Science and Literature: The Great Divide?
Alex Stuart, Jessica Goodman
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‘De la science dans la fiction’: Elisa Brune’s Petite révision du ciel and Les Jupiters chauds
Caroline Verdier
doi:10.59860/wph.a05884a

Belgian writer and journalist Elisa Brune (b.1966) is a versatile writer who has published in many genres (epistolary, documentary, biographic, scientific etc.) and, in most of her narratives, either adds a new twist to the genre in which she is writing, or combines several disciplines. In the two novels under consideration in this article, she combines literary creativity and scientific knowledge with the aim of popularising science, as is clear from her statement that it is ‘une motivation majeure que d’essayer de partager une passion qui est la mienne’. She does so by centring her plots around the life of a man who becomes a scientist, and thus including elements of scientific discourse throughout the text. In Petite révision du ciel and its sequel Les Jupiters chauds, the main character Vincent turns his life around and goes from being employed by an insurance company to becoming an astrophysicist. Although she acknowledges she is not the only one to do so, Elisa Brune is keen to mix science and literary writing, explaining that ‘le romancier prend la liberté de [...] rassemble[r] dans un même espace narratif des disciplines que l’organisation académique sépare complètement’. This article gives a brief overview of these two novels, examining how successfully science has been included in them and how effective both narratives are at popularising science.

What D. H. Lawrence Understood of ‘The Einstein Theory’: Relativity in Fantasia of the Unconscious and Kangaroo
Rachel Crossland
doi:10.59860/wph.a167c91

Towards the end of his 1922 essay Fantasia of the Unconscious, D. H. Lawrence provides an extended summary of 'what I understand of the Einstein theory'. Despite his claim elsewhere that 'I like relativity and quantum theories | because I don't understand them', here Lawrence demonstrates a perhaps unexpected grasp of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity: there is no one absolute force in the physical universe; mechanical principles can only be known in their relation to one another, or, more accurately, in relation to their particular frame of reference; and the relation between mechanical forces is constant and is expressed using the Lorentz Transformations.

Questioning Categories of Science and Fiction in Fin de Siècle Magazines
Will Tattersdill
doi:10.59860/wph.a2770d8

Studies in Literature and Science have so far tended to pass over science fiction (sf), the genre whose very name provocatively situates it on the two-culture divide. There are a number of reasons this might be the case, not least of which is that sf already has a considerable academic community associated with it, and there may be a wariness of repeating work or treading on toes. Equally, Literature and Science is a relatively young field of enquiry, and it may be felt that a focus on canonical figures is necessary to reinforce its legitimacy as a scholarly approach. Despite this, sf and other popular literatures are a crucial part of the public consumption and reinterpretation of scientific ideas, and their study can significantly improve our understanding of science’s cultural trajectory.

Metaphors of Science and Empire: The Entomologist Narrator in Amin Maalouf’s Le Premier Siècle après Béatrice, and the Scientific Subject in Chris Marker’s La Jetée
Sura Qadiri
doi:10.59860/wph.a3864bb

Amin Maalouf’s novel, Le Premier Siècle après Béatrice, tells the tale of the global rise in popularity of ‘fertility beans’, sold inside containers shaped like scarab beetles. These ensure the birth of male heirs to those who take them, and the result is that women begin to face global extinction. This causes the spread of global unrest, and the threat of apocalypse hangs in the air. The story is narrated by a Parisian entomologist, who first comes across the beans at a humanities conference on the mythological importance of the scarab beetle, where he is asked to offer a token scientific account of the scarab. The novel is narrated in a linear fashion, with twenty-six chapters headed A-Z. Thus a strong sense of narrative control is juxtaposed with the chaos of the events recounted. At an aesthetic remove, Chris Marker’s film, La Jetée, tells the story of a prisoner of war living in an underground world in post-apocalyptic Paris. Whilst the subject of a time-travel experiment, he is projected into the Parisian past, and pieces together disjointed memories, before being shot dead by those running the experiment.