Mark Morrisson - Modernism, Science, and Technology

Modernism,
Science, and
Technology
NEW MODERNISMS SERIES
Bloomsbury’s New Modernisms series introduces, explores,

and extends the major topics and debates at the forefront
of contemporary Modernist Studies.
Surveying new engagements with such topics as race, sexuality,
technology and material culture and supported with authoritative
further reading guides to the key works in contemporary
scholarship, these books are essential guides for serious
students and scholars of Modernism.
Published Titles
Modernism: Evolution of an Idea
Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers
Modernism in a Global Context
Peter J. Kalliney
Modernism’s Print Cultures
Faye Hammill and Mark Hussey
Forthcoming Titles
Modernism, War, and Violence
Marina MacKay
Modernism and the Law
Robert Spoo
The Environments of Modernism
Alison Lacivita
Modernism,
Science, and
Technology
Mark S. Morrisson
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2017
© Mark S. Morrisson, 2017
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For Laura, Devin, and Ciara
vi
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
1 Modernist culture, modernist science 1

2 The physical sciences and mathematics 37
3 The life sciences 83
4 The social sciences 117
Coda 149
Glossary of key terms from science studies 157

Works cited 160
Index 171
Acknowledgments
Bringing together the diverse and seemingly disparate threads

of scholarship on modernism, science, and technology into a
recognizable pattern, useful to students new to the field and scholars
with some familiarity, is a project I had long wished to undertake.
But it took the confluence of two remarkably persuasive forces to
make it realizable: an enthusiastic invitation to contribute such a
volume to the exciting New Modernisms Series at Bloomsbury, and
a sabbatical in the middle of my term as head of a large English
department. For the former, I thank Sean Latham, Gayle Rogers,
and David Avital, whose generous encouragement and welcome
advice made the new series the ideal venue in which to publish
the book. For the latter, I am grateful to the College of the Liberal
Arts and Penn State University for the precious research leave that
allowed me to read and write, and read some more.
I thank the Tate for generous permission to reproduce Umberto
Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, and Chris Sutherns
for his gracious assistance; ARS and the Philadelphia Museum
of Art for permission to reproduce Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride
Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass); and
the Kröller-Müller Museum for permission to reproduce Fernand
Léger’s Nudes in the Forest.
In addition to David Avital, I thank the Bloomsbury editorial and
production team, including Mark Richardson, James Tupper, and
Grishma Fredric at Deanta, for bringing this project into print with
welcome speed and courtesy, and I am grateful to Ryan McGinnis
for his expert work on the index. Finally, I must thank my children,
Devin and Ciara, for reminding me daily of the pleasures of the
present even as I immersed myself in the fascinations of the past,
and my wife, Laura Reed-Morrisson, who expertly commented on
every page of this book and inspired me when I needed it most.
1
Modernist culture,
modernist science
“Make it new,” prescribed Ezra Pound—the modernist poet,

impresario, political lightning rod, contrarian, coiner of phrases,
and launcher of movements. Modernists and avant-gardists of the
early twentieth century exceled at bold statements heralding a brave
new now. In 1924, Virginia Woolf famously observed that “on or
about December, 1910, human character changed,” and five years
later, Eugene Jolas proclaimed that “the revolution in the English
language is an accomplished fact.” Moreover, this reconfigured
present of modernism often hinted at an alluring—or frightening—
future that was already in the process of coming into the world, an
ontological eruption. The Great War and other violent upheavals
of the period could render those invocations simultaneously
exhilarating and terrifying, even apocalyptic. William Butler
Yeats, in “The Second Coming,” powerfully captured this tone:
“what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards
Bethlehem to be born.”1
As the war drew to a close, four empires had collapsed, and
the old aristocracies had lost much of their privilege. Future wars,
totalitarianism, social, cultural, economic, political, and religious
tumult, and the postcolonial world of later decades were visible
on the horizon. Scholars have focused on modernism’s emergence
in the context of such globally significant events, and rightly so.
An “age of empire” and the “long nineteenth century,” to use Eric
Hobsbawm’s phrases, were ending. Yet some of these dynamics
looked quite different across the Atlantic, where America was
2 Modernism, Science, and Technology
rising as a world power, more confidently signaling its own imperial

ambitions and industrial and technological modernization.
In England and the United States, experiences of loss and
vulnerability in a rapidly changing world were balanced by palpable
excitement about a future in which the imagination’s wildest flights
of fancy might be realizable—for good or perhaps for ill. Whether
causing apocalyptic dread or inspiring futuristic excitement, this
modernization was technological and scientific. As this volume will
show, many of the developments that fueled a growing modernist
self-consciousness were precisely these rapidly paced technological
and scientific changes. Science had achieved a formidable cognitive
authority across the nineteenth century. By the twentieth, it seemed
to augur swift, perhaps even limitless, progress in knowledge and
technology. While many people began to see science and technology
as the greatest agents of transformation, some began to doubt that
these changes were necessarily uniform, continuous, progressive,
or even necessarily beneficial. The vocabulary of “progress,”
“improvement,” “advancement,” “growth,” and “prosperity” was
a legacy of the Victorian period, but the dizzying pace and nature
of change in the early twentieth century caused some to question
the inherited narratives of progress. It was not just the new
scientific developments but the fact of flux, the unsettling nature
of fundamental change itself, that defined modernist science and
modernist culture.
Alex Goody contends that technology was “the dominating
episteme” of the twentieth century. “What the twentieth century
reveals about technology,” Goody argues, “is its profound fusion
with the human; as the century progressed it became impossible to
maintain an absolute distinction between the organic expressions of
human nature and the technological processes, forms and devices
which recorded and communicated those expressions as culture” (1).
Hints of that revelation were already present as the century began. Few
modernists could be accused of neo-Luddism. But they understood
and even created their technological and scientific culture in many
different ways. Italian Futurism, often seen as the defining European
avant-garde arts movement of the early twentieth century, offers a
useful starting point for our inquiry into the modernist science and
technology at the epicenter of the culture of modernism.
Like a garish advertising poster whose newly liberated
typography had broken its mooring on the line, Italian Futurist
Modernist culture, modernist science 3
F. T. Marinetti’s visually bold artist’s book Zang Tumb Tumb (1914)

declared: “No poetry before ours / with our wireless imagination
words / in freedom longggGGG live FUTURISM fi- / nally
finally finally finally / finally / FINALLY / Poetry being BORN”
(“Correction,” 57). Simultaneously sound poem and concrete
poem avant la lettre, Zang Tumb Tumb imagines the dynamism
of words visually scattered and even freed from the page not only
through the voice, but also, above all, through technology. Words
could be spread out across foldout pages through the technologies
of industrial typography. Or they could be freed from print itself,
and even from the spatial limitations of human vocalization: the
electromagnetic waves of telegraphy could propagate them across
space wirelessly. Paradoxically, to liberate the imagination from all
boundaries required fusing it with technology.
And perhaps no technology was more important to Marinetti
at the time than that of Marconi’s wireless (Toscano 109–30).
Even the exhaust-belching, cyborg-like hybrid of driver and race
car that Marinetti celebrated in his “Founding and Manifesto
of Futurism” (1909) was a mid-nineteenth-century innovation.
Internal combustion improved on the even older eighteenth-century
external combustion reciprocating steam engine that helped launch
the Industrial Revolution, so it was not new, just better. And the
engine could not transgress geographical boundaries like the
electromagnetic waves of the wireless could. Moreover, the wireless
was important not just for its technology but also for the science that
produced it. Guglielmo Marconi shared the Nobel Prize in Physics
in December 1909 with Karl Ferdinand Braun for their work on
wireless telegraphy. Marinetti drew Marconi’s innovation into his
modernist vision of a new world already coming into being, a world
of efficiency, dynamism, human control over nature, freedom from
material constraint through material technological and scientific
progress—a future riding the electromagnetic waves.2
Marinetti and the Italian Futurists enthusiastically aligned their
modernism with the expansive possibilities of technology and
science to augment the intensities of human existence. The airplane,
the racing car, the factory, war itself, which Marinetti controversially
proclaimed “the world’s only hygiene”: the confluence of poetry
and a new machine age energize and authorize the “Founding
and Manifesto of Futurism.” Adopting another marvel of modern
efficiency and expansive communication technology—the modern
newspaper—Marinetti published his manifesto on the front page

of the February 20, 1909, issue of Le Figaro in Paris some ten
months before Marconi was awarded his Nobel Prize. In the
manifesto, he wrote, “We say that the world’s magnificence has
been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing car
whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive
breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot—is more
beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace” (“Founding,” 41).
And the contemporaneity of that “new beauty” of industrial
modernity was figured in tropes of youth. “The oldest of us is
thirty” (“Founding,” 43), asserted Marinetti, himself already 32.
With his keen insight into modern promotional culture, Marinetti
knew that he could knock a few years off his age. What mattered
was Marinetti’s specific program: to break the chains of Italy’s
past, which, in his view, had sealed it in a museum or mausoleum
for the inspection of tourists, and to position the young Italian
state as resurgent, avant-garde, at the head of a technologically
modern world.
With their “Manifesto of the Futurist Painters” (1910), Umberto
Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino
Severini addressed the “young artists of Italy”: “The triumphant
progress of science makes profound changes in humanity inevitable,
changes which are hacking an abyss between those docile slaves of
past tradition and us free moderns, who are confident in the radiant
splendor of our future” (24–25). But the Futurists carefully avoided
positioning humans as passively transformed by an abstract and
independent agent, “scientific progress.” Rather, humans actively
remake the world in more extreme and ambitious ways through their
new technologies, scientific knowledge, and unfettered imagination.
Italy would be reborn as a land where “millions of machines are
already roaring; in the land where traditional aesthetics reigned
supreme, new flights of artistic inspiration are emerging and dazzling
the world with their brilliance” (25). These “new flights of artistic
inspiration” and the new technologies were mutually generative. In
his “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture” (1912), Boccioni
lauded science’s technological achievements, mathematics with
its new geometries of the “plastic infinity” (52), and human and
machine hybrids of modernity, all of which offered a nonfigurative
aesthetic to sculptors in countries enslaved by their histories,
“bowed down under the opprobrious burden of the Greeks and

Michelangelo” (51).
But there were many modernisms. As much as Pound’s exhortation
to “make it new” has come to summarize for many a key impulse in
modernism, one we can easily discern in Marinetti’s quintessential
avant-gardist pursuit of the disruptive energies of a dynamic
technological and scientific modernity for the new century, Pound and
Marinetti were not saying the same thing. Pound, Wyndham Lewis,
and many figures in their Vorticist group (a London-based response
to the provocations of Marinetti and the Italian Futurists) came to
dismiss Italian Futurism as trivial technophilia: “AUTOMOBILISM
(Marinetteism) bores us,” they wrote in the first issue of their short-
lived little magazine, Blast, in the summer of 1914 (“Long Live the
Vortex,” 8). In a further slap at the discourses of novelty and Italian
nationalism that were at the core of Marinetti’s movement, they
rejected Futurist technophilia not from an antitechnology position,
but by arguing that it was neither new nor specifically Italian: “Wilde
gushed twenty years ago about the beauty of machinery. Gissing, in
his romantic delight with modern lodging houses was futurist in this
sense. The futurist is a sensational and sentimental mixture of the
aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870” (“Long Live the Vortex,”
8). But even beyond this polemical effort to expose Italian Futurism
as all of the things it most rejected—passé, sentimental, derivative,
foreign—Pound most damningly tethered it to an outmoded version
of the old aesthetic of mimesis, calling Futurism “only an accelerated
sort of impressionism” (“Vortex Pound,” 154).
Ultimately, the most significant division between Pound and
the Italian Futurists lay in their stance not toward technology but
rather toward the resources of history. The very past that Marinetti
dismissed, along with the Victory of Samothrace, engaged Pound
profoundly. Along with the ultramodern “flenites” of the Vorticist
sculptor Jacob Epstein, Pound saw that ancient Greek sculpture as
a work of the “first intensity” (Pound, “Vorticism”). So if Pound did
not subsume the “new” in technoscientific modernization or place
it in an antagonistic relationship to history, as the Futurists had,
what did Pound mean when he urged readers to “make it new”?
Michael North has recently reminded us that the phrase “make
it new” arrived relatively late in Pound’s critical writing, in 1928
(and it did not gain critical currency until the 1960s). Moreover,
the phrase itself was not even new: the modernist poet’s repetition
of the inscription supposedly adorning the wash basin of Ch’eng
T’ang, the first king of the Shan dynasty (1766–1753 BC), was a
deliberate act of “historical recycling” (168), as North put it, not a
rejection of the past.3
My aim here is not to rehearse the many significant differences
between Pound’s and Marinetti’s modernisms, or those even greater
differences among the many writers, artists, and scientists who
will appear in this volume, but rather to emphasize the key point
of convergence for Pound, Marinetti, and most of the modernists
I address: simply put, they all understood science and technology
as a central feature of the modern world, and in many ways key
to its newness. But the terms in which they understood their own
technological and scientific modernity varied greatly. Moreover, this
transformational capacity of science and technology placed them at
the center of a modernism in which transformation itself had to be
understood in relationship to historical processes.
It is no contradiction that Pound valued the works of the distant
past even as he turned seriously to contemporary science to propose
a critical framework for modernism. More than three decades ago,
Ian Bell identified Pound’s engagement with science in his rejection
of Symbolism’s unseen world of the spirit: science offered a “new
materialism . . . as a means of access to the interstitiality of the
corporeal and the non-corporeal that was the habitation of the
modernist writer” (2). More recently, in an exploration exemplary
of the new modernist approaches to science and technology, Robin
G. Schulze clarified some of the implications of Pound’s engagement
with science by locating Pound’s modernism (and also those
of Harriet Monroe, Marianne Moore, and other key American
modernist poets) within Progressive Era concerns about racial and
national degeneration and eugenics. Scientists and reformers urged
Americans to return to nature and America’s rapidly vanishing
“frontier” in order to rejuvenate modern life, not to reject it. In this
interpretation, Pound seeks a modern nature—and a modernism
drawn from scientific discourse (Schulze 158–60).
Let us return briefly to Michael North’s work on novelty, as it
finds in modernism an approach to “the new” different from that
of revolutionary political change, which seems to lead to facile
repetition, mystification, or ineffective reform (154–55). Evolution
and science more broadly, North suggests, seemed to offer a
more viable foundation for modernism than religious or political

