for building collaborative projects that not only involve researchers from several disciplinary backgrounds, but also integrate practitioners from non-academic areas of discursive practice. I will at times refer to theoretical positions and methodological reflections that are useful for illustrating ways of conceptualising and operationalising interdisciplinary research perspectives, but without implying that other theoretical positions or methodological choices are not workable or legitimate. And I will conclude by offering a selective engagement with Rita Felski's Uses of Literature (2008) in order to exemplify ways in which interdisciplinary practices can lead not only to critical reflections, but also to innovative accounts of conceptions and practices that are key to our own discipline of literary scholarship. Indeed, it is part of my argument that one major incentive for devising productive instances of interdisciplinarity might lie in their disciplinary benefit – interdisciplinarity as a way of obtaining greater clarity both on the cultural status and functions of the materials that we study, and of the disciplinary practices that we implement. What I will present, then, is in no way a finished and static recipe book, but rather reflections on what has worked in particular instances and situations and could serve as points of departure that would need to be developed further and adapted to new instances and situations. It is a question of identifying the contributions that literary scholarship can uniquely make in contexts where the research objectives go beyond the disciplinary priorities which are generally defined in literary studies, and at the same time gaining new research angles that speak to these disciplinary positions. How can we develop research perspectives where a detailed and differentiated literary analysis becomes 'relevant,' as we highlight how literary narratives offer complex critical engagements with issues that are virulent in other public or academic discourses, and with the ways in which these issues are represented and addressed in those settings? And how, in turn, can such engagements feed back into our own critical and scholarly practice, refining and sharpening its focus as well as broadening and deepening its analytical scope? My remarks are informed by my experience as a member of the research group Fiction Meets Science (FMS; see www.fictionmeetsscience.org), which has been funded by the Volkswagen Foundation since 2013, in a funding format designed, among other things, to promote interdisciplinary collaboration as a way of highlighting the potentials of the