Events

The notion of entanglement, which in physics describes how two particles separated in space can communicate with each other, also applies to the supposedly irreconcilable cultures of science and narrative. The influence of science on narrative is easily demonstrated on the thematic level (science fiction, scientists as heroes); but narrative may also try to emulate the teachings of science, such as relativity, non-Euclidean geometry or quantum mechanics on a formal level, or set up a strange world that transposes cosmic or micro-phenomena on a human scale. The reverse entanglement—science influenced by narrative—is less common, but it can be found in the recent interest of the so-called cognitive sciences for the neural activity involved in the creation or processing of stories, as well as in the use of mildly narrative parables in works of scientific popularization. A third kind of entanglement, originating in "critical theory," describes the scientific project as a "narrative" to contest its claim to truth.

In this paper I will use Schrödinger's cat as a test case for the study of the relations between narrative and science. I will follow some of the lives of the famous feline from its initial appearance as an example meant to make a point in an otherwise abstract, purely argumentative scientific paper, to its narrative emancipation as a character or as a symbol in a story worth reading for its own sake. The cat paradox has inspired a variety of scientific and philosophical explanations. The purpose of my reading will be to see which ones of these interpretations provide suitable narrative material—i.e. which ones present what it takes to inspire to the imagination situations of tellability.


The uniform flow of time from past to future is ingrained so deeply in our perception of the world that it is hard to even imagine what the universe would be like without it. Authors from Lewis Carroll to Martin Amis have reversed time's arrow to great comedic or dramatic effect, but a consistent story is not easy to tell. Benjamin Button grows younger as time passes, but he still remembers the past and not the future. I will discuss how our scientific understanding of time both illuminates the difficulties involved in breaking free from convention, and possibly suggests new avenues for narrative adventure.


Science fiction, it has to be admitted, seldom has much to do with "real" science. The most we can say for it is that it typically concerns itself with applied science – engineering or technology – so that, in most cases, it really ought to be called "techno-fiction" instead of science fiction. Moreover, its value as forecast, which is often cited in its defense, proves to be extremely limited. Only rarely – much more rarely than its apologists would like to admit – does science fiction accurately forecast some real-world innovation or turn of events. Finally, science fiction is a genre of "formula fiction," and as with other formulaic genres – detective, romance, horror, etc. – it functions in part by recycling the familiar and the already-known. We recognize its motifs and materials, and this experience of re-cognition is a major source of its pleasures and satisfactions. So, if science fiction isn't really "scientific," doesn't really give us much insight into things to come, and mainly appeals to our desire for the formulaic and recognizable, what is it good for?

I will argue that, if science fiction isn't typically about "real" science, it can sometimes function analogously to science. It does so precisely insofar as it conducts thought-experiments, in something like the way "real" scientists do. If science fiction is a genre of formula fiction, dependent to some extent on familiar, ready-made, prefabricated motifs and models, it also, paradoxically enough, depends for its generic identity on the principle of newness. Every science fiction, to qualify as science fiction at all, must posit something new: a place, thing, type of being, or state of affairs that is not to be found in our contemporary reality, but can be imagined to exist or occur in some future or spatially distant reality. Science fiction proceeds from certain "what if?" premises, and extrapolates parts of its world more or less systematically from those premises, exploring the ramifying consequences (material, social, psychological, metaphysical, what-have-you) of a few key ontological innovations. Even if science fiction's "what if?" extrapolations never (or only very rarely) come to pass, science fiction serves the valuable function of imagining alternatives to received reality. It allows us to think of reality-models not as inevitably given, but as merely one set of possibilities among a range of alternatives; it relativizes reality.

Finally, I will argue that, viewed in this light, the science fiction genre appears as neither anomalous or marginal, but rather as prototypical of imaginative literature generally. From this perspective, all imaginative literature, including even the realist novel, can be seen to function, like science fiction, as a kind of thought-experiment, in the sense of projecting a world rather than merely modeling a received one. To parody the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky, science fiction is the most typical genre of world literature.


