Trains, pasteurization, electric lights, thermodynamics, cinema, and submarines are just a few of the marvellous scientific advances born in the nineteenth century. Positivism or faith in scientific progress, as formulated by Auguste Comte, is often seen to define the nineteenth century. Yet many in the century were deeply sceptical of scientific triumphalism, none more so perhaps than Louis Pasteur himself. The discourse around science, which justifies social policy and political ambitions, often finds itself at odds with how science is practiced and how technological discoveries come about. Scientific innovation inspires us to dream of utopian futures, but just as often reveals our worst fears of power and hubris. In this module we will investigate the relationship between science and literature in the 19th century. In what ways does scientific discourse borrow from the literary imaginary? How does French literature create new aesthetic forms from scientific paradigms? Is literature always opposed to science, or is there a science to literature? How are Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism informed by science? One of the key questions we will explore is why, in so many novels about science in the nineteenth century, scientists profess a profound and disturbing misogyny. From robots replacing “flawed” women to eugenics to men escaping the world in a submarine, science and technology in nineteenth-century literature reflect the unconscious desires of (fictional) male scientists, but also the fears of fiction writers about a world in the near future where the rational excludes the spiritual.  We will also look at francophone scientific discourse outside of France, from Haiti in particular. 

 

Aims and Learning Outcomes: 

The course is intended to give students a range of analytical tools to approach the comparative study of science and literature in the 19th Century, such as historical, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and cultural approaches. The course aims to encourage students to think of the challenges of dealing not only with the complexities of positivism, but also how literature and scientific discourse inform each other in French literary history. 

 

On successful completion of the module, students will be able to demonstrate: 


	critical analytical skills related to French novels of the 19th Century and to understand the main currents of scientific thought of that time; 
	
	
	an ability to use scholarly sources; 
	
	
	an ability to develop questions related to interdisciplinary research; 
	
an advanced ability to use scholarly sources. 

 

Suggested Reading: 

Primary Texts 

Mme de Staël, De la littérature (selections) 

 

Prosper Mérimée, Carmen 

 

Anténor Firmin, De l’égalité des races humaines (selections) 

 

Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet  

 

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, L’Ève future  

 

Émile Zola, Le Dr Pascal  

 

Jules Verne, Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers  

 

Arthur Rimbaud, Le bateau ivre 

 

 

 

Secondary Texts and Resources  

 

Barthes, Roland, “Nautilus et bateau ivre”, Mythologies. Édition illustrée, Jacqueline Guittard,         Editor (Paris: Seuil, 2010), 102. 

Beckett, Greg. “The Abolition of All Privilege: Race, Equality, and Freedom in the Work of Anténor Firmin.” Critique of Anthropology. 37.2 (2017): pp. 160-178. 

Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3rd edition, 2009. 

 

Beizer, Janet. Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. 

 

Bell, David. Real Time: Accelerating Narrative from Balzac to Zola. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. 

 

Blix, Göran. From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 

 

Bray, Patrick M. The Price of Literature: The Theoretical Turn in the 19th-C French Novel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019. 

 

Chambers, Ross. “The Queer and the Creepy: Western Fictions of Artificial Life.” Pacific Coast Philology: 40 (1), 2005, pp. 19-35. 

 

Ender, Evelyne. Architexts of Memory: Literature,  Science, and Autobiography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. 

 

Foucault, Michel. Les Mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. 

 

Goulet, Andrea. Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction.  

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 

 

Marchal, Hugues, ed. Muses et ptérodactyles: La poésie de la science de Chénier à Rimbaud. Paris: Seuil, 2013. 

  

Marin, Louis. Utopiques: Jeux d’espaces. Paris: Minuit, 1973. 

 

Murphy, Kieran. “The Occult Atlantic: Franklin, Mesmer, and the Haitian Roots of Modernity”. in The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States. Eds. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael J. Drexler. Philadelphia: University of Penssylvania Press, 2016: pp. 145-161. 

 

Pierssens, Michel. Les savoirs à l’oeuvre. Essais d’épistémocritique. Lille : Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1990. 

 

Schor, Naomi. George Sand and Idealism.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 

 

Serres, Michel. Feux et signaux de brume: Zola. Paris: Grasset, 1975. 

Virilio, Paul. Vitesse et politique: essai de dromologie. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. 

 