Invention
Literature and Science
12-15 July 2004
University of Leeds
FINAL PROGRAMME
As at 2 July 2004
Go to: [Monday, 12 July] [Tuesday, 13 July] [Wednesday, 14 July] [Thursday, 15 July]
MONDAY, 12 JULY
12.00-2.00: REGISTRATION (Worsley Building, main campus)
2.00-2.15: WELCOME: Malcolm Bowie, President of the Association
2.15-3.15: PLENARY 1
Chair: Malcolm Bowie
- Steven Rose (Open University): Is Popular Science Writing a Fraud? (With Apologies to Peter Medawar)
3.15-4.15: PARALLEL SESSIONS (A)
SESSION 1 (Science in the Ancient World)
Chair: Lucia Boldrini
- Estelle Strazdins (Melbourne): Transforming Fire: The Effect of Technology on Humanity in Hesiod's Prometheus Myth and the Watcher Myth of I Enoch
- Annabel Orchard (Melbourne): Smiths, Myths and Metaphors: The Motif of Immersion
SESSION 2 (Ecocriticism)
Chair: Philip Mosley
- Anthony Lioi (MIT): Inventing a Secular Enchantment: "Mysticism," Empiricism, and American Nature Writing
- Jane Walling (Durham): The Imagination of Plants: Botany in Rousseau, Goethe and Proust
SESSION 3 (Biological Life Cycles)
Chair: Jen Boyle
- Maricel Oró (Lleida): Female Ageing: Between Fiction and Real Life
- Rekha Murthy (MIT): Frankenstein and Galatea 2.2: Cautionary Tales for Men Considering (Pro)creation
SESSION 4 (Literary Treatments of Scientific Figures)
Chair: Glyn Hambrook
- Liana Ashenden (Cambridge: Wolfson): Games of Fact and Fiction in Matt Ridley's Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters and Simon Mawer's Mendel's Dwarf
- Gregory Lynall (Birmingham): Tailor, Conjurer and Workman in the Mint: Swift's Caricatures of Newton
SESSION 5 (Public Health and Education)
Chair: Jean Boase-Beier
- Clare Horrocks (Liverpool John Moores): Charles Kingsley and the "Science of Health"
- Daniela Janes (Toronto): Useful Knowledge/Light Reading: The Conflict Between Scientific and Literary Pursuits in the Toronto Mechanics' Institute
4.15-4.45: TEA/COFFEE
4.45-6.15: PARALLEL SESSIONS (B)
SESSION 1 (Physics and Literature)
Chair: Bent Sorensen
- Bernd Klähn (Bochum): How to Do Physics With Words: Isaac Newton's Contribution to Modern Narrativity
- Carolyn Brown (Greenwich): The Wonderworker: Between the Gutter and the Stars. Notes Towards a Quantum Textuality
- Allen MacDuffie (Harvard): Thermodynamic Morality in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
SESSION 2 (The Novel and Systems)
Chair: Gillian Beer
- Antonio Sánchez (London: Goldsmiths): The Fractal Narrative of Mario Vargas Llosa
- Milan Jaros (Newcastle): Materia Poetica: Models of Corporeality and Pataphysics in Literary Narratives
SESSION 3 (Translation)
Chair: John Spencer
- Jean Boase-Beier (East Anglia): Cognitive Stylistics and the Translation of Poetry: Bringing Together Science and Literature
- Federica Gusmeroli (Milan): La coscienza di Zeno in Translation
- Ken-fang Lee (Sussex): The Project of Modernity and Translation: Lu Xun's Translation of From the Earth to the Moon
SESSION 4 (Literary Creativity and Multimedia)
- Rukmini Nair (Delhi): Imagination, Illusion and Identity: Contemporary Indian English Fiction and the New Technologies
- Jelle Dierickx (Ghent): The Hidden Sound(s) of 20th and 21st-Century Poetry
- Anna Schaffner (Edinburgh): On the Technological Enhancement of Avant-Garde Aesthetics in Digital Poetry
SESSION 5 (Frankenstein and the Frankenstein Complex)
Chair: Daniela Janes
- Kate Drayton (East Anglia): Chained Tongues: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Approaches to Madness
- Lisa Zunshine (Kentucky): Why do Robots Go Astray? Can Cognitive Science Shed Light on the Frankenstein Complex?