An ancient listening module in Andromeda detects a series of radio signals from an unmapped region of a distant galaxy. The resident power determines that there is a chance the signals result from a primitively intelligent, possibly carbon-based, life-form and sends two of its more expendable entities to investigate.


The scientific approach to character has a lengthy past, extending to Aristotle and including several historical as well as recent theorists and practitioners in drama and narrative. In this connection one might understand the scientific to signify a degree of systematizing or codification, perhaps in a formulaic manner, of the representation of traits and personality and, as a consequential relation, of depicted agency or action more inclusively. And yet, while science and aesthetics may share a concept or ideal of beauty, the ancestral nature of drama is such that the scientific and the artistic tend finally to diverge, perhaps especially so in the representation, not to say the understanding, of character behavior and deed. While there are given plays or theories of drama that might be taken as ingenious experiments in the scientific representation of personality and action, there are intrinsic limitations, inherent in the art itself—its means as well as mysteries—upon these correlations. In such times as today, when plays on science and scientists come to more relative popularity or prominence, a distinction of scientific content from aesthetic method can become more central, with reference not only to dramaturgy but to understandings across a broader field of implication. In the longstanding relation of scientific depiction to theatrical audience, the generalized concept of dramatic character as experiential surrogate pertains in this regard, as do the particular and current applications of scientific endeavors or potentials in the aesthetic context. What, then, is to be understood from an audience's investment in a scientific stand-in on the stage, or from a dramaturgy that is particularly reflective of a given science—and what is the potential for actuality in such representations?


This paper outlines strategies for investigating narrative in light of recent developments in the study of mind. More than this, in an effort to move beyond a one-way importation of ideas from the cognitive sciences into research on stories, I seek to foster genuine dialogue and exchange between traditions of narrative scholarship and work in such fields as psychology, linguistics, and the philosophy of mind. To make the case that theorists of narrative have something to contribute to debates concerning the nature and scope of human intelligence, I sketch out an approach to the mind-narrative nexus that remains situated at the level of persons and person-environment interactions--rather than pursuing a reductionist program for research based on the assumption that the concept of person, and person-level phenomena, must yield to some other, more fundamental level of explanation, e.g., neuronal activity in the brain, information-processing mechanisms, or other causal factors operating at a subpersonal level. Studies of the relations between narrative and mind can viably appeal to multiple levels of explanation, and my argument is that this domain of inquiry will benefit from a fuller exploration of person-level accounts. Thus, in contrast with eliminative materialism (Stich 1983; Churchland 1986) and other reductionist frameworks, I share with Lynne Rudder Baker (2007) the assumption that the everyday world is populated by artifacts, institutions, and events whose existence depends on the existence of persons, which can be characterized as a "primary kind" within the conceptual scheme used by human beings to make sense of their experiences. I argue, furthermore, that it is at the personal rather than subpersonal level that narrative scholars are optimally positioned to contribute to--and not just borrow from--frameworks for understanding the mind.

Using several case studies, my paper explores how narratives at once ground themselves in and exert a shaping influence on the root concept of "person," which encompasses mental as well as material attributes--that is, a mind indissolubly linked with but not reducible to a body (Strawson 1959; Baker 2000). Woven into the fabric of narrative discourse, and structuring interpreters' engagements with the stories they encounter, relevant person-level phenomena include communicative and other intentions; actions that can be explained in terms of reasons for acting, and that unfold within the space of action possibilities afforded by humans' social and material environments; and the flow of conscious experience bound up with such patterns of conduct. Arguing that traditions of narrative scholarship can both illuminate and be illuminated by these and other phenomena associated with the minds of persons, I suggest more generally how research on the foundational concept of person lies at the meeting-point of the humanities and the sciences.

References

Baker, Lynne Rudder (2000). Persons and Bodies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

-----. (2007). The Metaphysics of Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Churchland, Patricia (1986). Neurophilosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT P.

Stich, Stephen (1983). From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT P.

Strawson, P. F. (1959). Individuals. London: Methuen.