discourse:
The implications of the evolutionary model of artistic change

and renewal are obviously very different from those of the
revolutionary model. Instead of cataclysmic and total change,
there is slow, steady, incremental advance. And the prototype for
artistic novelty comes not from religion and politics but rather
from science, so that the motives and practices that foster novelty
seem completely different—rational and dispassionate instead of
inspired. In this role, modernism wears a white coat, and potters
amongst its test tubes. (156–57)
Modernists pottering among the test tubes is an apt image. Yet

modernist writers, artists, and even scientists and philosophers of
science during the period seemed less certain that science could still
be characterized by “slow, steady, incremental advance.” The history
of science was about to receive its own modernist intervention.
A crucial feature of this age was the high degree to which many
people self-consciously understood themselves to be participating
in a present intensely marked by its modernity and modernization.
And this self-consciousness was not only prevalent among artists
and writers we now speak of as “modernist,” but also shared by
many scientists and engineers, inventors, and marketers of new
technologies—so much so that we might speak of a “scientific and
technological modernism.”
Science in transition
History of science
As literature and the arts were transforming and being transformed
by this modernist sensibility, scientific and technological orthodoxies
were similarly in flux in almost every field. We will use the now
common term for such changes—“paradigm shifts”—and will
momentarily review what Thomas Kuhn meant (and did not
mean) by it. Paradigm shifts were occurring at a high frequency
in the modernist era. Non-Euclidian geometries revolutionized
mathematics, and differential geometry contributed to Einstein’s
theory of general relativity. Relativity undermined Newtonian and

ether physics. Chemistry discovered that its fundamental particles,
atoms, were not indivisible (or stable) after all. While quantum
mechanics posited a mind-boggling subatomic world, extragalactic
astronomy showed how almost unimaginably vast the macrocosm
really was. Just as fundamentally, centuries of medical assumptions
gave way to germ theory, cell theory, and the neuron doctrine shaped
by the “new biology” of the period. Perhaps the most compelling
sign of the newly complex understanding of the psyche, even within
scientific circles, was the birth of psychoanalysis and sexology. This
age of scientific rationality paradoxically envisioned the mind itself
as an arena of primitive and largely unconscious forces and provided
controversial accounts of human sexuality. The emerging discipline
of anthropology eroded long-held beliefs about humanity. Scientific
and technological developments began to seem increasingly difficult
to separate: this was the age of the automobile, airplane, synthetic
plastic, radio, film, neon sign, audio recording, mass-market tabloid,
X-ray machine, cyclotron, skyscraper, tissue culture, and penicillin,
but also of chemical warfare, machine guns, eugenics, the Tuskegee
syphilis experiment, and the electric chair. Even during the Great
War, American journalists had begun to refer to the conflict as “the
chemists’ war” (LaFollette 9). Artistic expression was certainly
transformed, but even more strikingly, it contributed to the
construction of this brave new technoscientific world.
For the most part, modernist studies has turned away from grand
unifying claims about a monolithic modernism and instead has
attended to interdisciplinary investigations, microhistories, material
culture, and an expanded range of cultural texts and dimensions
of (plural) modernist cultures. The field has increasingly looked at
developments in the field of history of science that have emphasized
the embeddedness of science in a broad array of social, cultural,
institutional, and even textual practices. As Henning Schmidgen
argues, post-positivist historians of science investigate “the spaces ‘in
between,’ i.e., transitional zones populated with numerous actors:
scientists and technicians, instruments and organisms, but also and
above all, inscription devices of all kinds” (337). While offering
extraordinarily focused and compellingly detailed microhistories of
laboratories, instrumentation, and specific institutional dynamics,
historians of science have also significantly contributed to our
understanding of the larger institutional landscape of science,
revealing modernist-era institutions of science and technology to be

as much in flux as the scientific theories and disciplines were.
Institutions of science and technology

The early twentieth century can be seen as a period of transition
culminating in the “big science” that characterized the post–Second
World War era in the United States and Europe. Across the nineteenth
century, the primary site of scientific research in many fields shifted
from the natural philosopher’s private laboratory or voyage of
scientific exploration, which had been supported by patronage
or personal wealth, to the modern university, which employed
professional scientists. In the age of the great university laboratories,
the programs at Giessen, Göttingen, and Heidelberg gave Germany
an edge in nineteenth-century chemistry and physics. That German
academic chemistry was intended to support technology and
manufacturing, while in nineteenth-century England the last vestiges
of the amateur gentleman scientist were only beginning to give way
(Merricks 24). British universities, too, had created some strong
research facilities, such as the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge.
Founded in 1874 by the university’s first professor of experimental
physics, James Clerk Maxwell, as a teaching laboratory to help
support engineering and industry in the United Kingdom, the lab
emerged as the site of pioneering work in what became “nuclear
physics” in the first half of the twentieth century. And the remaining
philanthropic imperatives of the age still left some room for significant
research performed at independent privately endowed facilities, such
as the genetics research at the John Innes Horticultural Institution
under William Bateson and then J. B. S. Haldane.
We have come to think of “big science” collaborations as a
feature of the mid-century defense contract era. These enterprises
were established on a scale that would have seemed unimaginable
in the early twentieth century, as Peter Galison notes (“Many
Faces,” 1). But historians of science have recently shown how the
entrepreneurial, complex, and messy modernist-era science could
produce precursors to big science already in the 1930s and even
earlier. In the 1920s, for example, Stanford University, Caltech,
and the University of California at Berkeley were involved in
collaborations with industry and the state of California, working
on, for example, hydroelectric power to meet the increasing needs

of the rapidly transforming state (Galison, “Many Faces,” 3; Seidel,
Chapter 1). E. O. Lawrence worked with California companies,
such as the Pelton Waterwheel Company, to supply the power needs
of California industries, and, in turn, Pelton helped Lawrence build
an industrial-strength magnet for his early large-scale cyclotrons
(Galison, “Many Faces,” 3). Moreover, collaborations, such as those
between the Sperry Company and physicists at Stanford before the
Second World War, encouraged the patenting of research done in
university microwave labs (Galison, “Many Faces,” 3–4). As Marcel
LaFollette puts it, the period “from the 1910s through the mid-
1950s . . . was not only a time of significant growth of science in the
United States but also the time when the model for current science
policy was drafted” (7). The public understanding of science as an
activity of public policy and national interest in the United States
emerged during these years (LaFollette 7).
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technological
innovation, too, was rapid and exhilarating—but it was
simultaneously so risky that governmental and corporate responses
would be demanded by the 1920s to stabilize society and mitigate
risk. As Adam Davidson puts it, “The original age of innovation
may have ushered in an era of unforeseen productivity, but it was,
for millions of people, absolutely terrifying. Over a generation or
two, however, our society responded by developing a new set of
institutions to lessen the pain of this new volatility, including unions,
Social Security and the single greatest risk-mitigating institution
ever: the corporation” (44). Corporations, as Davidson explains,
spread risk across millions of investors. Though the earlier highly
innovative period, roughly between 1870 and 1920, produced the
major innovations that fired the modernist imagination—Davidson
lists “cars, planes, electricity, telephones and radios”—beginning in
the 1920s, companies became more conservative with innovations,
focusing on making money on the core technologies that had been
developed in the pre-corporate age.4
Modernist science
With Pound’s and Marinetti’s modernism in mind, let us now turn
briefly to an example of a similar sensibility from the sciences
(discussed in more detail in the next chapter). One of the major
events in chemistry and physics in the first half of the twentieth

century occurred in part through a collaboration across the far-flung
reaches of the British Empire. In 1902 and 1903, New Zealand–born
physicist Ernest Rutherford and English chemist Frederick Soddy
published communications of their interpretation of radioactivity as
a spontaneous transformation of what Rutherford later understood
to be the nucleus of an atom. Their research, which overturned the
bedrock assumptions of nineteenth-century chemistry and atomic
theory, was published in the most venerable of English scientific
periodicals: the Philosophical Magazine. As a sign of things to
come, the staid and conservative old journal was publishing a
revolutionary article by two young men in early academic posts,
performing their research in the new modern physics and chemistry
facilities at McGill University in Montreal, far from the imperial
metropole and the prestigious colleges of Cambridge and Oxford.
Orthodoxies could crumble under such circumstances, for reasons
we shall explore in this volume.
In 1908, Soddy gave a series of six free experimental lectures
on “The Interpretation of Radium” at the University of Glasgow
(Merricks 45). These lectures were published a year later in a book
with the same name. Soddy began The Interpretation of Radium
with a prescient alignment of the public enthusiasm for “new
discoveries in science” with that “for new works in art, literature,
or music” (ix); he then launched into a thrilling 250-page tour of
the “revolution” (Soddy’s term) in physics and chemistry that he
had helped initiate. Emphasizing the fundamental innovation of
this “newly-born science of radioactivity,” Soddy proclaimed that
its importance “may surprise those who hold to the adage that there
is nothing new under the sun. Frankly, it is not possible, because
in these latest developments science has broken fundamentally
new ground, and has delved one distinct step further down into
the foundations of knowledge” (2). Soddy was quick to praise his
scientific predecessors, and, like Pound, he had a deep sense of the
history of his field: “During the century which has just closed there
occurred, it is true at an ever-increasing rate, a ceaseless extension of
our knowledge of the nature of matter upon which physical science
is largely based” (2). He nevertheless insisted that “this advance
was for the most part an expansion rather than a deepening” (2).
In other words, the great research of the nineteenth century had
expanded knowledge only within a framework fundamentally
incapable of explaining the anomaly of radioactivity.
The “revolution” that Soddy and Rutherford had sparked with

their theory of radioactive decay required relative outsiders to cross
disciplinary boundaries—with Soddy as a physical chemist able
to work with the physicist Rutherford to understand the results
they were seeing in their provincial lab. Truly new scientific insight
required institutional shake-ups. As Soddy wrote, “Radioactivity
is a new primary science owing allegiance to neither physics nor
chemistry, as these sciences were understood before its advent,
because it is concerned with a knowledge of the elementary atoms
themselves of a character so fundamental and intimate that the
old laws of physics and chemistry, concerned almost wholly with
external relationships, do not suffice” (3). Calling radioactivity a
“new primary science” was a bold, even radical, provocation.
Soddy knew well that science, like other institutions, resists
sweeping change. But his understanding of the “revolution” that
had transpired looked ahead to later-twentieth-century work in the
history and philosophy of science and even science studies:
So drastic an innovation was, it is true, unanticipated. Radium,

however, is an undisputed fact to-day, and there is no question,
had its existence conflicted with the established principles of
science, which would have triumphed in the conflict. Natural
conservatism and dislike of innovation appear in the ranks
of science more strongly than most people are aware. Indeed,
science is no exception. (4–5)
But the rhetoric of Soddy’s Interpretation of Radium was not all

that different from the challenges to conservative institutions in
Pound’s or Marinetti’s writings. Even ignoring five appearances of
“newly” and four of “newer,” Soddy’s relatively short book contains
108 instances of the word “new”—such as the “new epoch” and the
oft-repeated “new science.” And when K. B. Hasselberg, president
of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, presented Rutherford
the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in December 1908, he walked a thin
line between a revolutionary and a conservative understanding of
Rutherford’s accomplishment. Affirming the continuity of scientific
research (and the wisdom of the Nobel Prize committee), he first
noted that Rutherford’s research efforts were “closely allied to,
and form a worthy continuation of, work which has already met
with recognition from the Academy in the shape of Nobel Prizes
on former occasions,” mentioning the work of J. J. Thomson, Henri

Becquerel, and Marie Curie. Institutions augment their authority
with such rhetorical strategies, and the relatively new Nobel Prize
(first awarded in 1901) and the far older Royal Swedish Academy
of Sciences (founded in 1739) were no exception. Hasselberg
then highlighted the blurry disciplinary boundaries of research
in radioactivity. Though Rutherford was a physicist, his work
was of absolute importance to chemistry: “The above-mentioned
disintegration theory and the experimental results upon which
it is based, are synonymous with a new departure in chemistry,
involving a fresh and decidedly extended comprehension of the
very basis of that science” (Hasselberg). Continuity with the “old”
innovators whom the Nobel had recognized over the previous seven
years, a new departure in a field (chemistry) that was not even the
disciplinary home of the award winner, a fundamental “fresh”
comprehension of the “very basis of the science”—such were the
demands of a major award for scientific revolutionaries.
Tools for modernist studies

In order to approach a period when science and technology
seemed more dynamically transformative than in perhaps any
earlier era—when change itself seemed to be at the heart of science
and technology—scholars engaging with science and technology
in modernist studies have had to transform their own methods
to become increasingly interdisciplinary. Developments in the
historiography of science mark this field, but so do significant
interactions with research in the fields of literature and science,
science studies, and STS (science, technology, and society, or science
and technology studies). These fields saw major developments
during the 1980s and 1990s.
Literature and science

James Bono has noted the decline by the late 1970s of a first
wave of work on literature and science, a field that had primarily
explored the influence of science on literature and had, essentially,
been limited to annotating scientific engagements in literary texts.
Bono sees a renewal of the field beginning in the 1980s, as literary

and science studies scholars paid a “new and intensive attention to
the practices of ‘scientists’ themselves” (556). Bono explains:
From the early 1980s on, a new generation of scholars

increasingly turned their attention to the performative
dimensions of the different kinds of work avidly pursued by
scientific practitioners in the making of knowledge about nature.
The common thread that bound together emerging work in
the reconfigured field of literature and science was analytic
attention to the performative effects and affordances of literary
and linguistic dimensions of science, attention turned in parallel
fashion to the material practices associated with different
sciences and thus to the performative effects and affordances
of laboratory and experimental protocols; collecting, observing,
recording, and categorizing devices and procedures; the material
regimes constituting such analytic practices, from mathematical
and statistical techniques for “reading” particular kinds of
data critical to specific scientific subspecialties; and, finally, the
networks of exchange that foster the circulation of the objects,
material practices, and epistemic things that contribute to the
making of scientific knowledge. (556–57)
Most of the interdisciplinary explorations that helped revive

literature and science as a field rejected the influence model, in
which science is seen as a stable given that, in turn, influences
literature, itself cordoned off as a separate practice.
By the late 1990s, Susan Merrill Squier was calling for strong
scholarly engagement at precisely this reconceived intersection of
literature and science: “I suggest that we need to shift the kinds of
questions we ask away from ‘Is this discourse primarily scientific
or literary?’ and ‘Is it engaged primarily in the explorations of
subjects or objects?’ toward ‘What kind of cultural work is this
doing? Where? And in what ensemble of social relations?’” (“From
Omega,” 144).5 And scholarly arguments about the role of rhetoric,
metaphor, literature, and culture in the development and reception
of scientific fields and facts had begun to flourish. Significantly,
much of the work that shifted modernist studies in this direction
had reached a critical mass across multiple fields. Evelyn Fox Keller,
author of Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology
(1995), taught in a program in the history and philosophy of science.

