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Identical coursesLiterature and Science (B-KUL-F0UY0A)
Bru Sascha (coordinator) | Bru Sascha | van den Bossche Bart Aims
This course wants to acquaint students with the multiple ties between literature and science and aims to help master students develop independent research within the field of literature and science studies. How does literature relate to science and vice versa? What is ‘science’ really? Does literature know things science does not (and, if so, how)? What concepts and methods help us to answer these questions and more?
This course focuses on modern literature, and more specifically on writing between 1890 and 1950. In the history of science this period is often described as that of the ‘third scientific revolution’ (after earlier revolutions in the 17th and early 19th centuries). Along with a panoply of new scientific insights, the period also saw many changes in literature: from the introduction of cheap printing techniques and the arrival of a mass readership to the rise of modernism and the avant-gardes. In this turbulent phase of European cultural history, so this course demonstrates, literature and science came to interlock in a variety of ways.
This course has been developed by members of the MDRN research lab (www.mdrn.be) working in the research programme ‘Literary Knowledge, 1890-1950. Modernisms and the Sciences in Europe’.
Previous knowledge
Is included in these courses of study
Activities
6 ects. Literature and Science (B-KUL-F0UY0a)
Content
This ‘blended’ course opens with a series of on-campus lectures, after which is made available online a series of representative case-studies relating Western-European literatures to the social sciences and humanities, the life sciences and medicine, and the physical sciences and engineering. The course is closed with a student conference during which students present a case-study of their own.
This course is in English, but student can compose their final exam paper, based on their presentation, in the language of their choice.
Course material
Reader: texts and secondary literature.