In "Psychology and Form," Kenneth Burke argues that increased interest in science, with its emphasis on "information," has led to a "derangement of taste." As a thought experiment, he asks us to imagine replacing Mark Anthony's famous "Brutus is an honourable man" speech with "a very intelligently developed thesis on human conduct, with statistics, intelligence tests, definitions; imagine it as the finest thing of the sort ever written, and as really being at the roots of an understanding of Brutus." What would happen? "Obviously, the play would simply stop."

To my mind, "Psychology and Form," one of the founding essays of rhetorical narrative theory, is itself perhaps "the finest thing of the sort ever written." But in his polemical zeal, Burke has simplified the complex intertwinings of science and art. Let me try a real, rather than hypothetical, example. Does Chekhov's Uncle Vanya "simply stop" when Astrov gives his ecology lecture to Elena? Perhaps the play shifts gear—but the effect is far from straightforward stasis. Rather, we get a new rhetorical alignment: just as the presence of historical events revises the author/reader contract in works of fiction, so does the presence of scientific exposition. In fact, while it is less often studied, the presence of scientific information is arguably more complicated, rhetorically, than the intrusion of history, since it is liable to introduce a greater distance between the authorial and actual audiences.

In this paper, I will begin to explore the range of what we might call Astrov effects, asking how the relations between authors, narrators, and audiences can be influenced by the presence in the text of "scientific" exposition—true, false, outmoded, imaginary, hypothetical, prophetic, superstitious. I will pay particular attention to the intricacies of Rebecca Goldstein's Properties of Light, where science mixes with the supernatural in striking ways.


Elegance The quality or state of being elegant

1. Refined grace of form and movement, tastefulness of adornment, refined luxury.
2. Of spoken or written compositions, literary style, etc.: tasteful correctness, harmonious simplicity, in the choice and arrangement of words.
3. Of scientific processes, demonstrations, inventions, etc.: 'Neatness', ingenious simplicity, convenience and effectiveness; so of a prescription.
   (Oxford English Dictionary)

Physicists like to imagine the universe in aesthetic terms. Brian Greene in The Elegant Universe writes this about Einstein's pursuit to understand the universe, an understanding which is at its heart aesthetic:

Einstein was not motivated by the things we often associate with scientific undertakings, such as trying to explain this or that piece of experimental data. Instead, he was driven by a passionate belief that the deepest understanding of the universe would reveal its truest wonder: the simplicity and power of the principles on which it is based. Einstein wanted to illuminate the workings of the universe with a clarity never before achieved, allowing us all to stand in awe of its sheer beauty and elegance. (ix)

"Wonder," "simplicity," "power," "clarity," "awe," "beauty," "elegance"--Greene's words underscore Einstein's underlying conception of the universe as a "thing of beauty" and convey something of his desire to design a theory able to describe the universe--a theory as beautiful as that which it defines. The desire for simplicity, clarity, singularity, "a seamless whole," are versions of what constitutes a beautiful theory--its elegance. The better the theory, the more elegant the theory because the more clarifying and demonstrating of the universe's elegance.

In this paper, I'm interested in exploring the aesthetics of scientific inquiry in relation to the aesthetics of narrative, specifically how science and narrative might share an "aesthetic of elegance." Significantly, the OED moves from a general account of elegance as refinement and grace to elegance made particular--as literary and as scientific. By definition, literally, they are connected. However, unlike scientific theorists, narrative theorists do not evaluate the worth of their theories by using a measuring stick of elegance. Perhaps this has something to do with a need not to/ desire not to "believe in" the underlying aesthetic elegance/beauty of the narrative world/universe they seek to define. What happens when we place embodiments/representations of the idea of elegance next to each other from the physical world and from a narrative world--what might such moments of associative study reveal about their worlds and their aesthetics?

I plan on bringing together Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe (and perhaps essays by Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein) with Jane Austen's Emma and Stanley Donen's Funny Face (with performances by Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn) to consider how the worlds about which they write/represent embody a shared aesthetic of elegance in their figures and forms. And to wonder, what might narratives about "fashion" have to do with the fashioning of the universe?