Drawing on his disciplinary background in rhetoric, Alan Gross
examined the role of rhetoric in the ways scientists establish and
persuade each other of scientific truths. In the second edition of his
groundbreaking The Rhetoric of Science (1990), Gross noted that
the rhetorical study of the history of science had attracted enough
attention to have become a site of controversy (vii). In 1994, Squier
published a key work for modernism and feminist science studies
titled Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive
Technology. The interdisciplinary commitment of these and other
scholars helped inspire a new generation approaching science and
technology in modernist studies. This second wave of literature and
science studies is now a thriving area of scholarship, with the support
of a scholarly infrastructure—found, for example, in the Society for
Literature, Science, and the Arts and its journal, Configurations, in
the United States and the British Society for Literature and Science
in the United Kingdom.
Kuhn’s “paradigms” and “scientific

revolutions”
As an entry point into the large and diverse fields of literature
and science and science studies, we shall turn to Thomas Kuhn,
a figure who addressed some of the same issues Soddy raised in
The Interpretation of Radium and gave post–Second World
War academia a set of terms that quickly spread well beyond
his original intentions for them. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (1962) would become the most widely read twentieth-
century account of how science comes to “make it new.” What
Soddy identified as the “expansion” efforts of nineteenth-century
chemistry, Kuhn would term “normal science.” And Kuhn provided
the enduring and now widely circulating term “paradigm shift” to
describe the phenomenon that the 1908 Nobel Prize committee had
seen in Rutherford’s research.
Turning from a stalling career in physics in the 1950s to work
instead at the intersection of the history and philosophy of science,
Kuhn explored the mechanisms of change in professional science.
Though it hardly advances a heroic conception of the scientific
enterprise, one of Kuhn’s most important assertions was that
the vast majority of scientific research comprises puzzle-solving

activities undertaken by scientists freed from basic metaphysical
and conceptual quandaries. He describes the paradigm or matrix
upon which scientific research programs can be mounted as the
“implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological
belief that permits selection, evaluation, and criticism” (16–17).
Kuhn’s “normal science” is inherently conservative, but he argues
that it must necessarily be so in order to provide the metaphysical
stability for professional science to proceed. Kuhn looks at how
science as it is institutionalized sustains its principles, questions,
and methods of inquiry: “No part of the aim of normal science is
to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit
the box are often not seen at all. Nor do scientists normally aim to
invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented
by others. Instead, normal-scientific research is directed to the
articulation of those phenomena and theories that the paradigm
already supplies” (24).
Inevitably, though, normal science will not always be up to the
task. Sometimes the powerfully conservative forces of the paradigm
fail to preserve equilibrium. Even within an established paradigm,
anomalies appear. Indeed, the process of normal science generates
these moments, as the puzzle solving is tested time and time again
and eventually fails. Soddy approached this understanding when he
asserted that radium itself would have “triumphed” even when it
“conflicted with the established principles of science” (4). Radium
and other radioactive elements presented the anomaly. But Soddy
did not have a systematic theory of how normal science changed in
the face of such refractory phenomena. Kuhn did.
When serious anomalies cannot be assimilated to the paradigm,
a crisis occurs, and new theories can proliferate. These new theories
meet with great resistance, and those scientists whose careers have
been staked upon the old paradigm often never accept any new
one. Sir Oliver Lodge, for instance, went to his grave in 1940 still
defending the nineteenth-century ether physics through which he had
attained his eminent position but which had been rejected by most
physicists for at least two decades. For Kuhn, a scientific revolution
is not simply the acceptance of a new theory. As he argues,
A discovery like that of oxygen or X-rays does not simply add one
more item to the population of the scientist’s world. Ultimately
it has that effect, but not until the professional community has
re-evaluated traditional experimental procedures, altered its
conception of entities with which it has long been familiar, and,
in the process, shifted the network of theory through which it
deals with the world. (7)
Kuhn proposed that true scientific revolutions, or paradigm shifts,

are rare because of the incommensurability of different paradigms.
Their practitioners are, essentially, not even talking about the same
world: “Scientific fact and theory are not categorically separable,
except perhaps within a single tradition of normal-scientific practice.
That is why the unexpected discovery is not simply factual in its
import and why the scientist’s world is qualitatively transformed as
well as quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either
fact or theory” (7). “Outside the laboratory everyday affairs usually
continue as before,” Kuhn explains. “Nevertheless, paradigm
changes do cause scientists to see the world of their research-
engagement differently. In so far as their only recourse to that world
is through what they see and do, we may want to say that after
a revolution scientists are responding to a different world” (111).
Thus what Kuhn calls a “scientific revolution”—a “non-cumulative
developmental episode in which an older paradigm is replaced in
whole or in part by an incompatible new one” (92)—happens very
infrequently.
Kuhn and modernism

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions speaks remarkably well to
modernist-era concerns about the Victorian imperative of scientific
progress. Kuhn’s model did not conform to the common view
of science as a gradual, steady, and progressive accumulation of
knowledge and methods. Instead, he offered an interpretation he
called “progress through revolutions.” As Michael North describes
it, this model “shares with evolution a particularly elegant solution
to the basic problem of novelty, for it turns out that normal science
produces anomalies, or deviations from its paradigm, in the course
of the same process that ordinarily produces confirmations of
it” (122). “Normal science and revolutionary science,” North
continues, “are thus like two sides of a Möbius strip” (123).
The assault of the strange and unassimilable on the conditions

of workaday normalcy, the role of crises in producing not only
incommensurability but also endless change and even rejuvenation—
these aspects of Kuhn’s thought resonate with many facets of the
earlier period’s modernisms. Structure has deep roots not only in
the scientific and technological tumult of the modernist period
but also in developments in the historiography and philosophy of
science that emerged from that earlier period. Kuhn’s thought owes
significant debts to directions in the philosophy and historiography
of science emerging from the tumultuous height of the modernist
era. In the philosophy department at Harvard in the 1920s and
1930s, A. N. Whitehead argued for a “process philosophy” that
returned a metaphysical focus to the philosophy of science and
made change central to an understanding of science, though his
approach was much more radical than the one Kuhn ultimately
adopted. And C. I. Lewis brought an American pragmatist approach
to European logical positivism and tested the waters of arguments
about incommensurability that Kuhn would much more confidently
affirm in the next generation.6
Key influences on Kuhn also included European modernist-
era thinkers such as Alexander Koyré (1892–1964), a Russian-
born French Jewish philosopher and historian and philosopher
of science. From 1908 to 1911, Koyré studied with Edmund
Husserl in Göttingen and then went to Paris in 1912 to work with
Bergson. Though an academic, Koyré’s life, like those of many
modernist writers and artists, was lived across multiple countries
and languages.7 In his scholarship on the history of sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century science, Koyré argued that outlook or theory,
rather than an objective and neutral uncovering of truths about
nature through experiment, was primary to scientific development.8
Koyré also played an instrumental role in Parisian surrealism’s
engagement with science in the 1920s and 1930s, beginning a vivid
and influential seminar at the École pratique des hautes études in
1926, which was then carried on by his friend Alexandre Kojève.
As Gavin Parkinson has recently shown, Kojève’s seminars brought
Hegel back into vogue in France and were attended by Raymond
Aron, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klosowski, Jacques Lacan, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, and Raymond Queneau. Koyré and Kojève drew
these philosophical discussions together with a strong interest in the
philosophy of science, and ultimately with discussion of quantum

physics through the journal Recherches Philosophiques, edited by
Koyré and others in the 1930s (Parkinson 122–27).
Another modernist-era thinker important to Kuhn was the
Polish Jewish physician and historian of science Ludwik Fleck,
who lived in the Ukraine, Austria, Poland, and for some time, in
Auschwitz and Buchenwald, ultimately spending his final days in
Israel.9 Fleck offered to Kuhn the concepts of “thought style” and
“thought collective,” which Fleck developed in part as a critique of
the logical positivism of Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, and the
Vienna Circle of the 1920s.10 Opposing what he saw as the Vienna
Circle’s effort to construe “an ideal, or thinking as it should be,”
“something fixed and absolute” (50), Fleck argued that knowledge
“does not repose upon some substratum. Only through continual
movement and interaction can that drive be maintained which
yields ideas and truths” (51). And, as Fleck maintained in Genesis
and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935), through a “thought
style,” knowledge is socially and historically produced, not just
described. When comparing the thought style of modern science
with that of an earlier period—for example, the alchemical writing
of Paracelsus or other medieval chemists—he writes, “Our physical
reality did not exist for them” (127). This concept of thought style
in Fleck ties together sociology, history, and epistemology: “We
can therefore define thought style as [the readiness for] directed
perception, with corresponding mental and objective assimilation
of what has been so perceived” (99; emphasis in original). In Fleck’s
work, we can see the path that Kuhn would take; we can also see
some affinities with the interests of Pound and other modernist
writers. The Kuhnian concepts with which (with some modification)
this volume approaches its topic are rooted in the tumult of the
modernist period itself and its stoking of interest in how science
addresses radical change.
Bijker’s technological frames

Some scholars, most prominently Steve Fuller, have argued
that Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, while enjoying
enormous influence in the second half of the twentieth century,
had a negative impact in many ways. To Fuller, Kuhn’s work is “an

exemplary document of the Cold War era” that, by locating normal
science and scientific revolutions in the abstract and relatively
depoliticized institutional space of academia, shielded a Cold War
agenda for science from critique (5).11 Though Fuller lands many
blows on Kuhn’s theory in the context of its success during the
Cold War and beyond, Kuhn’s work has, nevertheless, inspired
applications to other areas well outside the seemingly insulated
institutions of academic science. Moreover, seemingly contrary to
Fuller’s criticism, Kuhn’s work has resonated with academics most
committed to opening academia to radical critiques of science and
technology in contemporary society. The Dutch engineer-turned-
academic Wiebe Bijker, for example, followed his interests through
the STS movement’s efforts to offer more powerful academic
perspectives on nuclear arms as well as on environmental and other
important concerns in the 1970s (Bijker 4). Working within what
came to be known as the social construction of technology (SCOT),
he developed a sociological and political framework for the history
of modern technological change akin to Kuhn’s approach to the
paradigm shifts of science.
In a monograph published in the mid-1990s, Of Bicycles,
Bakelites, and Bulbs, Bijker used three key case studies to explore
how technologies emerge and either succeed or fail. His concept of
the “technological frame” was, as he himself notes, in some ways
“one of the many children” of ideas in Kuhn, but he sees it differing
in important ways:
First, technological frames are more heterogeneous than

disciplinary matrices and related concepts. Although disciplinary
matrices contain symbolic generalizations and metaphysical
assumptions as well as values, their character is primarily
cognitive. Technological frames are not purely cognitive, but
also comprise social and material elements. Second and most
important, the concept of technological frame is meant to apply
to all relevant social grounds, not only to engineers. (126)
The technological frame offers both problems and strategies

for solving them and serves as a constraint on what can even
be posed as a problem, but also, like Kuhn’s paradigms, has a
stabilizing effect. And, recalling Soddy and Kuhn, actors who
are disciplinary outsiders can add the alternative perspectives

and problem-solving techniques that help shake up a paradigm
or technological frame. The technological frame, like Kuhn’s
normal science, explains stability, but Bijker also proposes that
“the different degrees of inclusion in a technological frame”
of some actors explain the “built-in incentives for change” in
technologies. A prime example is that of Leo Baekeland, who,
in 1907, succeeded in creating the first synthetic plastic: “partly
working within the celluloid frame, but also partly in the frame of
electro-chemistry, Baekeland could become an agent of change”
(192). Bijker goes on to explain the constraints and possibilities
for change that competing technological frames and their actors
bring to historical and sociological interpretation.
Science studies and the influence of Bruno Latour