7.00-7.30: WINE RECEPTION (Devonshire Hall)
7.30: CONFERENCE DINNER (Devonshire Hall; bar open after dinner)
TUESDAY, 13 JULY
9.15-10.45: PARALLEL SESSIONS (C)
SESSION 1 (Popular Science I)
Chair: Jean Boase-Beier
- Megan Stern (London Metropolitan): E=mc2: The Cultural History of an Equation
- John Spencer (Liverpool): Popularising Science, Abusing Philosophy: A Deeper Look at Dawkins and Capra
- Kate Price (Cambridge: Homerton): Popular Science and the Invention of Poetry
SESSION 2 (Magic, Religion and Science I)
Chair: Penny Brown
- Anna Philpott (London: Birkbeck): It's the Oldest Book in the World, and I Wrote It: Helena Blavatsky and the Invention of a New Mythology
- Jo Poppleton (East Anglia): A Lofty Vehicle: Natural Philosophy and the Book of Revelation in the Pindaric Ode
SESSION 3 (Poetry and Science I)
Chair: Amanda Mordavsky
- Cristina Piñero Maese (Birmingham): Material memoria: How Poetry, as well as Science, can Illuminate the Darkness on the Other Face of the Moon
- Slavica Rankovic (Nottingham): The "Emergent Realism" and its "Distributed Author" in the Sagas of Icelanders and Serbian Epic Poetry
SESSION 4 (Science Fiction I)
Chair: Karen Seago
- Nicholas Ruddick (Regina): The Intersection of Science and Desire in Prehistoric Science Fiction: The Case of L. P. Gratacap's A Woman of the Ice Age (1906)
- Elizabeth Throesch (Leeds): Transcendence via Mathematical Analogy: The Fourth Dimension as Mythologised Theory in Charles Howard Hinton's Early Scientific Romances
SESSION 5 (Goethe)
Chair: Philip Mosley
- Pierre Laszlo (Liège): Can Scientific Discoveries Originate in Literary Texts?
- Katherine Downey (Dallas): Embracing Ambivalence: The Alchemy of Goethe and Winterson
- Angela Borchert (Western Ontario): Intertwining Sociability and Philosophy of Nature: Goethe and the Fragment on Nature
10.45-11.00: TEA/COFFEE
11.00-12.00: PARALLEL SESSIONS (D)
SESSION 1 (Shifts in Scientific Ideology)
Chair: Michael Hoare
- Miriam Jones (New Brunswick): William Hunter and William Cummin: From "Child Murder" to "Infanticide"
- Bryce Christensen (Southern Utah): Between Times Square and the Frozen Void: The Problematics of a Social Constructivist Approach to Science
SESSION 2 (Magic, Religion and Science II)
Chair: Rukmini Nair
- Marichka Masley (Kiev): Vedas: The Value of a Scientific Approach in the Contemporary World
- Sohaimi Aziz (Malaysia): The Malay Mentera: The Integration of Medicine and Literature
SESSION 3 (Reception of Literature)
Chair: Duncan Large
- Bent Sorensen (Aalborg): Physicists in the Field of Fiction
- Glyn Hambrook (Wolverhampton): "Plains-moi - sinon, je te maudis!": Baudelaire, Psychology and Literary Criticism in Fin-de-Siècle Spain
SESSION 4 (Colonial and Post-Colonial Writing)
Chair: Lucia Boldrini
- Joseph Okong'o (Moi): Scientific Discourse and the African World: A Study of Soyinka's Plays
- Simona Corso (Rome): Darting Fire and Speaking Thunder
SESSION 5 (William Blake)
Chair: Jean Boase-Beier
- Sibylle Erle (Nottingham Trent): The Forces of Blood: A Shaping Factor in the Creation Myth of William Blake
- Alexandra Dumitrescu (Babes-Bolyai): Redeeming Feminine Archetypes in Alchemical and Blakean Texts and Images
12.00-1.00: PLENARY 2
Chair: Gillian Beer
- Sally Shuttleworth (Sheffield): The Science and Literature of Child Study in the 1890s
1.00-2.00: LUNCH
2.00-3.30: PARALLEL SESSIONS (E)
SESSION 1 (Negotiating Gender)
Chair: Carol O'Sullivan
- Jen Boyle (Hollins): Epicurean Cybernetics: The Embodiment of Perspective Observation in John Milton's Paradise Lost and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan
- Andrew Mangham (Sheffield): Horrible Instincts: Victorian Ideas on Cannibalism and the Biological Development of Womanhood
SESSION 2 (Poetry and Science II)
Chair: Karen Leeder
- Rob Stanton (Oxford: Corpus Christi): "How many constants should there be?": Rae Armantrout's Quasi-Scientific Methodology
- Judith Hawley (London: Royal Holloway): Universal Knowledge and Universal Poems
