ENGL 1102 for Science Majors - Spring 2012

One section of ENGL 1102 has been reserved exclusively for students in the College of Sciences because of its specialized content. Currently, 19 seats remain in the class, so please notify your students. Here are the details:

ENGL 1102 G2
22670
MWF 12:05-12:55
Michael Tondre
368 Skiles

Course Description: During the nineteenth century in Britain, the sciences did not exist as a separate sphere of knowledge, but as parts of a broader intellectual landscape. Journals like Household Words and The Cornhill Magazine carried scientific articles alongside poetry, fiction, and political reports, while scientists like Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell gave public lectures attended by novelists, natural philosophers, and politicians alike. The nation as a whole was tied together though a vast network of railway lines and telegraphic wires. Science not only helped to shape the mainstream; in many respects, it was the mainstream. The ways in which scientists sought to produce knowledge about the world, and their relationship to the work of popular novelists, will be central to our purposes in this class. How can we read scientific documents closely alongside literary ones? In what ways did the writings of Charles Darwin resonate with those by George Eliot or Charles Dickens, who constructed parallel "plots" of identity and inheritance? Certainly we will examine how scientific ideas influenced literature, and vice versa. But our greater goal, here, will be to re-think the vey boundaries between science and literature, texts and contexts, fiction and fact.

Best wishes,

Shannon

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Shannon P. Dobranski, Ph.D.
Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies
School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
Georgia Tech