16918

Saviour of mankind or "mad, bad, and dangerous"? Science in fiction, culture, and society

Susanne Scharnowski

Information for students

Workload and Assessment: To obtain 5 ECTS credits, you will engage with the course materials (an average of 25-35 pages of English texts per week), attend the course regularly and participate in class discussions (at least 12 out of 14 classes). You will also have to pass a short mid-term test and the final written exam. close

Additional information / Pre-requisites

Is this the right course for you? You should be prepared to study literary as well as complex academic texts in English, and you should be interested in a critical analysis, interpretation and discussion of cultural and social phenomena. close

Comments

Topic: Since the Covid19 pandemic and in the context of climate change, slogans such as “follow the science” or appeals to “trust science” have become ubiquitous. In fact, for modern societies, science and scientists are probably the last remaining unquestioned authorities; when we need guidance, we turn to scientific experts and trust that they will give us solid advice. However, this is a relatively new development; during the time of the ascent of the sciences, from the 18th through to the mid-20th centuries, new discoveries and inventions in the sciences as well as the scientists and inventors themselves were met with fear, scepticism or suspicion. One powerful expression of this attitude of societies towards the sciences can be found in popular works of fiction: we still use the names of fictional characters such as Faust, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll or Dr Strangelove to characterise mad, evil or amoral scientists as well as dangerous scientific and/ or technological developments. Program: In this course, we will examine the development of literary / cultural imaginations of science and scientists, looking at key texts as well as key developments in the sciences: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, galvanism and the creation of life; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde: experimental drugs and the split personality; H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau: Vivisection and genetics; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: eugenics, genetic engineering and chemistry; the figure of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘father of the atomic bomb’, in post-war reality and fiction, and, finally, the benevolent scientific research on climate change as presented in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Earth trilogy. Based on extracts from the texts and on academic texts which contextualise and analyse the topics, discussions in class will take literature as a point of departure for a more fundamental examination of the connection between science and society. Some of the materials (presentations and film clips) will be available on Blackboard; additionally, students have to purchase the reader (a collection of photocopied texts in printed form) from the copy shop at Königin-Luise-Str. 39, near U-Bahnhof Dahlem Dorf. close