Science and Sensibility

Writing about the natural world is one of the world's oldest literary traditions and the site of some of today's most daring literary experiments. Known loosely as "science writing" this tradition can be traced through texts in myriad and overlapping genres, including poetry, explorer's notebooks, essays, memoirs, art books, and science journalism. Taken together, these divers texts reveal a rich literary tradition in which the writer's sensibility and worldview are paramount to an investigation of the known and unknown. In this course, we will consider a wide range of texts in order to map this tradition. We will question what it means to use science as metaphor, explore how to write about science with rigor and commitment to scientific truth, and interrogate the fiction of objectivity.