The confluence of modernist historiography and philosophy
of science, Kuhn and Bijker brings us to an area of scholarship
that has been of increasing significance to modernist studies: the
insistently interdisciplinary and at times intellectually controversial
field known as science studies. While Kuhn’s provocative framing
of the disciplinary matrix and paradigms of science in terms of
incommensurability suggested sweeping epistemological as well as
social, cultural, and even political concerns, his own scholarship
tended to isolate the workings of science from larger connections
outside of science, even while emphasizing the productive
disciplinary boundary crossings among scientific disciplines
that often contributed to new paradigms. Nevertheless, Kuhn
helped set the stage for science studies, in that he helped turn the
focus onto how scientists go about the production of scientific
knowledge.
Like Kuhn’s term “paradigm,” “science studies” has come to
be used so widely that it sometimes risks scholarly incoherence.
Nevertheless, it can still be conceptualized fruitfully. As David J.
Hess puts it in one of the most lucid and useful efforts to map the
field (as it existed through the late 1990s), “Science studies provides
a conceptual tool kit for thinking about technical expertise in more
sophisticated ways. Science studies tracks the history of disciplines,
the dynamics of science as a social institution, and the philosophical
basis for scientific knowledge” (1). That basic formulation covers

work being done in several disciplines—history of science,
philosophy of science, institutional sociology of science, social
studies of knowledge, and what Hess loosely labels the critical and
cultural studies of science and technology. This last area has been
the one most engaged by modernist studies.
I have described the modernist era in decidedly (if loosely)
Kuhnian terms as a period in which many paradigms were shifting
in science, technology, and even the social organization of the
economy as new modes of responding to the risks of innovation
arose. But, in the decades after Kuhn’s work rippled across multiple
scholarly and popular arenas, another thinker helped open a
productively interdisciplinary approach that drew science studies
into the orbit of the literary and cultural critical work of modernist
studies: Bruno Latour, the French philosopher and sociologist of
science.
In their 1979 book Laboratory Life: The Construction
of Scientific Facts, Latour and Steve Woolgar helped bring a
development in STS in the 1970s known as “laboratory studies”
into broader discussion in humanities fields. In laboratory studies,
researchers follow scientists in their labs and through the networks
of people, institutions, laboratory equipment, and nonhuman
participants in their research to conceptualize how scientific
knowledge is produced. Woolgar and Latour’s approach to the
workings of Roger Guillemin’s laboratory at the Salk Institute
came to the attention of literary scholars in part because it often
conceptualized the productions of the lab in textual and rhetorical
terms. And Latour’s 1987 book, Science in Action, offered STS an
approach emerging from the actor-network theory being developed
by Latour, Michel Callon, John Law, and others. In actor-network
theory, human and nonhuman actors (or “actants”), material and
conceptual, join together in social networks whose performances
create meaning. Science in Action drew together key concepts—
such as “technoscience,” “black box,” and the social construction
of knowledge—from other thinkers into a form that has inspired a
great deal of work across the disciplines.
Though the term had been used by others, such as Gaston
Bachelard in the 1950s and the Belgian philosopher Gilbert Hottois
beginning in the late 1970s, Latour put “technoscience” into many
scholars’ critical vocabularies by adopting this term in Science in
Action. It is meant to “describe all the elements tied to the scientific

contents no matter how dirty, unexpected or foreign they seem”
(174). The term thus encompasses not only the people and methods
we might traditionally see as “scientific” but also the material
technologies and concerns involved across the scientific enterprise,
as well as “supporters, allies, employers, helping hands, believers,
patrons and consumers” (175). While Latour’s broad approach to
technoscience refuses distinctions that some scholars would like to
preserve, Science in Action targets the artificiality of distinctions
between “science” and “society,” for instance, as well as “science”
and “technology.” As literature and science scholars Bruce Clarke
and Manuela Rossini sum it up,
One can say that the sciences seek to know natural objects while
the technologies aim to make artifacts that are instrumental
for cultural purposes. It is nevertheless the case that neither
practice can be adequately contemplated in the absence of the
other. One is always already concerned, in Latour’s coinage, with
technoscience. Only technological artifacts allow the sciences to
construe natural objects scientifically, and this inscribes the objects
that science describes (and most certainly, those it creates) with
significant cultural traces. Similarly, the discipline of literature
and science theorizes texts as technologies of communication
and meaning embedded in some material medium of discourse
or narration. (xvi)
Another key concept that Latour espoused for science studies that,
as we shall see, was also adopted in modernist studies was that of
the “black box,” a term derived from cybernetics. Facts or machines
have been blackboxed when, “no matter how controversial their
history, how complex their inner workings, how large the commercial
or academic networks that hold them in place, only their input and
output count” (2–3). Latour called for an approach to science that
has inspired a great deal of work in modernist studies: “If you take
two pictures, one of the black boxes and the other of the open
controversies, they are utterly different. They are as different as the
two sides, one lively, the other severe, of a two-faced Janus. ‘Science
in the making’ on the right side, ‘all made science’ or ‘ready made
science’ on the other” (4). The focus of Latour’s actor-network
approach is on the former: “our entry into science and technology
will be through the back door of science in the making, not through
the more grandiose entrance of ready made science” (4). Latour
articulates this imperative as his first rule of method: “We study
science in action and not ready made science or technology; to do
so, we either arrive before the facts and machines are blackboxed
or we follow the controversies that reopen them” (258; emphasis
in original).
Latour’s imperative to concentrate on science in action, rather
than ready-made or blackboxed science, is in part why his work
has been of such interest to scholars of modernism, science, and
technology, whose work treats the periods before many facts and
machines had become blackboxed—that period Kuhn would describe
in terms of the anomalies, crises, preparadigms, and ultimately
establishment of new paradigms within scientific revolutions. But
Latour had something at stake that Kuhn had not pursued: the
goal of breaking the habit of circular explanation he saw around
key concepts such as “nature” and “society,” and instead focusing
on the production of knowledge as the settlement of controversy.
Among his “Rules of Method,” he includes the following rule: “To
determine the objectivity or subjectivity of a claim, the efficiency
or perfection of a mechanism, we do not look for their intrinsic
qualities but at all the transformations they undergo later in the
hands of others. . . . Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause
of Nature’s representation, not its consequence, we can never use
this consequence, Nature, to explain how and why a controversy
has been settled. . . . Since the settlement of a controversy is the
cause of Society’s stability, we cannot use Society to explain how
and why a controversy has been settled” (258; emphasis in original).
This approach is rooted in an area of sociology significant to science
studies known as actor-network theory. Reexamining the sciences
or technologies before they have become blackboxed has become a
key feature of new modernist studies of science and technology, as
we will see in the work of Peppis and others.12 In his TLS review
of Science in Action, British mathematician and philosopher and
historian of science Nicholas Jardine predicted that the book
would “have an impact comparable to Thomas Kuhn’s Structure
of Scientific Revolutions both as a provocation to philosophers
and as an inspiration to sociologists and historians of science”
(1291). While Kuhn’s book has actually had much more impact
outside of academia than Latour’s, Jardine had anticipated its use
for modernist studies in its shared concerns with literary theory.

Jardine had in mind the reception theory of Hans Robert Jauss and
Wolfgang Iser. “Like them,” Jardine writes,
Latour constantly emphasizes flexibility of interpretation and

the “translations” whereby readers assimilate texts to their own
expectations and appropriate them for their own purposes.
Like Jauss and Iser, Latour is much concerned with the affective
powers of “scenes,” whether staged, portrayed or framed in
narrative. All of this suggests that what he needs if he is to oust
epistemology is an aesthetics of reception of scientific texts and
images. (1291)
Indeed, while the reception theories of Jauss and Iser have waned
in their academic influence since Jardine wrote his review, Latour’s
work itself has, in fact, generated a great deal of humanities-based
scholarship.
New modernist studies, science,

and technology
The strong resurgence of scholarly attention to science and
technology in what we might now style the “new modernist
studies” followed, not coincidentally, within a decade of the second
rise of literature and science in the 1980s and owed much to the
concerns of that field with the latest developments in the history
and philosophy of science, science studies, rhetoric of science, and
any number of interdisciplinary engagements of the production
of scientific knowledge. By the 1990s, that resurgent field of
literature and science had opened several new paths to scholars
of modernism in literature and the arts looking to offer richer
accounts of modernism, science, and technology during the period
when modernist studies diversified its methodologies, approaches,
and objects of study. Essentially, modernist studies followed the
trajectory Bono tracked in literature and science, moving from
approaches simply elucidating the influence of science upon
literature (and the references to science in literary works) to asking
different questions from different methodological starting places.
One can see a proliferation of strong exemplars of this shift by

the mid-1990s, and many of them were quite explicitly engaged
in feminist projects. Squier, whose first monograph had been on
Virginia Woolf and the sexual politics of London, had, in Babies
in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology,
seen her research on “the role of literature in the construction and
representation of science” as owing some debt to Kuhn (11). In
her groundbreaking work on modernist-era discourses in the life
sciences, which we will examine in more detail in Chapter 3, Squier
pushed Kuhn’s theories of the paradigm and paradigm shift into
directions Kuhn himself had not ventured with them, arguing that
paradigms “are often contained and perpetuated by the literary
structures and forms that escape our examination when we study
the production of scientific knowledge: by analogies, origin stories,
metaphors” (Squier, Babies, 203). As Evelyn Fox Keller argued,
“the ways in which we talk about scientific objects are not simply
determined by empirical evidence but rather actively influence the
kind of evidence we seek (and hence are likely to find)” (35). Latour
becomes essential to Squier’s call for feminist literature and science
studies to turn to the “micro-processes that produced” literature
and science as disciplines, to “literature and science in action and
not ready made literature or science.” As scholars of modernism had
excelled at the critical analysis of text, image, and discourse more
broadly and had long mined the rich veins of popular culture of the
period, their turn to literature and science and to science studies has
significantly enriched our understanding of the modernist period of
science and culture in transition.
Two cultures?
I would like to suggest that scholarship on the modernist period
has also offered new perspectives on a commonplace that, while it
has been critiqued for many decades, still remains in our twenty-
first-century society to some extent. While the modernist period of
shifting scientific paradigms, emerging technological frames, and
proliferating modernist and avant-garde manifestations in literature
and the arts certainly witnessed an increasing specialization
of scientific knowledge and professionalization, it would be
anachronistic to read the motivations of post–Second World War
arguments about the “two cultures” back into the 1910s or 1920s.
Indeed, it has become almost a familiar critical gesture over the
past few decades for scholars working in the history of science or
science and literature to warn against a too-ready acceptance of
the bifurcation asserted by C. P. Snow’s famous catchphrase, “the
two cultures,” and his bemoaning the separation of the sciences and
literature among intellectuals.
In May 1959, long after modernism had waned in the United
States and Western Europe, C. P. Snow delivered his famous Rede
Lecture on “The Two Cultures” and then expanded it into a book
of the same name. (In 1995, the TLS called it one of the 100 most
influential books since the Second World War.) Snow argued that “the
intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being
split into two polar groups. When I say the intellectual life, I mean
to include also a large part of our practical life, because I should
be the last person to suggest the two can at the deepest level be
distinguished” (4). As he saw it, “Literary intellectuals at one pole—
at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical
scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—
sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but
most of all lack of understanding” (4).
By the 1980s, an influential series in the rapidly growing field of
literature and science could dismiss the “two cultures” thesis as a
“not very helpful cliché” (Levine 3). George Levine argued that “it
is possible and fruitful to understand how literature and science are
mutually shaped by their participation in the culture at large—in
the intellectual, moral, aesthetic, social, economic, and political
communities which both generate and take their shape from them”
(5–6). The editors of a recent volume on the field of literature and
science not only note the inapplicability of Snow’s opposition
of literature and science in earlier historical periods but also
acknowledge its marking of the sense that “knowledge production
in the modern world increasingly proceeds through the specialized
or technical languages that enclose separate disciplinary spheres”
(Clarke and Rossini xvi). But recent scholarship on the modernist
era has worked to “bridge” the “two cultures” divide, as Mark
Micale puts it in The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology,
and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940 (vii), and
to contextualize Snow’s comments in the culture of postwar Britain
(Ortolano; Bowler; Small).
Print culture of modernism and science

One might turn to the print culture of the modernist period as a
general index of the extent to which scientists and others, to use
Angelique Richardson’s phrase, “spoke a common language,”
or to test Snow’s alarmist formulation of the “two cultures” as
characterized by “a gulf of mutual incomprehension.” Historians
of science have taken up science’s public representation and its
engagement with broad audiences and public issues, and they have
identified popular science writing in books and periodicals as key
resources for understanding these issues in the first half of the
twentieth century (before television, much less the internet, changed
the media through which science is disseminated outside of the
education system). From her vantage point in the last decade of the
twentieth century, LaFollette could note that “we routinely accept
as a fashionable truism the argument that there are ‘two cultures,’
but we have insufficient information on how any such separation
operates; we observe tensions between the citizenry and the scientific
establishment, yet we propose few plausible explanations for their
existence other than ‘disillusionment’ or ‘loss of confidence’” (2). To
sort out how understandings of science and scientists developed in
the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, LaFollette
turned to popular periodicals:
Descriptions of science were especially vivid in the popular

periodicals of early twentieth-century America. Curled up by
the fireside, teenagers could learn about the latest exploits of
physicists and chemists; their parents could read how research
could help win a war or cure disease. Until the rise of television
in the late 1950s, mass magazines such as The Saturday Evening
Post and Cosmopolitan were information sources about the
world of science that were easily accessible to millions of readers
in all parts of the country and from all walks of life. (3)
In the United States, this attitude that science should be made

available to mass audiences led, in LaFollette’s account, to a demand
for science articles in popular magazines that did not sharply decline
until the 1930s. Other historians have traced an increase in popular
science writing in America during the 1920s, and Ronald C. Tobey
has suggested that the increase was at the prompting of the scientific
community itself, after the First World War, in an effort to establish

a national science program (Tobey chapters 1–3).
But the period from roughly 1900 through the early 1930s also
featured a number of high-profile scientists in Britain publishing
books meant to bring a broader audience accessible accounts of
the new scientific paradigms. While highly technical articles in
specialized scientific journals had become the norm for scientific
professions by the beginning of the twentieth century, Bowler
has pushed back against the “myth of the isolated professional,”
the common misconception that the full professionalization and
specialization of science made scientists reluctant to engage general
audiences, as they had done earlier in the Victorian period. Bowler
has shown that “in the decades after 1900 a significant proportion
of Britain’s scientists tried their hand at nonspecialist writing, and
some of them made a regular habit of it” (3). Publishers of books
and mass-circulation periodicals, including newspapers, reached
out to those who wished to engage in home study or evening
classes (Bowler 1–2). And scientists such as Julian Huxley, J. B.
S. Haldane, Frederick Soddy, James Jeans, Arthur Eddington, and
Sir Oliver Lodge published several books that reached literary
figures and educated intelligentsia. Einstein himself published
such works (in translation) with British publishers, and, of course,
James and Alix Strachey were publishing their translations of
Freud in English through Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth
Press. Through books such as these, writers from Woolf, James
Joyce, Edith Sitwell, H. G. Wells, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence
to Lawrence Durrell engaged with science as published by
scientists themselves. (And, of course, many modernists were
reading classics of nineteenth-century science, such as those by
Charles Darwin, Louis Agassiz, Hermann von Helmholtz, and
many others.) Recent work, such as that of Elizabeth Leane, has
focused on the textual strategies of popular science writing. Leane
argues that popularizing science books, often by scientists, “can
be usefully viewed as an interface between the ‘two cultures’”
and are instances of “cross-disciplinary exchange” and even
“disciplinary skirmishes” (3). Michael Whitworth has shown
that such books had significant sales: “Eddington’s The Nature
of the Physical World sold over 10,000 copies in its first fourteen
months; Jeans’s The Mysterious Universe sold 70,000 copies
in its first two months” (46). Moreover, the literary periodicals
important to modernism (The Athenaeum and The Criterion, for

