Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the resignification of the queer as a valid category both in science and literary studies. It puts forward a criticism of the queer as a cultural construct and enhances its definition with evidence from the sciences of biology and quantum physics. Finally, it claims the validity of queer perspectives to understand the slippage between categories in any epistemology.

The incorporation of the humanities into digital transformation processes resulted in the emergence of a new research field called digital humanities. This new field has its origin in the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century. From the research point of view, through the analysis of the scientific production of the main academic databases, we provide here an overview of the international panorama of digital humanities, looking at the main countries, institutions, areas of knowledge and leading topics in this discipline.

Our human tendency to remember more and pay more attention to negative events (rather than positive ones) may be at the core of our ‘enjoyment’ of the arts. Indeed, if we engage in sad and tragic stories, it may well be because we have a built-in propensity to be affected by situations eliciting negative emotions (i.e. a psychological phenomenon called the ‘Negativity Bias’). A good example of this seemingly paradoxical tendency is Fernando de Rojas's Celestina (1499). Although the premise of the story is that of an amour courtois between two young lovers, Calisto and Melibea, the story ends with a suicide and, in between, there are also one murder, one accident leading to death and two executions. And yet, it was a bestseller at the time. This attraction to stories that elicit negative affects is also hypothesized to be the result of evolutionary pressures.

In this short essay, I want to address the relationship between positivity and negativity in affect theories and literary analysis by focusing on the connection between empathy and literature in early modernity, a period when affect theories emerge robustly and are articulated in treatises such as De anima et vita (1538) by Juan Luis Vives (1492–1590) or Nueva Filosofía (1587) by Oliva de Sabuco (1562–1626?). We begin with the proposition that fictional narratives may move us to care for others and help them. Indeed, the idea that fiction can make us more empathetic and, thus, turn us into better human beings is a powerful hypothesis that has been the subject of a great number of discussions and publications. However, as we continue to investigate whether and how fiction may lead to prosocial behaviour via empathic responses and what are the narrative strategies that authors may employ to elicit empathy in readers, we need to acknowledge that: (1) the connection between empathy and prosocial behaviour, known as the empathy–altruism hypothesis, is still a controversial one and more empirical evidence is needed to back it up; and (2) there is no direct correspondence between empathic authorial intention and audience reception, a phenomenon that can be discussed through notions such as failed empathy or empathic inaccuracy.

Martín Martínez was born in Madrid in 1684 and died fifty years later in the Spanish capital in 1734. He was one of the introducers of medicine and modern philosophy in the Spain of Philip V (Marañón 1962, 130). He is a focus for many of the aspects that bring together scientific research with literary writing and philosophical reflection. In fact, Martinez systematically considered the usefulness of writing science books in Spanish at the same time as he reflected on the scope of Cartesian or Gassendist philosophy and its relationship with scientific research in the sense that some sixty years earlier Robert Boyle had defined it in his The Sceptical Chymist (1661). He is therefore a model figure for observing the penetration of the Scientific Revolution in Spain in the early years of the eighteenth century.

This article argues for a specifically female appropriation and reshaping of the epic tradition in the wake of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Based on an analysis of Mathilde Blind's The Ascent of Man and Louisa Sarah Bevington's ‘Unto this Present’, it will show how this ‘female evolutionary epic’ responds to and counteracts Social Darwinist narratives of competition and struggle by emphasizing forces of (maternal) gestation, co-operation and sympathy in the development of life on earth. In doing so, these poems anticipate Peter Kropotkin's notion of ‘mutual aid’ as the primary factor in evolution.

Both Mina Loy's autobiographical poem ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose’ and C. Day Lewis's From Feathers to Iron are cognizant of epic without reproducing the conventions of epic narrative. In part, the epic quality of both comes from their depiction or implication of epic scales as a backdrop for human action. Unfamiliar scales were found in many sciences, with astronomy and cosmology being the most prominent in the early twentieth century. The essay considers Loy's scientific diction and Day Lewis's sources in popular science and astronomy works by A. S. Eddington and James Jeans.

In his cosmological epic Man, Ronald Duncan attempted to bridge the perceived divide between science and poetry. To do so, he had to find an aesthetically effective way to incorporate scientific data into poetry while using the form of the modernist long poem to replicate the insatiable processes of enquiry that he saw as defining science itself. Duncan's dialogic engagement with science and scientists instigated in turn the creation of a new kind of reference work, The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance, sharing and promoting the same conception of science as Man.

Crime fiction was introduced to the Greek reading public at an early period, first through the translation of works of Émile Gaboriau (1878) and later through the works of Arthur Conan Doyle from 1905 onward. Their effect can be seen in the first Greek crime fiction novel, by an anonymous writer, serialized in 1913 in the periodical Hellas, entitled Sherlock Holmes Saving Mr. Venizelos, who was the Greek Prime Minister of the time. The novel, that takes place in London, is a hybrid of a political and a crime fiction novel, using Doyle's forensic methods and electrical devices for its resolution. In this paper we will try to see how far this Greek by-product of the Holmes tradition follows the scientific approach of the original Doyle works, using his forensic methods as well as technological inventions of the time to solve the case.

This paper focuses on the function of the magic lantern, a seventeenth-century scientific invention with the ability to project frightening images painted on transparent slides, as a literary device intrinsically connected to the Gothic genre. Darkness, foul weather, animated portraits, eerie apparitions, crumbling abbeys and half-demolished tombs team with physics and optics in an intricate swirl of exchanges between literature and visual technology, still relevant today. These exchanges are vividly illustrated in Girona's spectacular Museu del Cinema – Col·lecció Tomàs Mallol.

This essay is built around three narratives of Shakespeare, code, and immortality: the first, the parallel between the passage of encoded genetic material in the body and the cultural transmission of text which converge in the reproduction of Shakespeare's sonnets into the medium of DNA, potentially collapsing a metaphorical relationship into a literal one; the second, the supposed conveying of information from a deceased Shakespeare to a superstitious Victor Hugo through the tapping out of code onto a tabletop during a nineteenth-century seance; and third, one in which I consider an alternative—or perhaps parallel—reading of Shakespeare's sonnets in which the author himself intends, against all odds and rationality, to preserve his deceased son in the form of sonnets that have more frequently been read as love letters to a young male lover.

Transcending the human perspective has always been a challenge – for philosophical as well as for literary and scientific narratives. The present study focuses on such a transcendence from humans to plants through a joint reading of a philosophical and a literary narrative in a form of interdisciplinary conversation. Instead of interpreting literature by means of philosophical commentaries, the philosophical narrative itself will be focused and illuminated through the literary text. The essay La vie des plantes (The Life of Plants) (2016) by Emanuele Coccia is chosen as the philosophical component of this approach. The literary lens for focusing on Coccia's phenomenological treatise enacts the imagery concerning the gradual transformation of a woman into a plant in the story ‘The Fruit of my Woman’ published in 1997 by the South Korean author Han Kang.

The long history of the relations between science and literature reveals a constant pattern of hostility. This paper argues that there has rarely been a genuine ‘conversation’ and that attempts to reconcile the fields have largely been unsuccessful. The effort to assimilate science to literature is understandable and in certain respects appropriate, but their radical differences, particularly via the distinction between fact and value, are permanent conditions. This paper argues that the healthiest and most fruitful relation between science and literature is one in which literary critics sustain their work of critique, not to enter the internal workings of science but to contextualize science and set against scientific activity aesthetic and ethical criteria.