Читать книгу Literature and Chemistry - Группа авторов - Страница 4

Scientia sine conscientia ruina animae ¹

The present volume represents the continuation of a dialogue between literary scholars, historians of culture and science, and chemists that started two years ago. On the occasion of the UNESCO International Year of Chemistry 2011, the interdisciplinary conference “Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities” was organised by the research group “Literature and Science” at the Department of Foreign Languages of the University of Bergen (Norway) on 27-8 October. The sixteen essays that came out of this event, all excursions into the mostly uncultivated field of “chemical humanities”, are here addressed to scholars and students of literature as well as to all readers interested in the historical and cultural affinities between the natural sciences and the arts. Covering a wide range of topics, epochs, and approaches, the essays are loosely organised into six different sections. In the following, they will be introduced progressively as pertaining to the branch of literary studies known as “Literature and Science”.

The first section below presents our general approach to the subdiscipline of literature and science, while the second summarises the recent development of the sub-subdiscipline of literature and chemistry. The five following sections contextualise the descriptions of the volume’s essays within their respective subject areas, while the final parts add up the numerous affinities between the literary and chemical crafts, arguing for the relevance of literature and chemistry in the study of the past, present, and future of human culture.