example), as Whitworth shows, “demonstrate that science was
deeply embedded in literary culture” (45). The little magazines
so significant to modernist literary publication (such as the New
Freewoman and The Egoist) also engaged science as well.
Summing up
The concerns and methods that animate research in modernism,
science, and technology can be summarized in the following (far
from exhaustive) list:
1 Primary focus on science and technology as constituents

of the broader society and culture of modernism. Though
different theoretical perspectives inform the approaches by
scholars of modernism, science, and technology, virtually all
are avidly interdisciplinary.
2 Emphasis on material artifacts, whether textual or not, in
the production of scientific fact and sociocultural meaning.
Science and technology are often considered together.
3 Examination of literary, rhetorical, and aesthetic forms of
science and literature—not simply thematic engagements.
4 Turn to periodicals as well as science writing, popular
science, science fiction, both in the periodicals and in books,
as an archive through which to map the cultural, social, and
intellectual connections in modernism, science, and technology.
5 Recognition of the important social, cultural, and epistemo-
logical implications of the new scientific and technological
paradigms of the modernist era, along with a similarly sophis-
ticated understanding of the persistence of features from nine-
teenth-century and earlier paradigms in frequently mutated
form during the paradigm shifts of the early twentieth century.
Overview
The chapters that follow will be organized around broad domains
of science not entirely demarcated from each other during the
period, but generally gaining recognition in the academic contexts

that were becoming the institutional home of much science of the
period: the physical sciences, life sciences, and social sciences.
Chapter 2, “The Physical Sciences and Mathematics,” draws
upon recent scholarship in modernism, science, and technology
to chart the shared engagements of modernism and the physical
sciences and mathematics that helped inform the paradigm shifts of
the period. Focusing on modernist culture’s emphasis upon tropes
and themes of energy, and the developments across the physical
sciences that drew the nature of energy and of matter increasingly
together, this chapter shows that, in terms of its relationship to
science, modernism loosely breaks down into two stages. An early
modernism emerges within the context of Victorian scientific
paradigms that were undergoing an unsettled phase—some in
crisis, some reaching widespread circulation and taking on ranges
of implication well beyond their original scientific or technological
origins, and some soon to be abandoned or transformed in
unanticipated ways. These included thermodynamics, late classical
ether physics, extradimensional geometries, and the birth of radio-
chemistry and what later became known as nuclear physics. This
period was fascinated by invisible energies driven by a mutually
reinforcing loop of engineering breakthroughs and scientific
interpretations, all shared as part of a rapidly modernizing culture
at the turn of the century. Hertz’s radio transmitter through
Marconi’s wireless, the discovery of X-rays and of radioactivity,
the use of the cloud chamber and new detecting devices were key
events in a cultural moment obsessed with such energies. A later
period encompassing roughly the 1920s and 1930s, including high
modernism and the advent of surrealism, demonstrated the shared
concerns of modernism and the new physics, as the mathematical
formalism and increasingly unvisualizable sciences of relativity
and quantum physics signaled a final break with classical physics.
The crises of representation and realism in literature, the arts, and
sciences and the move from the causal and mechanical explanations
of classical physics to the descriptionist and statistical bases of the
later sciences all had their seeds in the earlier Victorian sciences
that participated in the emergence of early modernism. These late-
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century concerns with unraveling or
shifting paradigms and the emergence of early modernist literature
and art reveal the sharing and expansion of resources among the
sciences, technologies, arts, and literatures of this period of rapid

modernization and scientific upheaval.
Chapter 3, “The Life Sciences,” turns to the modernist culture
contributing to and arising from upheavals in the life sciences
that were almost as radical as those in the physical sciences. If
the primary focus of the physical sciences was on the subatomic
particles, strange radiations, even stranger geometries and quantum
mechanics that came to describe them, the attention of the life
sciences was directed toward cells. Paradigm shifts in biology
involved the nature and organization of cells in living organisms,
and the life sciences came to reinterpret the very nature of life itself.
This chapter explores the shifts in metaphors guiding biology,
with the conceptual and metaphorical binary of mechanism and
vitalism giving way to a new organicism. Issues of organic form,
and of the murky boundaries of the organic and inorganic, were
probed and explored in modernism throughout literature, art, film,
and even architecture. The new neuron doctrine in neurobiology
(a key aspect of Gertrude Stein’s medical education and research
at Johns Hopkins University) understood the nervous system
not in terms of a continuous network, seen in the metaphors of
telegraph or railroad lines by which Victorians understood it, but
rather as individual, adjacent neuron cells, separated by synapses,
with implications for modernist culture and writing practices.
Moreover, advances in laboratory research permitted tissue to be
cultured outside of a living body, and allowed scientists steeped in
evolutionary, embryological, and early genetic research (in the era
after Mendel’s work was reinterpreted) to deploy the resources of
imaginative literature to understand the implications and possible
paths of their research. The chapter will situate in modernist
culture the growth of genetics and embryology and its attendant
technologies of reproduction, as well as research in areas including
cell culture, germ theory, epidemiology, neuroanatomy, nonvitalist
organicism, biocentrism in art and literature, optics and physiology,
and even that most positivist of practices—medicine. Finally, it will
turn briefly to new ecocritical interpretations of modernism and
nature study that are reinvigorating modernist studies.
Chapter 4, “The Social Sciences,” turns to the relatively recently
emerging human sciences such as anthropology, sociology, and
psychology, which were creating validity for themselves as sciences
through the institutional power of academia and professional

associations. These new sciences gained political and social
urgency and credibility across the United States, Britain, and much
of Europe as they confronted concerns about degeneration in the
face of urban modernity, or about the nature of crowd mentality,
or the psychological trauma inflicted by modern warfare as
seen in shell shock. New disciplines such as sexology or the new
psychology of psychoanalysis, and new social research, such as
that conducted by the Mass-Observation movement in Britain
in the 1930s, gave a scientific imperative to questions about
human motivation, behavior, and emotion that were central to
modernist literature and culture. These newly professionalizing
sciences behaved differently than the physical sciences that
Thomas Kuhn described with the concept of paradigms. Multiple
paradigms could coexist—multiple schools of psychology, for
instance—and proliferate without undermining one another.
Moreover, virtually all of these social sciences intersected fairly
directly with the biological sciences, just as neurochemistry and
neurobiology today inform psychology and psychiatry to a great
degree. The chapter culminates in two broad social movements
that turned to the social and biological sciences in response to
fears of degeneration at the heart of urban modernity—namely,
the eugenics movement and the “back to nature” movement in the
United States.
Finally, in its coda, the book turns to critical disability studies
as a new arena of inquiry for modernist studies that allows new
purchase on the sciences, modernisms, and legal and ethical issues
of the period. Like ecocriticism (discussed in Chapter 3), critical
disability studies orients modernist studies toward significant
political, social, and cultural concerns not only of the modernist
period, but of the present. We then conclude by returning to the
“two cultures” debate discussed above, exploring how the study of
science and technology in modernism reengages such debates around
the key imperative of much of this research—interdisciplinarity.
We shall now turn to the physical sciences as the area that saw
the most sweeping paradigm shifts during the modernist period, the
one that most alerted the broad reading public to the fundamental
reconceptualization of the universe and of the sciences by which we
approach it.
Notes
1 Even before the Great War, religious historian Philip Jenkins notes,
a widespread apocalypticism emerged as a response to rapid
modernization. As Jenkins argues, “From the late nineteenth century
these [apocalyptic] ideas experienced a worldwide vogue, as believers
tried to make sense of the sweeping changes they witnessed around
them—the collapse of old social assumptions, the rise of gigantic
cities and mass society, and the spread of seemingly miraculous
technology. Across cultures and denominations, the resulting mood
of expectation was peaking just as the war began” (137). Each of the
major combatant countries had their own interpretations of the war
as the battle at the end of times. In the United States, Billy Sunday
and other religious leaders described combat between Hell (with
the Kaiser as the Beast) and the forces of Heaven, while Germany’s
Ludwig Ganghofer would describe England as “Babylon, the great
Whore” (Jenkins 140–41).
2 As John White put it, “Marinetti singles out the invention of wireless
telegraphy as one of the great milestones in civilization’s progress
towards the Futurist electric millennium of the twenty-first century’’
(148). See Toscano (109–29).
3 North concludes: “With this history, running from ancient China to
Fascist Italy and back in place, Make It New can be seen to imply
a complete history of the concept of novelty. Of course, the explicit
emphasis of this history is on models of recurrence, from organic
renewal to Fascist revolution, and there is no doubt that Pound felt
the appeal of the total transformation that such models promise.
But it is also hard to miss the fact that Pound’s actual practice in
his successive repetitions of this slogan is one of quotation and
combination. Pound habitually worked by arranging and re-
arranging certain bits of knowledge that had been canonized within
his own idiosyncratic system, and the ancient Chinese saying is but
one of many nodes in this system, attracting to itself over the years
bits of Mussolini and bits of Neoplatonism and even bits of modern
anthropology. The form, then, of Make It New is recombinant, as it
comes to signify a whole anthology of Pound’s efforts and interests.
As he says himself in ‘The Serious Artist,’ major poets ‘heap together
and arrange and harmonize the results of many men’s labour. This
very faculty for amalgamation is a part of their genius’” (168).
4 Davidson notes that “most firms found that the surest way to grow
was to perfect the manufacturing of the same products, year after
year. G.M., U.S. Steel, Procter & Gamble, Kellogg’s, Coca-Cola and
other iconic companies achieved their breakthrough insights in the

pre-corporate era and spent the next several decades refining them,
perhaps introducing a new product every decade or so” (44).
5 Bono explains that this revived field of literature and science, which
draws upon science studies and history of science, targeted “an
abiding, if false dichotomy: that between discourse and (material)
practice, or, to put it differently, between text and action. . . . The
world as we know it and study it is filled with material-textual, or
material-discursive, hybrids—instruments; machines; illustrations;
diagrams; maps; charts; physical models; computer simulations—that
are simultaneously part of the material world and instruments for our
knowing and manipulating it. They are all, in their own way, what
I like to call material metaphors: embodied metaphors in action”
(558–59).
6 See Fuller (266–80) for a detailed examination of Lewis’s work in
relationship to Kuhn’s.
7 He fought for France in a Russian brigade in the Great War, ultimately
abandoning Russia because of the Revolution. While primarily
teaching in Paris, he also took positions in Cairo and in the United
States, where he moved because of the Nazi occupation of France.
8 Though it was published late in his life, Koyré’s From Closed World
to the Infinite Universe (1957) perhaps provides the best statement
of his research and arguments from across his career. Ultimately,
Koyré sought an internalist account of science to protect it from
subsumption in the realms of politics, technology, economics, and
modern warfare, imagining the possibility that science could simply
disappear entirely under these conditions (Fuller 66).
9 Kuhn acknowledged his debt to Fleck in his preface (xiii–ix),
though he positions Fleck’s Entstehung und Entwicklung einer
wissenschaftlichen Tatsache as “an essay that anticipates many of my
own ideas” (ix), rather than the source of them.
10 Indeed, following Peter Galison, Henning Schmidgen, and others,
one might characterize Kuhn’s thought as more of an “anti-
positivist” project in the aftermath of Carnap’s positivism than a
“post-positivist” approach like those of some more recent historians,
philosophers, and sociologists of science (Schmidgen 337; Galison,
Image 781–844). As Schmidgen puts it, “Whether it be the grand
story of single observations resulting in theories or, instead, a macro-
history of paradigms that successively break down, only to yield
new ones, Carnap as well as Kuhn were convinced that the existence
and development of science can be depicted by master narratives, or
grands récits” (337).
11 This agenda is represented, in Fuller’s history, by Kuhn’s mentor,