- Rachel Hewitt (Oxford: Corpus Christi): "Dreaming O'er the Map of Things": William Wordsworth and the Irish Ordnance Survey
SESSION 3 (Science Fiction II: Inter-War Science Fiction)
Chair: Claire Taylor
- Amanda Mordavsky (Sheffield): Dabbling in the Supernatural: The Weird Side of Science
- Rick Hudson (Southampton): Flee From the Deadly Light: Science as the Locus of Horror in H. P. Lovecraft's Fiction
- Alvin Kibel (MIT): Technological Worlds: H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster
SESSION 4 (Literature as Laboratory)
- Stefka Ritchie (Birmingham): Science in Samuel Johnson's Rasselas: The Case of the Astronomer's Madness
- Oksana Kirichkova (Calgary): Specificity of the Categories of Space and Time in Peter Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee
- Florian Mussgnug (Pisa): Scientific Metaphors and Methodology in Experimental Literature
3.30-4.00: TEA/COFFEE
4.00-5.00: PLENARY 3
Chair: Elinor Shaffer
- Katherine Hayles (UCLA): Narrating Bits: Digitality and Narrative Theory
5.15-6.15: PARALLEL SESSIONS (F)
SESSION 1 (Catastrophe)
Chair: Daniela Janes
- Elspeth Tulloch (Laval): The Parched Pastoral and Agrarian Reform in Sharon Butala's The Garden of Eden and Bessie Head's When Rain Clouds Gather
- Carol O'Sullivan (East Anglia): Fictions of the Apocalypse: Science in the Disaster Narrative
SESSION 2 (Imaginary Creatures)
Chair: Florian Mussgnug
- Marie Addyman (Newcastle): Verum factum: Writing the Barnacle-Goose Tree
- Aude Campmas (Paris): The Giant Squid and the Abysses: Scientific Controversies Serving the Romanesque Imagination
SESSION 3 (Science Fiction III: Bodies and Science Fiction)
Chair: Amanda Mordavsky
- Jutta Fortin (Vienna): Mechanisation in the Fantastic: Hoffmann's Der Sandmann and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's L'Eve future
- Claire Taylor (Leeds): Other Worlds, Other Bodies: Latin American Science Fiction
SESSION 4 (Wilkie Collins)
Chair: Katherine Downey
- Simon Marsden (Lancaster): Entangled Banks and Missing Branches: Problems of Relationship in Charles Darwin and Wilkie Collins
- Lucy Bending (Reading): Instant Decisions and Dull Brains: Perception, Deduction and Speed in the Late Nineteenth Century
7.30-8.45: DINNER (Devonshire Hall)
8.45-9.30: General Meeting (Bar open afterwards)
WEDNESDAY, 14 JULY
9.15-10.45: PARALLEL SESSIONS (G)
SESSION 1 (Science and Nation-Building)
Chair: Peter France
- Louise Lyle (Birmingham): Struggle for Frenchness in Selected Writings of Maurice Barrès
- Sylvia Rieger (Harvard): Dangerous Encounters: Interconnections of Science and Literature Between 1850 and 1910
- Michael Rand Hoare (London: Royal Holloway): A Comparative View of Science and Literature in European Perspective
SESSION 2 (Technology and Literature)
Chair: Keith Williams
- Karin Littau (Essex): Technological Aesthesis: The Impressing Inventions of Gutenberg and the Lumières
- Soeren Hattesen Balle (Aalborg): Means of Transport: Automobiles and Other New Vehicles of Ecstasy in the Writings of William Carlos Williams
SESSION 3 (Scientific Approaches to Literary Creativity)
Chair: Bent Sorensen
- Kent Hooper (Washington): The Role of Pure Chance: Introducing New Hypotheses in Interarts Discourse and in the Sciences
- Kenneth Holmqvist / Jaroslaw Pluciennik (Lund / Lodz): An Overview of the Science of Literary Creativity
- Camelia Elias (Aalborg): Stumbling unto Grace: Invention and the Poetics of Imagination
SESSION 4 (Medicine and Literature I)
Chair: Jean Boase-Beier
- Aris Sarafianos (Manchester): Re-Inventing the Aesthetic of the Sublime Medicine: The Physiology of Contractility and the Making of Edmund Burke's Philosophical Inquiry on the Beautiful and the Sublime
- Maria Ferreira (Aveiro): Towards a Science of Perfect Reproduction? Visions of Eugenics in Contemporary Fiction
10.45-11.00: TEA/COFFEE
11.00-12.00: PARALLEL SESSIONS (H)
SESSION 1 (Scientific Topoi and Narrative)
Chair: Keith Williams
