Easter Term 2019: 1919

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O213712/wallpaper-butler-henry-rba/

The Science and Literature Reading Group returns in Easter Term, taking as its focus texts first published a century ago in 1919. We will meet at our usual venue, Darwin College, on Monday evenings from 7.30-9pm. All are welcome to join in our friendly and wide-ranging discussions!

29th April: Gardens

• Amy Lowell, ‘Impressionist Picture of a Garden’, and ‘The Garden by Moonlight’ 
• Saki, ‘The Occasional Garden’ 
• Virginia Woolf, Kew Gardens

 

13th May: Cities

• Murray Leinster, ‘The Runaway Skyscraper’ 
• Hope Mirrlees, Paris: A Poem

 

20th May: Health

• W.N.P. Barbellion, The Journal of a Disappointed Man 
• Edith Wharton, ‘Writing a War Story’

 

3rd June: Heaven and earth

• Sri Ananda Acharya, selections from Snow-Birds
• May Wedderburn Cannan, ‘Stars’
• Wallace Stevens, ‘The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician’
• W.B. Yeats, ‘The Phases of the Moon’

In recognition of the International Year of the Periodic Table, we will also be teaming up with AD HOC (Association for the Discussion of the History of Chemistry) for a special seminar on Primo Levi's classic piece of science-writing, The Periodic Table (please note earlier start time and different location).

10th June (5pm, HPS): The Periodic Table

• Primo Levi (1919-87), The Periodic Table (1975): ‘Potassium’, ‘Nitrogen’, ‘Carbon’.

We hope our planned term on AI Narratives will go ahead later in the year.

Michaelmas Term 2018 - AI Narratives

This term the Science and Literature Reading Group joins forces with the AI Narratives research programme from the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.

All are welcome to join in our wide-ranging and friendly discussions: full details of meeting times and location will be available soon. The group is organised by Kanta Dihal and Melanie Keene.

For recaps, further readings, news, and other updates, please follow us on Twitter @scilitreadgrp or visit our blog.

Readings will include:

• Alan Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (1950)
• Nnedi Okorafor, ‘Mother of Invention’ (2018)
• Isaac Asimov, ‘Sally’ (1953)
• ‘Robots of Brixton’ (2011)

Easter Term 2018 - Aether (take 2)

The Science and Literature Reading Group will hold two sessions which were postponed from last term due to industrial action. We first complete our explorations of the aether by looking at the theme of communication, across and beyond the globe. We will then celebrate the end of our elements series with a found poetry workshop using all of the texts we have read and discussed over the previous two academic years.

All are welcome to join in our wide-ranging and friendly conversations, which take place in the Newnham Grange Seminar Room at Darwin College on selected Monday evenings from 7.30–9pm. The group is organised by Melanie Keene and Charissa Varma.

For recaps, further readings, news, and other updates, please follow us on Twitter @scilitreadgrp or check this blog.

14th May – Communication

• Rudyard Kipling, ‘Wireless’ (1902)
• Philip R. Coursey, ‘Interplanetary Wireless?’, Wireless World (1920) 
• Eric Roach, ‘Beyond’ (1950)

 

4th June – End of year party and Elementary Poetry workshop

• Online introduction to found poetry, and examples

Lent Term 2018 - Aether

Following our tour of the four classical elements, this term the Science and Literature Reading Group looks to the fifth: aether. Our first three meetings focus on ways in which ethereal concepts have been used: as a vehicle for the imagination; as a medium for interconnection; and as a means of communication. The final meeting will celebrate completing the elementary series with a found poetry workshop using all of the texts we have read and discussed over the past year.

All are welcome to join in our wide-ranging and friendly conversations, which take place at Darwin College on selected Monday evenings from 7.30–9pm. The group is organised by Melanie Keene and Charissa Varma.

For recaps, further readings, news, and other updates, please follow us on Twitter @scilitreadgrp or follow this blog.

22nd January – Imagination

• Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’, (1773).
• John Tyndall, The Scientific Use of the Imagination (1870).

5th February – Connection

• John Davidson, ‘Fleet Street’ (1909).
• Oliver Lodge, Ether and Reality (1925), ch. 2, ‘Fundamental notions about an ether’, 33-46.

26th February – Communication

• Rudyard Kipling, ‘Wireless’ (1902).
• Philip R. Coursey, ‘Interplanetary Wireless?’, Wireless World (1920).
• Eric Roach, ‘Beyond’ (1950).

12th March – Elementary Poetry workshop

• Online introduction to found poetry, and examples.

Michaelmas Term 2017 - Earth

This term the Science and Literature Reading Group gets down to earth. We will complete our cycle of themes based on the four ancient elements by exploring how different authors have tackled terrestrial topics, from muddy slimescapes to sublime mountain-top.

