Crowther - 13th Nov

Daniel Friesner's introduction to J.G. Crowther's 1929 comments on science journalism raised some intriguing discussion points. Crowther's distinction between literary imagination and scientific imagination, and his claim that the science journalist needs somehow to combine the two, was felt as a challenge that science writers still face today.

Two interesting comparisons were made, firstly to George Orwell's essay on Politics and the English Language (c. 1946/7), where Orwell asserts that good writing conjures visual images. The second comparison was to Dedre Gentner's work in cognitive psychology, where a structure-mapping theory of analogy is proposed. An effective analogy is said to convey relations, rather than properties, of the analogised entity. Gebner uses T.S. Eliot's poem 'The Hollow Men' as an example of an imprecise, rich poetic analogy as contrasted to the solar system / atom analogy which is more clear and systematic.

Following from this discussion of visual images, analogy, and contrasts or connections between science and poetry, we might pursue the following areas:

1. The science journalism of J.W.N. Sullivan, particularly his contributions to The Athenaeum (on relativity) which triggered a debate on 'Art and Science' with Roger Fry and I.A. Richards participating. This debate is discussed in relation to the development of T.S. Eliot's aesthetics by Michael Whitworth in his article 'Pieces d'identite', in English Literature in Transition, 39:2, 1996. The key articles are: Sullivan, 'The Place of Science' , which discusses the transformation of facts into impersonal theory; and 'The Justification of the Scientific Method', which proposes an aesthetic impulse motivating the formation of scientific theories. The subsequent articles by Fry and Richards are simply titled 'Art and Science'.

2. The imagist manefesti, published in literary magazines during the 1910s. The imagist principles and poems, while not directly engaging with science, offer a contrasting example of images used to communicate experience.

3. Metaphysical poetry, where analogies might work in a rather different way to the Eliot example offered by Gebner. For example, John Donne's 'The Flea': http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~lyman/english233/Donne-Flea.htm