- Stephen Thomson (Reading): In the Family: Sleepwalking, Science and the Everyday
- Stephen Gennaro (York, Ontario): Endosymbiosis and Representations of Victorian Science in Sherlock Holmes
SESSION 2 (Magic, Religion and Science III)
Chair: Peter France
- Arthur Bradley (Chester): Deus ex Machina: Towards a Philosophy of Religion and Technology
- Jeremy Stubbs (Manchester): Materialising Maidens: Spiritualism, Science and Fiction in the Heyday of Psychical Research
SESSION 3 (Psychology and Psychoanalysis I)
Chair: Kate Price
- Kalliopi Georgiadou (London: Goldsmiths): Alchemical Transformations of Desire
- Akemi Yaguchi (Cambridge): "The Impression She Made Was Overwhelming": Virginia Woolf and Her Heritage of Victorian Psychology
SESSION 4 (Hypertext and Interaction)
Chair: Karin Littau
- Angela Colvert (Roehampton): The Games Afoot: A Response to Puzzling Narratives
- Noga Appelbaum (Roehampton): Control Shift: The Internet as an Alternative Multicultural Space within Young Adult Literature
12.00-1.00: LUNCH
1.00: TRIP TO HAWORTH (Optional)
7.00: DINNER (Devonshire Hall)
8.00: DRYDEN TRANSLATION COMPETITION PRIZE (Devonshire Hall; bar open afterwards)
THURSDAY, 15 JULY
9.15-10.45: PARALLEL SESSIONS (I)
SESSION 1 (Crossing Genres)
Chair: Camelia Elias
- Lucia Boldrini (London: Goldsmiths): Primo Levi's Obscure Writing?: The Periodic Table, "The Two Cultures" and "Commitment"
- Helga Lénárt-Cheng (Harvard): A Typical Individual? Scientific Autobiography, Statistics and Eugenics
- Christian Emden (Rice): Experiment: Aesthetics, Science and the Logic of Invention, 1700-1900
SESSION 2 (Literary Critiques of Scientific Progress)
Chair: Jutta Fortin
- Orsetta Innocenti (Rome): The Genetic Uncanny Between Inheritance and Environment: Kurt Vonnegut and Michel Houellebecq
- David Cruz Acevedo (Córdoba): A Perfect Mechanism: Science and Reason as Dominating Structures in Pynchon
- Margaret Clarke (Portsmouth): Entropy and the Crisis of Utopias in Modern Brazilian Narrative
SESSION 3 (Poetry and Science III)
Chair: Stephen Thomson
- Caroline De Mulder (Ghent): Leconte de Lisle's Polemical Use of Science
- Joseph Acquisto (Vermont): Testing the Limits: Music, Science, and Poetry in René Ghil
- Karen Leeder (Oxford: New College): Elective Affinities: Poetry and Science in the Work of Raoul Schrott and Lavinia Greenlaw
SESSION 4 (Medieval Cosmology)
- Todd Pettigrew (Cape Breton): Faustus Forever: Christopher Marlowe and Infinity
- Larissa Koroleva (New South Wales): On the Development of the Medieval Cosmological Paradigm
- Anne Aurasmaa (Helsinki): Aesthetics in Practice: Beauty as Healing
10.45-11.00: TEA/COFFEE
11.00-12.00: PARALLEL SESSIONS (J)
SESSION 1 (Perception, Film and Literature)
- Alenda Chang (Maryland): A Peaceable Kingdom? Visual Documentary Representations of Nature and the Rhetoric of Ethological Film
- Keith Williams (Dundee): Prosthetic Visions: Optical Speculations in H. G. Wells's Early Stories
SESSION 2 (Medicine and Literature II)
Chair: Todd Pettigrew
- Alison Williams (Swansea): The Laughing Doctor: Medical Humour in the Works of François Rabelais
- Michael Igoumenidis (Manchester): The Influence of Literature on Medicine
SESSION 3 (Psychology and Psychoanalysis II)
Chair: Duncan Large
- Claire Moran (Paris): From Darwin to Freud: Science in the Art and Writings of Odilon Redon
- Simon Fellows (Wolverhampton): Perchance to Dream: The Advent of Psychoanalysis and the Evolution of Science in the Theatre of Arthur Schnitzler and Ramón del Valle Inclán
SESSION 4 (Popular Science II)
Chair: Peter France
- Felix Sprang (Hamburg): "Trite and Fruitlesse Rhapsodies"? Popular Science Writing in Early Modern London
- Sam George (York): "Not Strictly Proper for a Female Pen": The Scientific Poem and the Sexuality of Plants
12.00-1.00: PLENARY 4
Chair: Malcolm Bowie
- Gillian Beer (Cambridge): Imagining the Interior (of the Body)
1.00: END OF CONFERENCE
Return to the [ "Invention" Conference homepage ] [ BCLA home page ]
