Hey fellow students let me first say that I've enjoyed reading all of your posts, as an english cscl major in this course, I feel slightly out of my element when it comes to technical elements of modern science. Be it practice or theory, the last intelligent meeting I've had with science was freshmen biology in Southern Illinois.
It's difficult to defend a liberal arts degree in our current economy. I'm from a fairly blue-collar background, that rejects the idea of an education for sake of well-being, or studying something that can't get you a comfy career. (This is my backbone on the subject if anyone has the time...http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-foster-wallace-kenyon.html)
So it's with this opposition that I begin a focus on stories, authors, narrative plot lines, completely immersed in the stuff, with little to no opinions on the evolving world around me. I know about forming characters, not processes like global warming. I believe it's happening, but I couldn't give an educated response as to why...something about greenhouse gasses...C02...Hummer's are bad...Al Gore is our real life Captain Planet...and when we all put our power rings in the circle, mine is ignorance. (for anyone who lost me this involves a cartoon from the 90's that I was very invested in--->http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpXM9bj-WPU)---anywho, the point I'm struggling to arrive at is that I've recently encounter this thing "science" (witchcraft?) in a peculiar way.
Last semester, I went to a University event where the author Richard Power's gave a lecture on the incorpaoration of fact into fiction. The guy had an engineering degree from the University of Illinois, and I think another degree from Massachusetts (witchcraft), was thoroughly educated to pursue a mechanical engineering career, but instead was a world renowned fiction author.
He described the incorporation between the two, as this kinetic romance of two very different things. Art vs Math. Paint vs Pi, (took me forever to come up with that)-just the general incorporation of technical language, usually in a descriptive manner, into a fictional piece of writing. I don't know why this had the impact on me that it did, I had always liked certain authors that that kind of thing, like Chuck Pahlniuk or David Foster Wallace, but I didn't really realize that it was that part of their work I was responding to.
I know this strays from the other responses, and I hope it's accepted warmly. I had a hard time thinking of something good, so instead I seemed to have articulated on something bad, but a lot of people make a great living that way.
I'm so glad somebody got fiction into the house (as well as David Foster Wallace.
ReplyDeleteSure, it's easy to see facts ---> fiction, but with M. Latour, I'd suggest that it goes the other way as often. The facts we seek may be determined by our stories.
The Titanic was in a novel 15 years before they made it into a ship (and it drowned poor Lenny DiCaprio).