We are delighted to meet in an appropriate new venue: the Watson Gallery of the Department of Earth Sciences. Many thanks to Simon Crowhurst for arranging this! Directions can be found at the bottom of this post.

All are welcome to join in our wide-ranging and friendly discussions, which take place fortnightly on Monday evenings from 7.30-9pm.


16th October - Stone

• Pliny, Natural History, books XXXVI ('The Natural History of Stones') and XXXVII ('The Natural History of Precious Stones') 

 30th October - Ground

• Ludvig Holberg (trans. John Gierlow), Niels Klim’s Journey Under the Ground (1741; 1845 edition) 
• Edmond Halley, 'An Account of the Cause of the Variation of the Magnetical Needle; With an Hypothesis of the Structure of the Internal Parts of the Earth: As It Was Proposed to the Royal Society in One of Their Late Meetings' (1753)

13th November - Mountain

• Elizabeth Parker, ‘The Alpine Club of Canada’, Canadian Alpine Journal I:1 (1907), 3-8.
• Mary T. S. Schaffer, ‘Untrodden Ways’, Canadian Alpine Journal I:2 (1908), 288-294.
• Mary E. Crawford, ‘Mountain Climbing for Women’, Canadian Alpine Journal II:1 (1909), 85-91.
• Ethel Jones, ‘A Graduating Climb’, Canadian Alpine Journal II:2 (1910), 158-164.
• Mary M. Vaux, ‘Observations on Glaciers in 1910’, Canadian Alpine Journal III (1911), 127-130. 

27th November - Mud
Read as many poems from our muddy anthology as you'd like:

• Mary Borden, from ‘At the Somme: The Song of the Mud’ (1917)
• U A Fanthorpe, ‘Earthed’ 
• Seamus Heaney, ‘Digging’ (1966)
• Andrew Hudgins, ‘Child on the Marsh’ (1988)
• Curzio Malaparte, translated by Water Murch, ‘Xian of Eight Rivers’ (2012)
• Roger McGough, ‘Soil’
• Jana Prikryl, ‘Geodes of the Western Hemisphere’ (2016)
• Helen Saunders, ‘A Vision of Mud’ (1915)
• Robert William Service, ‘Mud’
• Joyce Sidman, ‘Into the Mud’ (2005)
• George Szirtes, ‘Soil’ (2000)
• Tess Taylor, ‘Mud Season’ (2016)
• Alison Townsend, ‘Mud poem’ (2002)
• John Vernon, ‘Mud Man’ (1982)

 

Directions to the Watson Gallery:

Enter the Downing Site and go to the Earth Sciences entrance below the steps to come in, i.e. not the museum entrance but the departmental entrance below it. If you find yourself locked out of the building, attendess can get themselves let in by waving outside the big arched ground floor windows on the Downing Site, beyond the steps with the stone bears, where the Anglo-Saxon sarcophaguses stand.

Easter Term 2017 - Water

In Easter Term our exploration of the four elements reaches the water. Appropriately enough for this most protean of substances, we will engage with several forms of media: a poem, a short story, a play, and two essays. In very different ways, these works comment on the relationships between literature and water: experiencing and analysing, surviving and following, cherishing and chronicling its varied appearances as river, rain, ice, and sea.

We will meet at Darwin College from 7.30-9pm as usual. All are welcome to join us, whether new or old members of the group! Follow us on Twitter @scilitreadgrp or look at our blog for full news and updates.

8th May – River

Alice Oswald, Dart (2002). Also in several College and University libraries.

22nd May – Rain

Ray Bradbury, 'Death-By-Rain', Planet Stories (1950). Republished as 'The Long Rain' in several collections of his short stories, or contact MK for a copy.

5th June – Ice

Wilkie Collins, The Frozen Deep (written 1856, published 1866).
 

26th June – Sea

R.L. Carson, 'Undersea', Atlantic Monthly (1937), 322-325; and 'The Edge of the Sea', address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1953). Republished in Linda Lear (ed.), Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999), or contact MK for a copy.

Lent Term 2017 - Air

This term the Science and Literature Reading Group takes to the air, as we continue our series of meetings exploring the elements. We will focus on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century pneumatics, from eudiometry to aeronautics, considering how air was philosophised, exploited, and consumed.

Meetings take place on Monday evenings at Darwin College from 7.30-9pm. Please note that this term we will be meeting in the ground floor seminar room of 1 Newnham Terrace. All are welcome to join in our wide-ranging and friendly discussions!

The group is organised by Melanie Keene and Charissa Varma. For recaps, further readings, news, and other updates, please visit our blog: https://sci-lit-reading-group.blogspot.co.uk/. We have also recently joined twitter: you can follow us @scilitreadgrp.


