Have We Forgotten How to Have Fun in ‘Literature and Science’?

Abstract

What follows is based on a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern, Switzerland, which is an institute of exact sciences. In an institute better known for the Rosetta mission or the discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, I was a lone literary researcher amongst astrophysicists and astronomers. The experience was illuminating, but also frustrating, and at my most hand-wringing moments I found myself asking: what is it, really, that the field of 'literature and science' is trying to achieve? This article will re-examine what the practice of reading literature as an interdisciplinary endeavour looks like (and what it might look like). In doing so, I will argue for the reinstatement of an attitude to literature and science that privileges the methodologies of literary studies as a discrete academic field.1 The aim of this argument will not be to undermine the rich fruits that interdisciplinarity brings to literary studies but rather to argue that it is the identity of literary studies that makes it such a valuable contributor to interdisciplinarity in the academy. My aim is to begin to combat a prevailing discourse in which literary studies is situated as 'in service' to the work of other disciplines. In the first part of this article, I will discuss what I see as potential problems with the status of literary studies as part of interdisciplinary work, namely in the field of literature and science. I also identify the symptoms of these problems as being particularly prevalent in regard to my own area of research, science fiction. In an effort to demonstrate a profitable role for a return to reading literary texts as text, I then turn to a few fictional pieces which, I believe, demonstrate both an insistence to be treated as fiction as well as the potential to make powerful contributions to the discourse of literature and science.