In the first paper, Alexis Ferguson shows how the scientific model of binary, “biological” sex was mediated through literary forms in the nineteenth century. Ferguson analyzes George Henry Lewes’ textbook The Physiology of Common Life (1859), uncovering Lewes’ turns to literary rather than scientific modes of address and representation to grapple with questions of cis-sexuality and sexual difference—a turn that, Ferguson argues, uncovers how the literary imagination shaped the historical emergence of “the logics of cis-ness” in the biological and physiological sciences in ways that continue to inflect and inform the present.
In the second paper, Celia Xu explores how the concept of the fold shaped approaches to complex mathematical problems as well as poetic and philosophical experimentation in the latter twentieth century. Xu identifies the fold as an indispensable strategy not only for constructing three-dimensional models in pedagogical settings, but also for approaching complex mathematical problems such as optimization (e.g., Buckminster Fuller’s domes), catastrophe theory (René Thom’s point of inflexion), and the ontology of mathematical objects (Alfred Tarski’s system of axioms for Euclidian geometry), as well as poststructuralist philosophy and criticism. In a reading of Susan Howe’s poem The Midnight (2003), Xu shows how contemporary poetry takes up the fold in ways that resonate across disciplinary boundaries, taking seriously the forms of knowledge that emerge across distinct disciplines as she compares the fold’s role in representative mathematical and artistic investigations.
In the third paper, Patrick Whitmarsh reads twenty-first century Anthropocene fiction as formally staging the same challenges of computation and representation that contemporaneous planetary science faces. In readings of contemporary novels by Rumaan Alam and Allegra Hyde, Whitmarsh shows how Anthropocene fiction both updates Lukácsian ideas of history and totality for a planetary age and serve as literary analogs to models of planetary computation that seek to map environmental complexity. In particular, Whitmarsh argues, the dialectic of character and narrative form in these novels parallels the dialectic of citizen science and institutional science.
Finally, Benjamin Mangrum draws from collaborative research with a computer scientist to investigate the aesthetic judgments of machine learning programs that examine films and book covers, developing judgments based on human training data: they find “aesthetic criteria” in the training data, formulate models based on those criteria, and then redeploy the models on other visual objects to discover scenes that it finds aesthetically pleasing. Mangrum’s presentation steps back from this in-progress collaborative scholarship to ask theoretical questions about how aesthetics functions in machine learning, asking questions such as: What does the computer “see” when it identifies and evaluates the aesthetics of visual objects? Do their model “see” aesthetic criteria that are invisible but give some quantifiable basis to aesthetic judgments? Do machine-learning models change how we understand aesthetics or simply confirm extant biases and theories?
Collectively, then, the session advances new accounts of literature's intervention in scientific discourses, highlighting the ways that narratological, rhetorical, and formalist experiments recast scientific theories and models. To allow for robust comparative and synthesizing discussion, the four panelists will be asked to keep remarks fairly brief—around 12 minutes each—leaving at least twenty minutes for unstructured conversation among panelists and with audience members at the end of the session.