6th February: Atmosphere

• Joseph Priestley, ‘Of Dephlogisticated Air, and of the constitution of the Atmosphere’, from Observations on Various Kinds of Air (1776 2nd edn), Vol. II, 29-61.

20th February: Breath

• Richard Polwhele, ‘The Pneumatic Revellers; An Eclogue’, in Poems (1810), Vol. V, iii-viii and 1-17.

13th March: Flight

• Thomas Baldwin, Airopaidia (1786), as much as you’d like of 1-164 (‘The Excursion throu’ the Air’), especially 1-14, 29-59, 94-97.

Michaelmas Term 2016 - Fire

This term the Science and Literature Reading Group is on fire. Our four themed sessions will explore flames elemental and personal, spiritual and experimental, spontaneous and accidental. As usual, we will read a diverse range of sources, including ancient philosophy, comic poetry, diary entries, experimental reports, and serialised fiction. This term an additional optional piece of scholarship/commentary has also been suggested on each reading list.

Meetings take place on Monday evenings at Darwin College from 7.30-9pm. The group is organised by Melanie Keene and Charissa Varma. For recaps, further readings, news, and other updates, watch this space!

All are welcome to join in our wide-ranging and friendly discussions!

17th October – Cosmic Fire

• Patricia Curd (ed.), A Presocratics Reader (2011), chapter 5 on Heraclitus of Ephesus.
• Brooks Haxton, ‘Fragments of Heraclitus’, New England Review 22 (2001), 15-19.
• Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection’ (1918)

Optional further reading: ‘Heraclitus’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, particularly section 4, ‘Cosmology’.

31st October – Spiritual Fire

• John Tyndall, ‘On sounding and sensitive flames’, Philosophical Magazine 4 (1867), 92-99.
• W.F. Barrett, ‘Note on “sensitive flames”’, Philosophical Magazine 4 (1867), 216-222.
• [James Clerk Maxwell], ‘To the Chief Musician Upon Nabla: A Tyndallic Ode’, in ‘The British Association Meeting at Edinburgh’, Nature 4 (1871), 288-298, 291.

Optional further reading: Richard Noakes, ‘The “bridge which is between physical and psychical research”: William Fletcher Barrett, Sensitive Flames, and Spiritualism’, History of Science xlii (2004), 419-464.

14th November – Bodily Fire

• Paul Rolli, Joseph Bianchini and John Hilliard, ‘An Extract…Upon the Death of the Countess…’, Philosophical Transactions 43 (1744), 447-465.
• Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852-3), chapter XXXII, 'The Appointed Time'.
• Justus von Liebig, Familiar Letters on Chemistry (1859 4th edn), letter XXIV, 296-322.

Optional further reading: J.L.Heilbron, ‘The Affair of the Countess Görlitz’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 138 (1994), 284-316.

28th November – Fighting Fire

• Samuel Pepys, Diary, September 1666.
• ‘The Londoners Lamentation’.
• R.M. Ballantyne, Fighting the Flames (1868), chapter IV, ‘Tells of a Fierce Fight with the Flames’.
• Hilaire Belloc, ‘Matilda: who told lies and was burned to death ’ (1907).

Optional further reading: Robert M. Hazen and Margaret Hindle Hazen, Keepers of the Flame: The role of fire in American culture, 1775-1925 (1992), chapter 4, 'Fighting Back'.



If you have difficulties accessing any of the readings then please email Melanie for pdf copies!

Easter Term 2016 - Frogs

   
The Science and Literature Reading Group returns for Easter Term 2016 with a series of meetings themed around frogs. The four sessions will explore various literary manifestations of frogs from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, and from pond-dwelling tadpole to taxidermied specimen.

Fortnightly meetings will take place in the Newnham Grange Seminar Room at Darwin College, on Monday evenings from 7.30-9pm. All are welcome! Organised by Melanie Keene (Homerton) and Charissa Varma (Darwin).
 

2nd May – Natural historical frogs

•  Edward Topsell, ‘of FROGS’, in The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents (1658), pp. 718-726.

16th May – Experimental frogs

• W.T. Sedgwick, ‘On Variations of Reflex-Excitability in the Frog, Induced by Changes of Temperature’, in Studies from the Biological Laboratory (1883), pp. 385-410.

30th May – Anthropomorphic frogs

• Hermann Ploucquet, The Frogs who would a-woo-ing go’, in The Comical Creatures from Wurtemburg (1851), pp. 58-60.

• Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Jeremy Fisher (1906).

 13th June – Poetic frogs

• Christina Rossetti, ‘A Frog’s Fate’ (1885).
• Robert Graves, ‘The Frog and the Golden Ball’ (1965).
• Seamus Heaney, ‘Death of a Naturalist’ (1966).

Optional additional reading

• Charlotte Sleigh, Frog (2012).