Works Cited

Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe. New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1999.


From 2004-2009, I collaborated with artist Josiah McElheny on the design of four cosmologically inspired sculptures, which represent the history of the expanding universe and the formation of structure within it. I will describe the sculptures and the astronomical concepts that underlie them, which include the nature of cosmic expansion, the transition from an opaque universe to a transparent universe, the formation and clustering of galaxies and quasars, the seeding of cosmic structure by primordial fluctuations in the early universe, and the possibility that our observable cosmos is only an "island" in a larger "multiverse." I will also describe how our collaboration unfolded through months and then years of meetings, e-mails, writings, and talks, resulting in a series of works that both of us consider a spectacular success.


Tom Stoppard is well-known for his two science-informed plays Hapgood (1988) and Arcadia (1993), which respectively interweave quantum mechanics and chaos theory into their plots and structures. Stoppard's canon before and after these works rarely directly refers to scientific paradigms at all, but there are clear indications that a science-directed curiosity informs Stoppard's works throughout. This presentation will begin with an introduction to Stoppard via Hapgood and Arcadia, summarizing the works and their explicit debt to the sciences. It will then move to Stoppard's earlier works to describe Stoppard's culturally- and philosophically-informed theatre, including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972). Travesties (1974), and The Real Thing (1982). This early theatre vividly anticipates Stoppard's intuitive "discovery" of many of the breakthroughs in the new sciences in ways that suggest parallels between the scientific and artistic imaginations. From there, the presentation will conclude with a look at Stoppard's later works, including The Invention of Love (1997), his trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2002), and Rock'n'Roll (2006), wherein "science" recedes in explicit significance but still effectively influences Stoppard's thinking and theatre. Throughout his career, Stoppard celebrates indeterminacy, nonlinearity, and uncertainty from the perspective of a cultural critic, beginning with astute and accurate intuitions. Mid-career he discovers supportive scientific allies and utilizes the discovery with brilliant effect. And he most recently has moved into a phase that downplays an arts-sciences enthusiasm while still capitalizing on internalized lessons of that earlier period in his career. What we see in Tom Stoppard is a three-phased writer, beginning with solid intuitions playfully exhibited for all to enjoy, moving to direct exhibitions of complex interrelations between the arts and sciences, and most recently entering a phase where scientific principles clearly exist but appear with the restraint perhaps expected of a mature mind reflecting on a career that has had such a brilliantly patterned but utterly unplanned trajectory.


Any number of theorists from a variety of disciplines (among others, White, Jamison, Ricoeur, Greimas, Virtanen, Swales, Bruner, Fludernik, Schank, Abelson) have pegged narrative or narrativity as a privileged mode of understanding and expression. They have done this in different ways, but with a shared implication that narrative, though formally a text-type among other text-types, is linked directly to a dedicated pre-linguistic capability out of which we organize events in time and thereby create meaning. In partial support of this is the widespread recognition that narratives of any length can support a variety of other textual modes (description, argument, meditation, lyrical effusion) without readers losing the sense that a narrative is in progress. This is an immensely complex issue, of course, with many unknowns and complicated by what appears to be another "deep" capability for tagging information as fiction or nonfiction. So I cannot hope to answer the question in my title, but rather intend to pursue the issue in a reading of J. M. Coetzee's 2007 novel, Diary of a Bad year. This is a book in which the author has bound together two text-types, exposition and narrative, but without the clear indication that narrative works as an over-arching system as it does in other exposition-heavy novels like Moby Dick, Marius the Epicurean, or Herzog. Instead Coetzee has laid the two text-types quite literally side by side, making the work as a whole a kind of laboratory in textual cognition. I will use it as such and in this paper report on the results of my investigation.


