Science/Literature: The Interface

• Published in: Australian humanities review no. 65; pp. 65 - 68
• Main Authors: White, Jessica, Archer-Lean, Clare
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bundoora Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) 01.11.2019
• Subjects: Archaeology; Australian literature; Beer, Gillian; Biology; Carson, Rachel (1907-1964); Climate change; Communication; Creative nonfiction; Creative writing; Creativity; Davidson, Robyn; Dictionaries; English literature; Essays; Fiction; Genetics; Genre; Humanities; Hypotheses; Imagination; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Literary criticism; Literary translation; Mass extinctions; Novels; Poetry; Prehistoric era; R&D; Reading; Research & development; Science; Scientific method; Scientists; Visual impairment; Wohlleben, Peter; Writing; Australia; United States > US; Virginia; Western Australia Australia
• ISSN: 1325-8338; 1325-8338

[...]most importantly, the translation of complex scientific knowledge is critical in a world in which we are crashing through the world's sixth mass extinction, and in which the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes how the alterations to 70 percent of land on the Earth's surface are adding significantly to climate-warming emissions. Mostafa's essay, 'In Search of Lost Time: Fiction, Archaeology and the Elusive Subject of Prehistory', interprets these two poles not so much as literature (or literary criticism, as he explains) and science, but as scientific research and creative writing. Investigating the representation of plant science in three texts-John Wyndham's science fiction novel The Day of the Triffids (1951), Peter Wohlleben's work of popular science, The Hidden Lives of Trees (2015) and Mununjali author Ellen van Neerven's story 'Water' from her collection Heat and Light (2014)-White posits that reading about plants can be a way of counteracting plant blindness, or the inability to see plants as having agency and individuality. The discipline of science covers an array of fields, including biology, chemistry, physics, genetics, mathematics (to name a few), and when it meets one of the many genres that constitute literature-literary fiction, genre fiction, creative nonfiction, popular science, poetry and play-the range of options for stories that contain and communicate science is vast.