James Bryant Conant—president of Harvard during Kuhn’s early
years there, then the director of the National Defense Research
Committee that oversaw the atomic bomb program, and later
chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger, overseeing 1950s
attacks on communism. In Fuller’s critical interpretation, Kuhn’s
formulation of normal science and scientific revolutions insulated
science in academic arenas of abstraction: “Arguments that would
be understood as contestable in a political setting, because agents see
them as potentially affecting the course of events, can easily acquire
the status of fact when transferred to the depoliticized environment
of the academy, where agents are removed from the levers of change.
In other words, we may have a situation in which abstraction implies
less, not more, critical reflection on the material conditions of
thought” (6). Indeed, as we shall see in later chapters, in many ways
Soddy had anticipated Fuller’s critiques of Kuhnian “normal science”
and would eventually retreat from laboratory research entirely into
areas that would appeal to other modernists—monetary policy,
political critique, and even ecological thinking.
12 To return to our example of the Italian Futurist Marinetti, Toscano
invokes Latour to argue that, before wireless technology got
blackboxed as radio, audiences to whom it had been presented, and
who had learned about it through representations of the science
and technology and ideologically saturated representations of the
meaning of wireless, in part created their understanding of wireless
through the representations by Marinetti and the Futurists (xiii).
2
The physical sciences
and mathematics
In the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Marx and Engels

summarized the experience of modernity in the oft-quoted phrase
“All that is solid melts into air.” Expanding upon Marx and
Engels’s phrase, Marshall Berman argued that “to be modern is to
experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s
world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble
and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe
in which all that is solid melts into air.” But, he continued, “to be a
modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom”
(Berman 345–46). Scientists were not immune to this experience of
disintegration and renewal. Indeed, though science might at times
be invoked as a stabilizing force of progress, it also productively
generates its own endless cycle of destruction and renewal. Around
1905, Einstein suffered an epistemological crisis at a moment of
scientific revolution. Unable to reconcile the old classical physics
paradigms with the new science of quanta, the twentieth-century
icon of scientific insurrection fretted, “It was as if the ground had
been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be
seen anywhere, upon which one could have built” (qtd in Parkinson
21). Yet many of the physicists and chemists of the modernist era—
Einstein with some struggle, Soddy with infectious enthusiasm—
would find themselves at home in the maelstrom of modernity.
And the physical sciences and technologies of the period, as well as
the modernist arts and literatures that engaged with them, helped
sweep away many of the cognitive and epistemological certainties

of the nineteenth century.
Major developments in the physical sciences and related
technologies were so significant a feature of the culture of modernism
that a comprehensive engagement with recent scholarship on the
subject would easily overwhelm this volume. The role of fin de siècle
photography, drawing, and painting in scientific understandings of
the nature of evidence; the part played by the advances in telescope
optics in Edwin Hubble’s paradigm-shifting work in extragalactic
astronomy; or the new possibilities for mass production and mass
destruction brought about by advances in industrial chemistry—any
of these topics, and others, could occupy much of this chapter.1 But
many of the fundamental paradigm shifts of the physical sciences
can be organized around new understandings of energy and matter
that were perhaps the most significant scientific, technological,
and cultural achievements of the modernist period. Looking at
modernism through the lens of these sciences and technologies,
as scholars have done with an increasingly interdisciplinary
sophistication, one immediately perceives the “centrality of the
theme of energy in modernist discourse” (1), as Linda Henderson
and Bruce Clarke put it. To be sure, From Energy to Information,
their influential 2002 volume, makes a compelling case that a shift
from modernity to postmodernity might be viewed “in terms of the
conceptual crossover from energy to information” (1). But even
before Einstein’s famous E = mc2 quantified the interchangeability
of mass and energy in 1905, the sciences of energy had already
begun to raise paradigm-shaking questions about the nature of
matter, of life and death, and even of the existence of undetectable
yet omnipresent particles, extradimensional space, and an unseen
universe. The physical sciences of the modernist period made claims
that were simply bizarre by the standards of classical physics and
chemistry. Late-nineteenth-century science had dealt with invisible
yet at least visualizable matter, forces, and geometries. As Michael
Whitworth sums it up, “Scientific research into matter in the
period 1880 to 1930 began with a world that was so minute as
to be invisible, and ended with one that was so strange as to be
unvisualizable” (“Physics,” 206).
Although Darwinian evolutionary theory was perhaps the most
widely noted scientific paradigm shift of the nineteenth century and
Freudian psychoanalysis one of the most influential new paradigms
The physical sciences and mathematics 39
to emerge at the fin de siècle, the physical sciences and mathematics

of the late nineteenth century through the first third of the twentieth
are an essential starting place for our exploration of modernism,
science, and technology. The physical sciences enjoyed a special
prestige during the period.2 As we shall see, the way modernist-era
science came to understand or describe energy and its relationship
to matter shows paradigm shifts in specific sciences collectively
signaling much broader changes in culture and epistemology
during the modernist era. Clarke’s term “technoscientism” usefully
describes the intermingling of concepts among the sciences and other
social or cultural fields, or the outright appropriation of scientific
terms and ideas outside of their original scientific context. It draws
together the sociohistorical term “scientism”—indicating, often
negatively, the appropriation of science for nonscientific activities—
with the theoretical work by a host of scholars, including Bruno
Latour, Gillian Beer, and Donna Haraway, “in which the splicing
together of science and technology also implies their inextricable
relations to society as a whole” (Clarke, Energy Forms, 7). For
historians of science, it is a crucial concept.
Nineteenth-century paradigms
Across the nineteenth century, the physical sciences and mathematics
had been phenomenally successful at professionalizing, building
institutions and public interest, and contributing to the technological
and engineering developments that reshaped industrial nations.3
Narratives of scientific progress seemed easily supportable by
successes in physics, chemistry, mathematics, and astronomy as well
as in engineering triumphs, including in chemistry and electricity.
It was an age of energy as much as it was an age of empire. Yet
in retrospect, it might be seen as an extraordinarily successful
period of “normal science,” in Kuhn’s language, rather than one of
revolutionary paradigm shifts in the physical sciences.
Revolutions were plentiful indeed—think of the European
political revolutions of 1848, or, within the life sciences, the
advent of Darwinian evolutionary theory. But some scientific
and technological developments would prove their revolutionary
consequences only many years later. Victorian thermodynamics, as
we shall see, was a product of an age during which energy most
significantly meant steam power, rather than electricity, and the

transfer of energy central to the science was laden with concerns
about work during the Industrial Revolution and about force
going back to the age of Newton. The centrality of entropy to
thermodynamic thinking, its application to areas of science and
culture well beyond engineering and the physics of inanimate
systems, and the nonclassical, Newtonian demands of statistical
analysis in thermodynamics became crucial in the later nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.
New geometries
Non-Euclidean geometries emerged in Germany across the
nineteenth century. Carl Friedrich Gauss’s early work in the field
was not published, but his student at the University of Göttingen,
Bernhard Riemann, developed a strong non-Euclidean geometry a
half century later, which was then further elaborated by Felix Klein
and others. This development became crucial to Albert Einstein’s
general theory of relativity in the new century. Klein and other
mathematicians, including Arthur Cayley, the Sadlerian Professor
of Pure Mathematics at Cambridge, argued over the relationships
among Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries, with Klein
ultimately seeing Euclidean, hyperbolic, and elliptical geometries all
as independent and self-subsistent (Struve and Struve 152). But the
full impact of these and other non-Euclidean geometries (and their
challenge to the cognitive authority of Euclid) can be registered
early in the twentieth century in modernist culture and the “new
physics.”
Likewise, the noncommutative properties of matrix calculus,
though understood in the nineteenth century, became crucial when
Max Born suggested the little-known branch of mathematics to
Heisenberg to solve problems in his quantum theory and thus to
create matrix mechanics in the 1920s (Parkinson 29).
Ether physics
While thermodynamics and non-Euclidean geometries are examples
of Victorian-era sciences whose paradigm-shifting implications
were realized later, during the modernist era, other highly

prominent physics paradigms of the earlier period also began to
collapse. Perhaps most significant of these was the ether physics
that had dominated the nineteenth century and raised issues about
the nature of fundamental forces, setting the stage for wave/
particle tensions that eventually led to the dualities of quantum
physics. While the notion of a “luminiferous ether” helped unify
electromagnetic energies and make them central to physics,
the approach of ether physics, as we shall see momentarily, was
thoroughly classical Newtonian. Efforts to explain Newton’s force
of gravity itself in terms of particles of something like ether had
occurred as early as the late seventeenth (Nicolas Fatio de Duillier)
and mid-eighteenth centuries (Georges-Louis Le Sage). By the
nineteenth century, scientists assumed that electromagnetic waves
must propagate through a medium. Victorian physics thus made
increasingly significant demands for all space to be filled with a
mysterious, rarified, and virtually undetectable medium, the ether.
Though attempts to detect the existence of such a medium obtained
negative results, the ether paradigm was held by some physicists
well beyond 1905, when Einstein had shown it was unnecessary.
Moreover, modernism emerged at a moment when ether was not
only increasingly discredited by some scientists but also lingering in
popular culture through its late-Victorian-era propensity to spark
speculation, even by scientists, about areas outside the realm of
Victorian physics—such as telepathy, the afterlife, and the physical
existence of a spatial fourth dimension.
Thermodynamics
Another arena in which the move away from classical mechanics was
later understood as a paradigm shift was in the use of probability
and statistical mechanics to understand large thermodynamic
systems. The laws of thermodynamics were a striking achievement
of the steam age, a mid-nineteenth-century confluence of classical
physics, industrial technology and engineering, and social and
cultural imperatives. One can locate the emergence of classical
thermodynamics in the period from the 1820s to the 1860s,
during which key principles were formulated by British, German,
and French scientists and engineers.4 That these thinkers worked
within shared seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paradigms

helps explain their more or less simultaneous contributions to
classical thermodynamics. But developments in thermodynamics
in both the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries strongly
illustrate the benefits of interdisciplinary understandings of science
and technology as aspects of a broader social and cultural milieu
and not simply isolated institutions emerging from a narrowly
conceived discipline.
From the start, cultural, social, and political conditions made the
articulation of the laws of thermodynamics not only possible but
also widely resonant. Decades ago, historians of science, including
Kuhn himself, began to demonstrate the significance of social and
theological metaphors and concerns (Myers 35) to the development
of thermodynamics—especially in the writings of Kelvin, Clerk
Maxwell, and von Helmholtz. Historians of science and literature,
such as M. Norton Wise, Crosbie Smith, Anson Rabinbach, George
Levine, and Greg Myers, have shifted the focus from the pessimism
and cosmic decay implicit in the second law to much more widely
circulating implications of the first law, and thermodynamics in
general, for waste, efficiency, and work (MacDuffie 207). Myers,
for example, explored “how the language of social and moral
criticism came to permeate the rhetoric of the nineteenth-century
British popularizers of physics, and how the language of physics
came to be used for social and moral criticism” (36). M. Norton
Wise has continued to investigate the reach of thermodynamics into
even wider cultural issues—for example, the role it played in the
gendering of concepts of time (“Time Discovered,” 39). Victorianists
Gillian Beer and George Levine reject categorical separations of
literature and science in their work. And Tina Young Choi has
recently argued that the idea of conservation of energy formulated
in the first law was applied widely to both scientific and social issues,
particularly in tandem with ideals such as national and social self-
sufficiency, which related to thermodynamic conservation’s sense of
a containable system informed by cause and effect. It also served as
a strong example of “the ways in which nineteenth-century scientific
and literary discourses enabled each other’s articulation . . . [and]
were engaged in the same discursive struggles” (303). Rather than
looking simply at thematic representations of thermodynamics,
Choi explores the relationships between thermodynamics and
literary forms and conventions, such as narrative closure and

omniscient narrative.
If the conservation of energy articulated in the first law of
thermodynamics—that energy could transform from one form to
another but not be created or destroyed—preoccupied the minds
of many in the mid-nineteenth century, by the end of the century
(and during the nascence of modernism), the second law of
thermodynamics had become more urgent. Engineers and physicists
theorizing the conversion of forms of energy described by the first law
of thermodynamics could see that, while energy was not destroyed
as it was converted into the work of a mechanical engine, some of
it was always lost, often through friction, as wasted heat. In 1850,
the German physicist Rudolf Clausius gave this dissipation, this
increasing lack of availability of energy for work, a name: entropy.
William Thomson (later Kelvin) and Hermann von Helmholtz
continued to formalize it as the second law (Whitworth 59).
Modernism and entropy

Thermodynamics, and especially entropy, has been of special
significance to scholars of modernism, science, and technology.
The shifting modes of scientific understanding that classical
thermodynamics straddled have allowed modernist studies to
be particularly in tune with the ideologies and formal reach of
thermodynamics in early modernist culture. Energy itself, as Clarke
points out, is a notion with theological and humanistic origins that
only later became a key concept for physics, and the term never
entirely lost its earlier resonances (Energy Forms, 2). Moreover,
the birth of thermodynamics in a period during which Newtonian
physics still reigned supreme, along with the concepts and language
of dynamic chaos, allowed for particularly wide-reaching allegories
and forms (8). Clarke describes early modernism’s move away
from nineteenth-century naturalism’s “empiricist and deterministic
literary scientism,” and an emphasis on “the detached description
of discrete items,” toward an “immaterial and energic scientism
patterned after the force fields and energy transformations of late-
nineteenth-century electromagnetic and atomic physics”: witness
Ezra Pound’s “rose in the steel dust” (Dora Marsden, 5).
What we see in early modernism’s engagement with thermo-

dynamics, and especially with entropy, is a period of rampant
boundary crossing in the sciences and interactions with broad-

er cultural, social, ideological forces, with all of the muddle and
generative creativity of shared linguistic resources. For example,
vitalism, the enduring legacy of eighteenth-century reactions against
mechanical explanations of life, in its effort to conceptualize what
distinguished living from inanimate systems, nevertheless adopted
Newtonian terms and concepts—Newton’s gravitational force
appears in the “life force” of vitalism (Clarke, Dora Marsden, 28),
and dances around the edges of biology and a path not taken by
most energy physicists of the period. And the dissipation of energy
in a closed system in thermodynamics was tied to concerns about
biological and cultural degeneration and even the end of life on
earth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Entropy
offered up much more horrific possibilities than the inefficient func-
tioning of steam engines. It was quickly applied to a wide variety
of issues involving inanimate matter. Kelvin himself helped raise a
disturbing implication of the second law of thermodynamics in a
popular article titled “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat” in Macmillan’s
Magazine in March 1862, highlighting the consequences for life
as stars cool and energy dissipates: a seemingly irreversible slide
toward entropy creates a cold, exhausted universe, whose energy is
incapable of supporting work of any kind. It was all just a matter
of time. But how much time? Kelvin used the cooling of the sun to
estimate how long the sun had made life sustainable on earth—and
hence whether such a world had existed long enough for evolution
to have generated its current life forms. More interesting to many,
though, was how much sun we had left. Using thermodynamic cal-
culations, Kelvin concluded, “As for the future, we may say, with
equal certainty, that inhabitants of the earth can not continue to
enjoy the light and heat essential to their life for many million years
longer unless sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great
storehouse of creation” (“On the Age,” 393).
Science fiction of the late nineteenth century produced some
classic images tying together the degeneration of humanity and a
dying sun. French astronomer Camille Flammarion’s 1894 classic,
La Fin du Monde, portrayed humanity surviving a narrow miss
by a comet that would have destroyed all life on earth only to
contemplate a frozen, lifeless, dark end. In 1925, Eliot’s “The
Hollow Men” concluded thus: “This is the way the world ends / Not
with a bang but a whimper.” Some thirty years earlier in a story
Flammarion published in English in the Contemporary Review as
“The Last Days of the Earth,” a dog whimpers over the bodies of
the last human couple on a dying, frozen earth:
And the snow continued to fall in a fine powder on to the

entire surface of the earth. And the earth continued to turn on
its axis night and day, and to float through the immensity of
space. And the sun continued to shine, but with a reddish and
barren light. But long afterwards it became entirely extinguished,
and the dark terrestrial cemetery continued to revolve in the
night around the enormous invisible black ball. And the stars
continued to scintillate in the immensity of the heavens. And the
infinite universe continued to exist with its billions of suns and
its billions of living or extinct planets. (569)
Depictions of this inevitable “heat death” did not simply concern