Taking as my starting point the cognitive-evolutionary research in mind-reading, a.k.a theory of mind (i.e., our evolved ability to explain behavior in terms of underlying mental states), I speculate about the ways in which the workings of our mind-reading adaptations shape human culture. According to evolutionary psychologist Jesse M. Bering, after a certain age people "cannot turn off their mind-reading skills even if they want to. All human actions are forevermore perceived to be the products of unobservable mental states, and every behavior, therefore, is subject to intense sociocognitive scrutiny" ("Folk-Psychology of Souls," 12). Moreover, given that mind-reading adaptations respond not just to actual interactions with other people, but also to imaginary interactions (e.g., fictional narratives), we should ask what kind of culture is bound to emerge in response to our constant readiness—indeed, need—to attribute mental states.

We can call it a culture of greedy mind readers, in which a variety of representations continuously feed our mind-reading hunger yet are never able to fully satisfy it. Moreover, new possibilities for mind-reading emerge regularly, driven by changes in historically-specific means of cultural production. (Case in point: five years ago, I could not foresee that today I would need to read a particular blog regularly. Back then I didn't even know what blogging was. And now I am addicted to this blogger's way of thinking: I crave my daily fix of her mental states.)

Among the phenomena that one may expect to encounter in a culture of greedy mind-readers are stories that depict people's response to their perception of other minds (e.g., novels); arrangements that let us read mental states into sequences of movements set to music (e.g., ballet); specially designated social spaces in which we can appreciate the gap between what people feel and what they would feel had they known as much about their real situation as we do (theatre); events during which numerous physical bodies form complex patterns guided by the shared understanding of intentions (team sports), and so forth. There is no predicting what forms such phenomena will take in a concrete historical moment in a particular society. However, we can predict with certainty that no cultural form will endure unless it lets us attribute mental states to somebody or something.


Beginnings are a largely unexamined topic in narrative and dramatic theory but in fact are extremely important in a number of ways. There are three kinds of beginnings in drama 1) the beginning of presentation of the story on stage (the syuzhet), 2) the beginning of the story being enacted (the fabula), and 3) the beginning of the performance itself. Each kind of beginning is worthy of analysis and can produce interesting results; this is especially true of the beginning of the story being performed (as well as the implicit larger question of when does any complex story actually begin?). For the last century, the beginning of the theatrical performance has also been prominently experimented with, and at times can seem to conflict with the text of the play. The results of these analyses have suggestive analogues in cosmology and important implications for the establishment or construction of beginnings in any field that focuses on narrative, such as history or some branches of psychology. Special attention will be given to plays that utilize scientific theories as they explore beginnings, such as the lost beginnings in Stoppard's *Arcadia* or the excessive beginnings in recent work by Caryl Churchill.


Given the recent appearance of a number of well-received plays with scientific themes, characters, and metaphors, it is no surprise that critical discourse is just beginning to assess the quality and accomplishments of science plays. A leading spokesperson for one critical approach is Carl Djerassi, an award-winning chemist who, after retiring from academia, has published a number of plays on science themes (Oxygen; An Immaculate Misconception). As well, Djerassi has become a respected polemicist for adjudicating which plays belong to the category of what he terms "science-in-theatre."

In my paper I explore some ramifications of Djerassi's assumptions, focusing on how they position theatre and performance as a mirror held up to the nature that a given science proposes. I argue that such expectations have led a good deal of playwrights to pursue a strategy of "veracity" in their presentation of scientific themes (using Frayn's Copenhagen as a readily-recognizable example). In contrast to these assumptions, I present the work of less-known playwrights and theatre devisers (such as Luca Ronconi) whose strategy is rather one of what I term "variety" – "theatre-in-science," to reverse Djerassi's formulation. In their work, theatre and performance are recognized, and celebrated, for their ability to warp the mirror of scientific veracity and to awaken imaginative responses that still honor complex scientific ideas (such as Ronconi's Infinities, created in collaboration with the cosmologist John Barrow).

In my conclusion, I interrogate the consequences of what I consider a too-heavy investment of science-in-theatre at the expense of theatre-in-science, considering how art/science collaborations are normally funded and for what purpose they usually come into being.


