Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: The bulk of the essays collected in this special issue of the JLS present selected papers read at the conference "Literature and Science in Europe, 1890-1950" that was hosted by the MDRN research lab at the University of Leuven in February 2022. 2 With the aim of exploring changes in the relation between science and European literature in the modernist period (roughly, the decades between 1890 and 1950), the conference took to literature and science in a broad sensewith science including all forms of officially sanctioned or institutionalized scholarship (thus, also within the humanities), and literature signaling not only a small number of canonized high modernist European authors but all types of creative writing in the period, popular fiction included.Of special interest to participants was whether (and if so, how) the rapid changes to the sciences led to corresponding alterations to (the reflection on) the epistemic status of European literature within the larger economy of knowledge production in the period.This was a key question because the conference figured within the framework of a larger research project, Literary Knowledge, 1890-1950: Modernisms and the Sciences in Europe.This project, graciously supported by Excellence Funding from the University of Leuven Research Council from 2018 until 2023 and conducted by a team of eleven 3 in conjunction with two expert advisory boards, 4 investigated how literature from various, mainly, Western European regions and countries (including Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Russia) during the modernist period had defined its own epistemic function in light of the massive expansion of (fundamental) scientific knowledge production.This comparative project covered a broad spectrum of types of writing as well a wide variety of (composite and nascent) scientific disciplines in the periodincluding archaeology, genetics, astronomy, and cosmology.While more scholarly publications to come out of this project are on their way (albeit not all in English), we are pleased to be able to present a portion of our work here.The essays collected here provide only partial answers to some key questions that have been of concern to us in the past five years. BeansLet me begin with a note on ignorance and beans.The year is 1934, the place is Paris.We are a fly on the wall in the home of André Breton, self-acclaimed leader of Surrealism.Breton has two visitors: Roger Caillois, a young student at the École normale supérieure who at this point is close to the Surrealist group but will soon break away from it, and Jacques Lacan, a thirty-something psychiatrist who has finished his PhD just a few years earlier.Together, these men are confronted with a basket filled with haricots mexicains, so-called jumping beans that have been left by a previous visitor and the sight of which is new to all three.Indeed, at this point rare in Western Europe, the seeds from a Latin-American shrub house the living larvae of a Mexican moth.The exotic beans, as they seem to wiggle and shake independently in the basket, mesmerize the three ignorant men, who each respond in their own way to the conundrum.As they collectively try to dispel the magic of the beans, they soon find themselves arguing over the relationship between literature and science.Lacan goes first; he urges his fellow bystanders not even to touch the beans and to dispose of them
DOI: 10.12929/jls.16.2.01
Author: Sascha Bru
Institution: Cornell University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4411031283