Translation or transformation? the relations of literature and science*

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The theme announced for this lecture, ‘the presentation of science through literature’ might suggest a one-way traffic, as though literature acted as a mediator for a topic (science) that precedes it and that remains intact after its re-presentation That is not how I understand the relations between the two. I shall emphasize interchange rather than origins and transformation rather than translation. Scientific and literary discourses overlap, but unstably. Victorian writers, scientific and literary, held to the ideal of the ‘mother-tongue’; in our own time the variety of professional and personal dialects is emphasised instead. Yet the expectation lingers that it should be possible to translate stably from one to another. This expectation may prove unrealistic. M ore is to be gained from analysing the transformations that occur when ideas change creative context and encounter fresh readers. The fleeting and discontinuous may be as significant in our reading as the secure locking of equivalent meanings. Questions can change their import when posed within different genres. Recognizing scientific reference within works of literature may not be as straightforward a business as it seems. To put it at its most direct: how do we recognize science once it is in literature? Can such reference to scientific material be drained again of its relations within the literary work and returned to autonomy?

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: