| Between Science and Literature: An Introduction to Autopoetics Contributor(s): Livingston, Ira (Author) |
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ISBN: 0252072545 ISBN-13: 9780252072543 Publisher: University of Illinois Press OUR PRICE: $27.72 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: October 2005 Annotation: Ira Livingston's "Between science and Literature sets out to introduce the fundamentals of cultural and literary theory to a non-specialist audience. Using ideas about self-reference, self-organizing processes occur at all scales, cutting across traditional divisions between words and things, and argues for an approach that sees language as a part of the world, rejecting the traditional split between words in our minds and things "out there" to which they are supposed to refer. Livingston makes his case by drawing on the work of thinkers across disciplines, ranging like Stuart Kaufman, as well as historians, gender theorists, and science fiction writers. The reader gets a feel for the concepts and how to use them through a series of model explications and analyses, operational definitions of concepts and terms, extended case studies, and thought experiments. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory - Language Arts & Disciplines | Communication Studies |
| Dewey: 801 |
| LCCN: 2005006664 |
| Physical Information: 0.54" H x 5.94" W x 8.64" (0.72 lbs) 208 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Between Literature and Science follows through to its emerging 21st-century future the central insight of 20th-century literary and cultural theory: that language and culture, along with their subsystems and artifacts, are self-referential systems. The book explores the workings of self-reference (and the related performativity) in linguistic utterances and assorted texts, through examples of the more open social-discursive systems of post-structuralism and cultural studies, and into the sciences, where complex systems organized by recursive self-reference are now being embraced as an emergent paradigm. This paradigmatic convergence between the humanities and sciences is autopoetics (adapting biologist Hubert Maturana's term for "self-making" systems), and it signals a long-term epistemological shift across the nature/culture divide so definitive for modernity. If cultural theory has taught us that language, because of its self-referential nature, cannot bear simple witness to the world, the new paradigmatic status of self-referential systems in the natural sciences points toward a revived kinship of language and culture with the world: language bears "witness" to the world. The main movement of the book is through a series of model explications and analyses, operational definitions of concepts and terms, more extended case studies, vignettes and thought experiments designed to give the reader a feel for the concepts and how to use them, while working to expand the autopoetic internee by putting cultural self-reference in dialogue with the self-organizing systems of the sciences. Along the way the reader is introduced to self-reference in epistemology (Foucault), sociology (Luhmann), biology (Maturana/Varela/Kauffman), and physics and cosmology (Smolin). Livingston works through the fundamentals of cultural, literary, and science studies and makes them comprehensible to a non-specialist audience. |