the future of energy and inanimate matter. Looking at nineteenth-
century popularizations of thermodynamics, Greg Myers has
argued that, “like Darwinism, thermodynamics has been inter-
twined with social thought, influenced by it and influencing it since
the earliest formulations” (“Nineteenth-Century Popularizations,”
35). Thermodynamic scientists, such as von Helmholtz, Kelvin,
and Clerk Maxwell, drew on concepts and metaphors from theol-
ogy in their science, just as later thinkers important to modernism,
such as Henry Adams and Gustave Le Bon, turned to thermody-
namics “as a vision of universal history, a scientific explanation
for what they see as the growing disorder of society” (36). At the
fin de siècle, social and cultural concerns that modernity itself was
causing social and even biological degeneration tied directly to
heat death.
As the above discussion suggests, much modernist scholarship
on thermodynamics has involved a capacious sense of text.
Scholars have engaged with periodicals—generalist journals such
as the Fortnightly Review or Athenaeum (in Whitworth’s work),
the Freewoman/New Freewoman/Egoist constellation, or the New
Age (in Clarke’s)—and popular science writing and science fiction,
alongside scientific articles and books and modernist literature in
periodical or book form. This scholarship has carefully attended to
issues of form and figurative language in modernism and science,

whether Whitworth’s focus on metaphor, or Clarke’s on allegory,
and epistemological issues of science as they emerge in relationship
to social, cultural, and political discourse.
To H. G. Wells in his most famous novel, The Time Machine
(1895), all the social and biological evolution caught up in his
Darwinian and Marxian tale of the Morlocks and the Eloi essentially
amount to the same cold silent end as Flammarion had imagined. As
the time traveler recounts of his trip to the distant future of a dim
sun and dying earth: “The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began
to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white
flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came
a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was
silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it” (70).
The interplay between the science of thermodynamics, the
technologies of the steam age, and the social and cultural and even
religious imperatives with which thermodynamics was caught up
produced different consequences and interpretations over time.
The engagement of various modernist authors such as Conrad,
Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Lawrence, and Katherine Mansfield has been
an important focus in modernist studies. By the later nineteenth
century, as we have seen, the thermodynamics of entropy and
dissipation was already connected to cultural fears of degeneration
as a consequence of modern, technologized, urban civilization (as
in the works of Nordau and Le Bon, as well as in Flammarion’s
fiction). Indeed, social energetics models arising in the Victorian
period made the dissipation of energy in a mechanical system and
in a society or civilization more or less functionally equivalent. But
the efficiency and conservation ideologies of the mid-Victorian
period found a further scientistic complication in the pairing of
vitalism with thermodynamics at the individual human level. By the
early modernist period, the mechanistic underpinnings of vitalism
(which gave us phrases such as “life energy” or “life force”) had
been synthesized into “electrovitalism” as a bulwark against the
inevitable dissipation of energy in an inorganic system that led to
the fears of heat death. Victorian concerns from Darwin that species
were not essential—and were neither permanent nor planned—and
from Kelvin that the material universe itself was not permanent
(Rabinbach 69) were answered by modernists’ appeals to individual
vitalism.
For a quick example of scholarship on this issue, we can turn

to Bruce Clarke’s reading of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.
Vitalism as an answer to entropy cut across disparate political
ideologies. As Clarke writes,
The imperative to escape from the rule of entropy tied progressive

and reactionary evolutionisms together: they diverged merely in
their counterentropic strategies. Edward Carpenter envisioned
a spontaneous and uncoerced individual and communal
exfoliation beyond the rule of entropy, whereas social Darwinists
in the wake of Spencer and Huxley would make themselves fit
for survival by defying entropy and hoarding their prerogatives,
by maintaining and strengthening defensive differentiations of
class, gender, and race. (Dora Marsden, 162)
Lawrence, as early as his Study of Thomas Hardy (1914), had

posited a mystical vitalism as a life source separate from the
functioning of materialist dissolution. In Women in Love (1920),
Lawrence’s character Gerald Crich offers his ever more efficient
management of industrial coal mining and production as a bulwark
against entropy, and he engages in a kind of erotic entropic struggle
with Gudrun, whose energy is diminished while Gerald’s increases
in their sexual relations. But, as Clarke shows, “Lawrence inserts
Gerald’s industrial sorting into the antivital register of destructive
mechanism. In the narrator’s evaluation, Gerald’s mechanical
willfulness promotes rather than reduces entropy: ‘It was the first
great step in undoing, the first great phase of chaos, the substitution
of the mechanical principle for the organic’” (Dora Marsden, 165).
Gerald’s icy death late in the novel demonstrates the failure of his
counterentropic strategy.
Moreover, the novel tests out a different counter-entropic sorting
strategy through the character of Rupert Birkin, who introduces
the gender polarities of Weininger and other gender theorists of
the day into his thermodynamic scheme. As Clarke puts it, “Birkin
now interweaves the vitalist and thermodynamic threads of his
thought with an electromagnetic schema of gender polarity, giving
‘coolness’ a positive valence, as of crisp spring mornings, relative to
the negative fires of mechanical passion, and then complicates the
whole complex with the added twist of a daemonic evocation of
superhumanity” (Dora Marsden, 166). But Birkin’s efforts are not
seen simply as Lawrence’s solution to the problems of dissipation

posed in materialistic physics or vitalist evolutionary schemas:
“Despite the manifest organic motives of Lawerence’s vitalism,
Birkin tendentiously analogizes the sexual polarity of male and
female to thermodynamic or electrical differentials, that is, to
the mechanics of physical system. If thermodynamic difference
is necessary to produce usable energy—if there must be polarity
to generate an electrical current—then, by analogy, polar sexual
differences are needed to maintain any possibility of a ‘productive
exchange’” (168). Here, the sexual binaries break down the
homoerotic tensions between Birkin and Gerald. The narrator even
distances himself from the excesses of Birkin’s musings on polarity:
“So Birkin meditated whilst he was ill” (qtd on 168). Where Clarke
goes with this thermodynamic quandary in Lawrence’s work, as
well as in that of other modernists (Marsden and William Carlos
Williams, for example), is toward the development his later
work tracks from modernist cultures of energy to postmodern
information:
One small benefit of our postmodernity is the relatively recent

scientific affirmation that thermodynamic entropy does not pose
an imminent or elemental threat, that an “escape from entropy”
is both impossible and unnecessary. We now think of entropy as
the partner of information. Disorder is not entirely random—it
can be made to signify—nor is it necessarily destructive—it may
herald or provoke higher organizational levels. . . . If Lawrence
often fashions elaborate defenses against “dissolution” and
“corruption,” it may also be said that on occasion he saw past
the ideological chimeras of his culture and seized upon the utility
of dynamical chaos, as we now understand the term: at times he
grasped both the promise of anarchic creativity and the positive
energies to be derived from entropic processes of “waste.” (Dora
Marsden, 169–70)
Though modernist scholars have explored the implications of the

mechanical and social discourses of entropy across a wide range
of authors,5 one frequently invoked text that gives an even earlier
modernist exemplar of the concerns Clarke identifies is Joseph
Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). Conrad’s novel critically
probes narratives of progress by demonstrating a thermodynamic
entropic breakdown in London that faces a plot to bomb the

Royal Observatory at Greenwich. The plot ultimately unravels as
Stevie, portrayed as a figure of “degeneration,” accidentally sets
off the bomb early, killing himself and precipitating a narrative
equilibrium. Jill Clark has recently read the novel in ways that
align its thermodynamics with more recent chaos theory: “The
anarchists are personifications of systemic chaos, through which
chaos works for the self-organization of London’s culture. They
are parts of Conrad’s holistic system of London, each essential
to its construction. Conrad reveals his characters as mechanisms
maintaining London’s social and cultural order” (2). Conrad, as the
author, becomes the renderer of “cosmic chaos” (2).
Whitworth locates Conrad’s masterwork of entropy in the rich
constellation of scientisms and metaphors of the later Victorian and
early modernist period that Clarke and others have charted over the
past few decades. He both highlights the container metaphors used
to voice concerns with the dissipation of energy and draws attention
to the late Victorian descriptions of crowds in terms of “abstract
flows of matter.” These metaphors link writing across fields, from
the thermodynamic writings of Clerk Maxwell, the early crowd
psychology of sociology of Gustave Le Bon, the work of astronomer
and science popularizer Arthur Eddington, and modernist writing
by Lawrence, Woolf, and others. Whitworth suggests that Conrad
may have been inspired by Wells’s treatment of the biological and
physical decay of an increasingly dissipated solar system in The
Time Machine and tracks the confluence of thermodynamic thinking
across multiple registers—economic, political, biological, temporal,
and social—and the Victorian anxieties about entropy in the face of
fragile national and racial unity (Einstein’s Wake, 73–77).
The spatial fourth dimension

and ether physics
Before turning to the twentieth-century paradigms of the new
physics that will occupy much of the rest of this chapter, we must
look briefly at two other nineteenth-century developments that
contributed greatly not only to the physics and chemistry of the
next century but also to the emergence of early modernism: the
innovations in non-Euclidean geometries and the increasingly

elaborate ether hypotheses of the Victorian era.
The spatial fourth dimension

Though non-Euclidean geometries were developed across the
nineteenth century (as in the contributions by Gauss, Riemann, Klein,
and Cayley mentioned above), Euclidean geometry was still seen as
a basis for epistemic certainty, as it had been by philosophers from
Descartes to Kant (see Torretti). Nineteenth-century British school
editions of Euclid’s Elements, Whitworth explains, “reinforced
the use of ‘Euclid’ as a byword for infallibility and for self-evident
truth, presenting his geometrical axioms as the very foundation of
civilization” (199). Yet, before they became a mainstay of the new
physics, the non-Euclidean geometries of a spatial fourth dimension
became an important feature of early modernist art and literature,
of popular culture, and even of religious and occult speculation.
One of the most influential scholarly interventions in the area of
modern art, science, and technology emerged several years before
the full fruition of the current wave of modernist studies on the
subject: art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s innovative
work on modern art and the spatial fourth dimension, titled The
Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art
(1983). Henderson’s research began as the correction of an error of
anachronism in critical writing connecting analytical cubism with
relativity and an Einsteinian temporal fourth dimension.6 Einsteinian
relativity, Henderson argues, was never cited in Cubist literature
and was scarcely known to artists until after its observational
confirmation by Arthur Eddington during a solar eclipse in 1919.
What Henderson found instead was the influence of a massive vogue
for the spatial fourth dimension (a vogue that had largely been
forgotten by the mid-twentieth century). She draws on a wide range
of philosophical speculation, such as Charles Howard Hinton’s The
Fourth Dimension (1904), Edwin Abbott’s satirical novel Flatland
(1884), and the efforts by Leipzig astrophysicist J. C. F. Zöllner
to provide a scientific basis for spiritualism in fourth-dimensional
space; writers including H. G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad,
Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Proust, and Gertrude Stein (Henderson,
The Fourth Dimension, 98); as well as French periodicals and even
the 1909 Scientific American essay contest for “the best popular
explanation of the Fourth Dimension” (142). Henderson examines
the enormous impact of this rich vein of scientific and scientistic
speculation on the emergence of cubism, from Picasso to Duchamp,
and of lesser-known efforts (such as those of New York architect
and theosophist Claude Bragdon) to bring extradimensional
thinking into architectural design. She also describes the heady years
of the Russian avant-garde as it adapted the mystical hyperspace
philosophy of P. D. Ouspensky and others to its painting and poetry
in the early twentieth century, and she discusses postwar France
and the Holland of Mondrian and Van Doesburg. As Henderson
puts it, “Emerging in an era of dissatisfaction with materialism and
positivism, ‘the fourth dimension’ gave rise to entire idealist and
even mystical philosophical systems. . . . Only the popularization
of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, with its redefinition of
the fourth dimension as time instead of space, brought an end to
this era in which artists, writers, and musicians believed they could
express higher spatial dimension” (97–98).
Other scholars of modernism have also addressed the fourth
dimension. Ian Bell, whose Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics
of Ezra Pound (1981) set the terms of many later investigations of
Pound’s relationship to the science of the modernist era, has recently
returned to the scientific contexts of Pound’s Imagist poetry and
its movement into the Vorticist project of Blast during the war
and finally into the Cantos. While Pound rarely directly invoked
the fourth dimension in his writings, Bell makes a compelling
case that “modernist poetics did avail itself of trajectories within
fourth-dimensional thought through a telling obliquity” (Bell,
“Ezra Pound and the Fourth Dimension,” 131). Drawing on the
classic popularizing texts of a spatial fourth dimension, such as
Bragdon’s Four-Dimensional Vistas (1916) and Hinton’s Fourth
Dimension, the latter of which explained electrical current as a
“four dimensional vortex” (qtd in Bell 132), Bell shows that ideas
from fourth-dimensional geometry informed Pound’s Imagism and
his Vorticist work, “Before Sleep,” H. D.’s “Oread,” as well as the
later Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and cantos as late as The Fifth Decad
of Cantos (1937).
A different kind of historicist argument sets the non-Euclidean
geometries involved in Vorticism (and Pound’s work in particular)
in dialogue with contemporary poetry, as in Lori Emerson’s work
on hyperspace poetics. Emerson sees in Pound and other poets (she

looks also to William Carlos Williams) an interest in the potential
of non-Euclidean geometries “to capture a general conceptual shift,
one from viewing space as that which is stable and can be mapped
using a transcendent model of counting to a view in which space
is constantly in flux and shifting along with the counter” (173).
This kind of argument asks for more dialogue with present writing
than the rigorous historicizing of new modernist studies has often
provided, and it demonstrates that our understanding of the current
digital culture can be enriched by a deeper engagement with the
media of the modernist age. The Euclidean paradigm continued
for more than half a century with remarkable cognitive and
epistemological authority, before alternatives to it helped change
science and foster an efflorescence of modernism in the arts and
literature.
Ether physics and vibratory modernism

