| Hardcover, 177 pages Published 2009 Borrowed from the library Read November 2012 |
by Tabitha Sparks
Solid monograph overall, but I'd like to focus on one bit in the introduction, where Sparks argues that much literature and science criticism claims “that novelist’s conscious was shaped by empirical domains extrinsic to the imaginative realm we ascribe to the novel. In such cases, proof of a novelist’s scientific or medical acumen can suggest, if indirectly, that literature is substantiated through its relationship to ‘hard’ subjects like science” (10-11). Having read a lot of this kind of criticism over the past year, I've seen what she's talking about crop up quite a bit. Sparks avoids this trap herself, talking about how medical professional characters reshape the marriage plot in the nineteenth-century novel, and it's an admonition worth keeping in mind: literature and science criticism should tell us more about literature than the extent of its accuracy in depicting science.
No comments:
Post a Comment