We know the 'Two Cultures' is a myth. Theorists and practitioners from both sides have roundly rebuked the notion, beginning, for me, with an essay I have long misplaced called "The Myth of the Two Cultures" and re-appearing periodically in almost every field, most recently in medical humanities via a number of essays bemoaning the resistence medical students exhibit toward the medical humanities and in an even more recent study in Literature and Medicine showing that science and medicine have roots and practices that place them closer to allegory than objectivity. This being the case, why do the Two Cultures persist in almost every corner of our world? Beginning with this question, my presentation will look at ways in which the structure and surveillance practices of medical education attempt to create narrative beings bereft of feeling and at how medical students represent themselves and others undermining those intentions through and narratives that enable, gather, and preserve authentic feeling. When students write or tell their stories, they share what they have learned to do, even in the hardest of places, with outsiders, first with their peers and then, perhaps, with others. Drawing on emergence theory and on the helpful metaphor of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, we'll consider some student narratives of this type, paying particular attention to the representation of spatial movements that signal narrative and on-the-ground resistance. We'll discover that it is precisely the panoptic gaze medical students learn on the way to becoming doctors that enables a variety of narratives designed with a very different, more neighborly panoptic reader always already present.


One of the most significant projects in contemporary evolutionary theory centers on determining who or what is the unit of selection—that is, what kind of entity is the focus or agent of natural selection. Although over the last 150 years, biologists have answered in many ways (e.g., gene, organism, group, population, species), the major contemporary responses are either that it is the organism or the gene. Evolution is generally presented as a story of organisms "struggling" to survive and consequently reproduce (basically versions of Darwin's narrative), or as a story of genes "trying" to get copies of themselves into future generations (a new story told, to use W. D. Hamilton's phrase, from "the gene's-eye view"). Implicit in both accounts is the metaphoric language of motive, purpose, and intentionality that persistently characterizes explanations of what is nevertheless recognized as a purposeless and non-directional process: a rhetorical problem that has haunted evolutionary discourse since Darwin and that continues into more contemporary instantiations of evolutionary theory.

In this paper, I analyze one of the most important texts aimed advocating a gene-centric view of evolution, George Williams' highly influential Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966). Like other gene-selectionists, Williams is faced with the problem of how to tell a story that seems to lack an agent, a problem Richard Dawkins later famously tackled with his metaphor of the "selfish gene." Williams, however, does not anthropomorphize genes. Instead, he endows organisms with the kind of metaphoric intentionality that would make them masters of their own genetic destiny: "The goal of a fox is to contribute as heavily as possible to the next generation of a fox population." Thus, Williams is able to retain the Darwinian organism as the rhetorical agent but to do so in a way that places the gene conceptually at the center of the story (if not in the agent's position). The conceptual and rhetorical challenges Williams negotiates in Adaptation and Natural Selection are related, and they reflect ongoing issues in how evolution is both theorized and represented. The purposive metaphors and analogies with human actions—what Kenneth Burke calls "motive" language— that Williams consistently uses appear inextricable from his theoretical argument: not simply decorating but helping to structure the kinds of claims Williams makes.
I offer some personal reflections on my life as a fairly successful theoretical physicist and a struggling writer. I have published popular books on physics, on language, food, and culture, and a textbook on quantum field theory, and recently spent a year trying to write a novel. I will speak about the challenges posed and satisfaction offered by these diverse endeavors.


The play Operation Epsilon is based on the true story of the German nuclear scientists who were interned at Farm Hall, England by the joint British and American authorities just after the fall of Germany in World War II. All the rooms in Farm Hall were under surveillance and all conversations recorded on wax disc. These conversations were later transcribed, translated and sent to the military authorities in Washington and London. Only those portions that were thought pertinent to the military authorities have been retained. Much of that text from the transcripts appears in the play interwoven with scenes that have been imagined.

Working with material that is historically documented and scientifically specific presents major strategic issues for the playwright. How true to the transcripts and the chronology of events must that action be? How much of the scientific material can drive the action and still reach a lay audience? How can the emotional and moral implications be embodied in the given action?