GERM 320: Science As Fiction (HC) Spring 2016

Beer's classic text focuses on how writers responded to Darwin's discoveries and to his innovations in scientific language continues to open up new approaches to Darwin's thought and to its effects in the culture of his contemporaries. This third edition includes a new essay that investigates Darwin's concern with consciousness across all forms of organic life. Also includes an updated bibliography reflecting recent work in the field.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a tale crafted two centuries ago to awaken thrilling horror, is a story that speaks to deep fears and desires that lie at the heart of our responses to biological science. Tracing the history of the development of biological science and how it has been received and understood by the public over two centuries, Turney's book argues that the Frankenstein story governs much of today's debate about the onrushing new age of biotechnology.

Drawing together literature, media, and philosophy, Ghostly Apparitions provides a new model for media archaeology. Stefan Andriopoulos examines the relationships between new media technologies and distinct cultural realms, tracing connections between Kant's philosophy and the magic lantern's phantasmagoria, the Gothic novel and print culture, and spiritualist research and the invention of television.

In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age.

Otis examines how the image of the biological cell became one of the reigning metaphors of the nineteenth century. At the heart of her story is the rise of a fundamental assumption about human identity: the idea that selfhood requires boundaries showing where the individual ends and the rest of the world begins. Otis focuses on the scientific and creative writing of four physician-authors: American neurologist S. Weir Mitchell; Spanish neurobiologist Santiago Ramon y Cajal; British author Arthur Conan Doyle; and Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler.

Silent cinema and contemporaneous literature explored themes of mesmerism, possession, and the ominous agency of corporate bodies that subsumed individual identities. At the same time, critics accused film itself of exerting a hypnotic influence over spellbound audiences. Stefan Andriopoulos shows that all this anxiety over being governed by an outside force was no marginal oddity, but rather a pervasive concern in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This book presents a series of essays, each specially written by an expert in the area, which focus on the role of Romantic philosophy and ideology in the sciences, and on the role of the sciences in Romantic literature.

Sheds new light on modernity and illuminates the work of important thinkers of the last two centuries. Tracing debates about the nature of time, causality, and free will, as well as the introduction of modern technologies: telegraphy, photography, cinematography.

A collection of essays that seeks to understand how objects become charged with significance without losing their gritty materiality. True to the particularity of things, each of the essays singles out one object for close attention: a Bosch drawing, the freestanding column, a Prussian island, soap bubbles, early photographs, glass flowers, Rorschach blots, newspaper clippings, paintings by Jackson Pollock.