LAURA SØVSØ THOMASEN, ph.d.-stipendiat

Constructing New Worlds of Science – Visual, Textual and Literary Representations of Science 1650-1850 

Projektet omhandler sammenhængene mellem naturvidenskaben i tekst og billeder og hvordan disse elementer er blevet en del af skønlitteraturen. Gennem en række cases vil projektet søge at illustrere hvordan naturvidenskabelige tekster og illustrationerne til teksterne oversættes i en skønlitterær kontekst. Et eksempel er den engelske videnskabsmand Robert Hooke, der i slutningen af 1600-tallet med sit værk ”Micrographia” var en af de første der viste hvordan insekter, planter osv. så ud når man kiggede på dem i et mikroskop. Mange af Hookes illustrationer fra ”Micrographia” er blevet ikoner for den videnskabelige revolution der fandt sted i perioden, hvor videnskabelige instrumenter som f.eks. mikroskopet og teleskopet åbnede nye verdener for videnskaben at undersøge. Før Hookes værk var der ikke ret mange skønlitterære forfatter der f.eks. interesserede sig for insekter, men med Hookes og videnskabens indblik i en mikroskopisk verden blev f.eks. et insekt som fluen også en spiller i litteraturens verden bl.a. hos William Blake, Goethe og Robert Burns. Andre casestudier i projektet vil se nærmere på Charles Lyells geologiske værker i relation til bl.a. Tennyson og hvordan James Cookes optegnelser af og tekster om Venus-passagen fra sine ekspeditioner til Tahiti 1760erne.

Constructing New Worlds of Science – Visual, Textual and Literary Representations of Science 1650-1850

Images and text have always been part of science, especially when it comes to documenting new findings and theories. Since the 1960s, many new approaches to science and the history of science started to develop with the rise of new historiographies, including social constructivism. Historians of science began to focus on interrelations between science and other cultural expressions and began to acknowledge the mutual influences between cultural forms and science. Today, the fields of ‘literature and science’ and, in particular, ‘art and science’ are integrated parts of the historiography of science.

In this proposed PhD project, I will investigate the interrelations between science, literature, and the visual arts thereby integrating perspectives from the field of literature and science and the field of art and science. Taking up three or four different case studies, I will look into how certain scientific themes, experiments or theories are portrayed through text, literature and image.

The PhD project will include a thorough theoretical introduction outlining the methodological and theoretical relations and oppositions within the fields of ‘literature and science’ and ‘art and science’. The introduction will be followed by three to four case studies in the form of articles centred on different time periods and scientific disciplines (see below). The project will be concluded by an in-depth discussion evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of combining a number of perspectives from the fields of ‘literature and science’ and ‘art and science’ in different case studies.

The Fields of ‘Literature and Science’ and ‘Art and Science’

In order to understand the perspectives the two fields may bring to the analyses of different case studies, it is necessary to look into their methods and approaches. Looking at the fields of ‘literature and science’ and ‘art and science’ in a broad perspective there are two points that spring to mind. First, within both fields there are differences when it comes to how science is basically understood. Usually, there is a fundamental conflict of understanding between the scientists and the cultural critics writing in both fields. Second, there are plethora of approaches when it comes to the relation of science to art and literature. These range from close studies of a particular piece of art or literature to broad contextual readings. But whatever approach one chooses to take, works on the relations including science, text and image are few in numbers, especially when it comes to having a clear definition of approach or theory.

One noticeable exception is the book From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature (2002) edited by Bruce Clarke and Linda D. Henderson. It is one of the first works to investigate the relationship between science, literature and art from the age of thermodynamics and forward. Their investigation into the relationship between science, technology, literature and art takes an interdisciplinary approach to the theme of transitions, but still focuses on the historical development and contextual influences of science, technology, art and literature. Clarke and Henderson’s book is, to the best of my knowledge, the only book that has set out to find a method for analysing science, literature and art as dependent on each other. Other works have approached the three components from the perspective of history of science by analysing the historical role of text and images (for instance Early Modern Zoology: The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts, 2007, edited by K. A. E. Enenkel).

There has been a clear tendency in both the fields of ‘art and science’ and ‘literature and science’ to focus substantially on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Especially for the field of ‘art and science’, the invention of the photography has been the subject of countless analyses. However, I find the relationship between text, image and science in the decades before the invention of the photography to be grossly neglected. Hence, my case studies will focus mainly on illustrations in scientific publications during the 200-year period c. 1650-1850.

