Scientific Paradigm in Literature

The purpose of this research is to examine the parallels and correspondences between the scientific paradigm of the time and the form the contemporary novel took, with particular emphasis on the realist, modernist, and postmodernist texts. The plan of the research will be to set forth a cultural context for the emergence of the scientific paradigm in literature, and then to demonstrate how literature and science overlapped and converged to shape literary form and content.

Downs characterizes Darwin's Origin of Species as one of the dozen or so scientific books that decisively changed the world, not just of science but of the culture as well. He quotes Julian Huxley writing a generation after Darwin on the human implications of Darwin's science:

Darwin's work has enabled us to see the position of man and of our present civilization in a truer light. Man is not a finished product incapable of further progress. He has a long history behind him, and it is a history not of a fall, but of an ascent. And he has the possibility of further progressive evolution before him. Further, in the light of evolution we learn to be more patient. The few thousand years of recorded history are nothing compared to the million years during which man has been on earth, and the thousand million years of life's progress. And we can afford to be patient when the astronomers assure us of at least another thousand million years ahead of us in which to carry evolution onwards to new heights (Do

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menon of science fiction. Scholes and Rabkin connect the emergence of that literary form with the growth of the scientific attitude in the culture as a whole, asserting that the history of science fiction "is also the history of humanity's changing attitudes toward space and time. It is the history of our growing understanding of the universe and the position of our species in that universe" (Scholes and Rabkin 3). It is arguable that science fiction alone does not define changing human attitudes toward space and time, but the case is easily made. Like the history of science itself, the history of this literary form is thin and episodic until about four centuries ago, when the scientific method began to replace more authoritarian and dogmatic modes of thought, and people at last could see that the earth is not the center of the universe with the sun, moon, and stars all spinning round it for the edification of mankind (Scholes and Rabkin, 1977, p. 3). Scholes and Rabkin view the history of literature in general as "a steady movement away from myth toward realism" (p. 5), together with "its opposite--fiction which is aware of the difference between natural and supernatural but deliberately presents supernatural events . . . C

Category: Literature - S