The Components of the PhD project

The theoretical section of the PhD project will take its starting point in synthesizing some of the views on science, art and literature to establish a perspective from which to analyse the case studies. In both the fields of ‘literature and science’ and ‘art and science’, focus has been on the scientist’s role as observer and someone who documents his science. In his Darwin and the Novelists, 1991, George Levine analyses how Darwin’s ideas on evolution entered into nineteenth-century novels. In addition to this, he includes some observations about Darwin (and the scientist in general) as the so-called ‘disinterested observer’. Thereby Levine means that Darwin had to distance himself from his subject matter (in Darwin’s case the human race) in order to attain a full and objective understanding of it. This ideal of the disinterested observer also entered into the literature of the time. Another approach was followed by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison in their 1992 article “The Image of Objectivity”. In that article, they discuss whether images constitute knowledge or not, and how the role of the observer has shifted. This visual epistemology of Daston and Galison combined with the notion of the observer scientist from Levine appear to be fruitful starting points in the analyses focusing on the documentation of new scientific ideas represented through text and image.

The Case Studies

Through the four outlined case studies, I will analyse the relationship between science, scientific illustrations and literature. I understand scientific illustrations to be either illustrations published in the scientific text or illustrations made afterwards as a commentary to the scientific text. My analyses will focus on how poems and novels observe and document the scientific idea in relation to the imagery of the scientific theme or theory. The case studies deal with different periods of time, different scientific disciplines and different genres. My reason for choosing these particular case studies is that they all present interesting perspectives on the relations between science, image, text and literature and have not, to the best of my knowledge, previously been analysed with the dual emphasis on literature and the visual arts. The case studies will be connected by the theoretical discussions and findings outlined in the introduction of the PhD project.

1. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the English scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703) produced a number of drawings as illustrations to his Micrographia (1665) about his observations through a microscope. His illustrations are mostly detailed investigations of plants and insects, and they opened up to a whole new microscopic world. Both in the years before and after Hooke’s Micrographia authors wrote on insects in their poetry. Poems like John Donne’s (1572-1631) “The Flea”, William Blake’s (1757-1827) “The Fly”, Robert Burns’ (1759-1797) “To a Louse” and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749-1832) “The Death of a Fly” (1810)   all pose interesting perspectives in relation to Hooke’s writings and illustrations in Micrographia. The poems are all highly metaphorical in nature and deal with other things than insects: Similarly, the Micrographia introduced a new world where detailed studies of small objects give meaning to aspects of the world outside.

2. The second case study takes up its starting point in 1768, when James Cook sailed out bound for Tahiti to witness the transit of Venus. The transit was documented in writing and in drawings both by Cook, himself, and by the accompanying astronomer Charles Green. Later, the writer John Hawkesworth was commissioned to edit Cook’s writings from his journey, thereby creating a new perspective on Cook’s journey, the transit of Venus and Cook’s description of the transit. The transit of Venus and other heavenly bodies entered into the literature of the time, both before and after Cooks voyages, when authors such as Denis Diderot, François-Marie Arouet Voltaire and Jonathan Swift wrote on astronomical subjects. Explorations to foreign corners of the world are an interesting literary phenomenon. Literary authors as well as explorers tend to create a certain literary discourse around the journeys of the explorers. The transit of Venus observed on Cook’s journey is no exception: The diversities between the original observations (written as well as imagery), later fictitious accounts and later revised versions of the original writings all bring about interesting perspectives between science, text and image in this particular case study.

3. Charles Lyell’s (1797-1875) geological works had a major influence on science – and culture in general – in the first half of the nineteenth century. His Principles of Geology, first published in 1830, was illustrated by amongst others the scientist Sir William Herschel. Being a relatively new scientific discipline, many took an interest in geology, including many literary authors. Most noticeably was Alfred Lord Tennyson, who in his “In Memoriam” (1833-50) and other works related to Lyell’s Principles of Geology. Looking at Herschel’s illustration of Lyell’s work, one notices the somewhat dramatic style of the image, which seems to belong in a work of literature as much in a work of science. The new world that Lyell encountered in his geology no doubt translated into image, literature and text in a very remarkable fashion.

4. In his book Seen/Unseen, 2006, the art historian Martin Kemp treats Robert Thornton’s (1768-1837) illustrations of different scientific undertakings. Among those illustrations is Thornton’s “Combustion of a Metal Spring” inspired by the works of scientists like Alessandro Volta, Luigi Galvani and Humphry Davy. The scientific works of these scientists also inspired the author Mary Shelley to write her novel Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus, 1818. Frankenstein has in recent years been subjected to a variety of analyses, a few of which also explore the author’s scientific sources. But in the novel, itself, science is used in a very subtle fashion, only explaining very little. However, the illustrations by Thornton together with the scientific works can give new insights into the science that is present in Victor Frankenstein’s mind and work.