Ether physics, too, continued as a paradigm for some years after
physicists started having doubts about its explanatory capacities.
But its unraveling as a paradigm was, to speak loosely, messier and
much more contentious and final. To put it simply, while Euclidean
geometry is still useful in many circumstances and is still taught to
all schoolchildren in the early twenty-first century, ether physics
is not. Though it may have seemed an elegant hypothesis within
the classical Newtonian sensibility of nineteenth-century physics,
at the height of modernism in the 1920s and 1930s, it had lost that
paradigmatic power.
Yet for the first few decades of European and American
modernism, while the ether was waning as a physics paradigm
for electromagnetism and gravitation, it was reaching its zenith
in the arts and in broader popular culture. As Henderson recently
put it, “The ether could be all things to all people” (“Vibratory
Modernism,” 129). It served as a basis for occult thinking, as in
the work of Rudolf Steiner, Annie Besant, and C. W. Leadbeater,
or the connection to the “Unseen Universe” that Balfour Stewart
and Peter Guthrie Tait had explored in their 1875 volume The
Unseen Universe, or Physical Speculations on a Future State, or as
an avenue to representations of newly conceived space and matter
through modernist art. Indeed, Henderson’s new edition of Fourth

Dimension (2013), with its 100-page-long “Reintroduction,” has
helpfully brought her 1983 volume up to date by showing that
the spatial interpretation of a fourth dimension, which dominated
modern art before the temporal focus of relativity became dominant,
reemerged in the 1960s and 1970s through the work of Buckminster
Fuller, Robert Smithson, and the Park Place Gallery Group, among
many others. But more significant for the modernist studies at hand
is her work over the past decade to connect the influence of the
spatial fourth dimension to that of ether physics in modernist art.
In the face of technological innovations in the late nineteenth
century—for example, the wireless telegraph broadcasting from the
Eiffel Tower that expanded the boundaries of communication, or the
X-rays, discovered in 1895, that revealed the permeability of matter
and the further powers of unseen energies—artists, Henderson
argues, turned to what she has termed “vibratory modernism” to
shape their understanding of newly conceived space and matter. The
major physics concerns that the ether hypothesis tried to explain—
the propagation of electromagnetic waves and of gravity—were soon
to be understood without the help of the mysterious, imponderable
particle that had seemed so necessary to Victorian physicists. But
that simplified version of the history of sciences suggests that ether
was a failed paradigm that scientists simply dispensed with after
it had outlived its usefulness. Rather, as suggested above, some
eminent scientists committed to the mechanical explanations
of ether physics held on to it in the face of the new physics—Sir
Oliver Lodge perhaps being the most commonly cited example.
The turbulent period of the ether’s demise can be dated (somewhat
arbitrarily) from the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 through
1919, when Arthur Eddington’s eclipse expedition brought public
attention to the success of Einstein’s general relativity. During that
period, artists, writers, popular science readers, occultists, and even
scientists saw in the ether the hint of the radical new understandings
of matter, energy, and space that were coming into their own during
the paradigm shifts of the new physics.
The impact of the widespread equation of the ether with
conceptions of space registered in the visual arts, of course. For
Henderson, the emergence of a “vibratory modernism,” probing
the nature of electromagnetic waves through the supposed ether,
ties together seemingly disparate modernist painters. She identifies
Figure 2.1 Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space,

1913, cast 1972. © Tate, London 2015.
two major responses to the ether. The first can be seen in the work
of the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, who “sought to give
physical form to the ether as a space-filling medium” (128) (see
Figure 2.1). The other, exemplified in the work of Czech abstract
painter František Kupka, imagined the implications of wireless
telegraphy for artistic communication (128). A third response to
the vibrating ethereal medium can be seen in the development of
Marcel Duchamp’s work, in which, rather than trying to follow
Kupka’s response to Hertzian waves and paint “exteriorizations
of thought,” Duchamp turned away from painting entirely and
Figure 2.2 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
Even (The Large Glass), 1915-23. The Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier, 1952. © ARS, NY. Photo: The Philadelphia
Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.
took on the role of the engineer to create a kind of machine of

the electromagnetic in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
Even, or The Large Glass (1915–23) (see Figure 2.2).
These two threads of nineteenth-century physics and
mathematics—the fourth dimension and the ether—were never
far apart either in the writings of scientists or in popular literature
and periodicals. This same constellation of scientific ideas and
technological inspirations, as we have seen in the introduction, was

taken up by modernist authors, including Boccioni’s fellow Italian
Futurist Marinetti, whose celebratory affirmation of technoscientific
modernization, Zang Tumb Tumb (1914), responded to the
challenge of the wireless imagination with its bold typographic
experiments. As different as Pound and Marinetti were, scholars
of Anglophone modernist poetry have detected similar investments
and interventions in the modernist culture of the fourth dimension
and the ether.
Pound’s Vorticism grappled with the “whorls” and “knots” and
“vortexes” of the extra-dimensional mathematics of Bragdon,
Hinton, and others. But the vortex in Pound’s work also deeply
touches the ether mechanics that pervaded much early modernism.
As Bell had explored in 1981 and as Antje Pfannkuchen has taken
up as well, the prehistory of Pound’s vortex can be located in
Hermann von Helmholtz’s 1858 article “Über Wirbelbewegungen”
[“On Vortex Motion”], in which Helmholtz not only helped launch
the field of hydrodynamics but also proposed a novel interpretation
of the atom that remained in the mix with other theories until the
ether hypothesis lost its place in physics in the twentieth century.
Helmhholtz’s paper offered up a conception of an “ideal fluid,”
a frictionless environment in Helmholtz’s mathematical model in
which eternally rotating particles remain constant in vortex threads,
which, in turn, form vortex tubes, or, as Helmholtz called vortex tubes
turning in on themselves, vortex rings. As Pfannkuchen explains,
“Helmholtz’s vortices thus exist permanently and indestructibly
and are all within the fluidity of the liquid as durable and lasting
as the hardest solid. With this description Helmholtz defined an
element of an ideal fluid that has all the properties of a solid” (65),
and he thus influenced Kelvin’s model of the atom as a vortex in
the ether in his 1867 article titled “On Vortex Atoms,” which was
published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and
the Philosophical Magazine. Kelvin’s model gave the ether and its
special form of motion a central role in the nature of all matter:
The concept of the vortex atom was based on the presumed

existence of the ether and implied the chimerical claim that
matter and ether consist principally of the same substance and
that their only difference is the substance’s state of motion. This
would mean that vortex motion alone transforms imponderable
ether into ponderable particles of matter that are—in contrast to

the ether—subject to gravitation. In other words, vortex motion
would be the origin of all (material) things. (Pfannkuchen 66)
Pfannkuchen’s research aligns with current modernist studies

approaches to physics in its turn to popular science writing and
to the circulation of such ideas in broader reading publics through
periodical literature. Stewart and Tait’s Unseen Universe (1875)
used ether theory and thermodynamics to address religious and
even occult speculation, for example. Indeed, the ether and Kelvin’s
vortex theory of matter were still widely discussed in popular
science writing such as C. W. Saleeby’s article on “Gravitation
and the Ether” in the July 1905 Harper’s Monthly Magazine that
Pfannkuchen examines in relationship to Pound. Both Kelvin in his
vortex theory of the atom and Pound in his Vorticism, Pfannkuchen
argues, demonstrated the “ambition to produce a theory that was
not simply new but that answered fundamental questions of its
object . . . and that explained the basic mechanisms operative in
master works” (71).
Radioactivity and the subatomic world

Kelvin’s exquisite but vague vortex atom concept and, indeed,
the entire ether hypothesis were soon to fall to the new physics of
relativity and quantum mechanics.7 But before that could happen,
another form of electromagnetic energy would catch the imagination
and test the mettle of scientists, artists, and writers alike, ultimately
resulting in a major paradigm shift affecting physics and chemistry
as well as the course of twentieth- and twenty-first-century history
and culture, one that changed the way the building blocks of all
matter came to be understood: the strange energies of radioactivity.
In radioactivity, we see the ascension of a new paradigm sweeping
aside the Victorian paradigms of both physics and chemistry so
definitively, and so quickly, that one of the key architects of the
new paradigm, chemist Frederick Soddy, could view all of the
accomplishments of nineteenth-century physical sciences as far
from revolutionary. Radioactivity put the “new” in the new physics.
The first paradigm that radioactivity helped overthrow was the
very one upon which most nineteenth-century chemistry rested,
elaborated clearly and fruitfully by John Dalton in his 1808

treatise, A New System of Chemical Philosophy. Dalton used the
word “atom,” from the Greek “atomos,” indivisible, to denote
the fundamental nature of each chemical element. The atom was the
smallest particle, indivisible and unalterable, and, as Dalton argued,
the ultimate particles of all homogeneous bodies are perfectly

alike in weight, figure &c” (1: 143). Chemistry, then, was based
upon the interactions of these atoms with each other: “Chemical
analysis and synthesis go no farther than to the separation
of particles one from another, and to their reunion. No new
creation or destruction of matter is within the reach of chemical
agency. We might as well attempt to introduce a new planet into
the solar system, or to annihilate one already in existence, as
to create or destroy a particle of hydrogen. All the changes we
can produce consist in separating particles that are in a state of
cohesion or combination and joining those that were previously
at a distance. (1:212)
To be fair, one might see Dalton’s continued relevance even in twenty-

first-century chemistry, in that the field, as opposed to physics, still
largely focuses on the interactions of atoms. But the basis of current
chemistry’s understanding of those interactions is now completely
different from Dalton’s, and it is tied very differently to the research
of physicists than it could have been in 1808. Since Daltonian
chemistry had become established as the paradigm for the field in
the early nineteenth century, though, the disciplinary boundaries
between physics and chemistry were increasingly blurred in the
emergence of the subfield of “physical chemistry,” in which key
scientists in the new study of radioactivity were trained: Soddy
and Sir William Ramsay, for example. Occupying the borderland
between physics and chemistry were Ramsay’s friends and
European colleagues: the Dutch physical chemist Jacobus Henricus
van’t Hoff; the Latvian-born chair of physical chemistry at Leipzig,
Wilhelm Ostwald; and the Swede Svante Arrhenius. Mary Jo Nye
notes that physical chemistry’s institutionalization as a subfield was
marked by the launch of the Zeitschrift für physikalische Chemie
in 1887 and the Journal of Physical Chemistry in 1896. Indeed,
“the disciplinary boundary between physics and chemistry became
less well defined after 1900 . . . [and] physical chemistry played
an important role in this development” (Nye 110). Radioactivity,

initially approached by physicists and by physical chemists,
spawned two disciplines—radiochemistry and, eventually, nuclear
physics—which would then briefly struggle for ownership of the
new research in radioactivity. Nuclear physics was clearly winning
that struggle by the beginning of the 1920s.
Radioactivity and the search for understanding of an expanded
range of electromagnetic energies very quickly undermined the
bedrock assumption of Dalton’s Treatise—that atoms are, by their
very nature, fundamental particles, indivisible, unalterable. Let me
briefly provide a sketch of the narrative of late-nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century developments in these sciences that recent
historiography of science and modernist studies help complicate. In
a greatly simplified form, it goes something like this. While testing
several vacuum tube apparatuses in November 1895, German
physicist Wilhelm Röntgen unexpectedly discovered mysterious
rays that can penetrate soft substances. Invoking the use of X for an
unknown quantity in mathematics, he named these unknown rays
“X-rays.” Two weeks later, he took the first X-ray photograph—of
the bones inside his wife’s hand (see the front cover of this book). A
few months later, in January 1896, Dr. John Macintyre lectured at
Glasgow University on “The New Light—X-Rays,” and by March
of that year, he had set up the world’s first X-ray department, which
used X-rays as a medical tool at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary.
More eventful surprises followed. A few short months after
Röntgen’s discovery, French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered
that the uranium potassium sulfate crystals he had left in a drawer of
photographic plates emitted another new kind of ray of their own.
Marie Curie (both a chemist and physicist) named this phenomenon
“radioactivity.” She and her physicist husband, Pierre Curie, went
on to show that thorium and other elements exhibited radioactivity
as well, and, in a story that was to attract major attention from the
press, discovered the highly radioactive element radium in 1898.8
The Curies’ shared Nobel Prize in 1903 was the first in a long series
of Nobel Prizes awarded to the pioneering researchers in atomic
physics and radiochemistry, as the new chemistry subfield was
quickly titled.
These new rays demanded explanation, and the early efforts
quickly began to suggest serious problems with the Daltonian atomic
paradigm. In 1897 at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge
University, which would become the site of much of the pioneering

research in nuclear physics, British physicist J. J. Thomson showed
that cathode rays were composed of negatively charged particles.
Using Johnstone Stoney’s word, Thomson named the newly
discovered particles “electrons.” Thomson immediately recognized
the implications for Dalton’s atomic paradigm, arguing in February
1897 at Cambridge and again in April 1897 at the Royal Institution
that atoms were not, as Dalton had thought, indivisible. He described
electrons as tiny (with a mass less than a thousandth of the mass
of a hydrogen atom) negatively charged particles that can be torn
from atoms. In 1904, he proposed the “plum pudding” model of
the atom as a positively charged fluid orb containing negatively
charged electrons.
Then a breakthrough occurred that set the physics and chemistry
of radioactivity on the path toward the new physics. As we saw
in the introduction, Soddy, a chemist trained at Oxford, and
Ernest Rutherford, a physicist who had studied under Thomson
at the Cavendish Lab at Cambridge, performed experiments
at the provincial physics lab at McGill University in Canada in
1901 and 1902 that allowed them to offer a novel theory with
enormous consequences for Dalton’s atomic theory. Radioactive
elements, they showed, disintegrate, releasing radioactive rays and
transforming into other elements in the process. Back in England,
Soddy worked with chemist Sir William Ramsay to identify helium
as the gas released in the process. In 1911, now at the University of
Manchester, Rutherford bombarded gold foil with alpha particles,
essentially a helium nucleus, emitted by radioactive elements, and
used the scattering of the alpha particles to demonstrate what
would soon be called the nucleus of an atom. As early as 1904,
the Japanese physicist Hantaro Nagaoka had already objected to
Thomson’s plum pudding model, noting that the negatively charged
electrons, the “plums,” could not be contained in a positively
charged “pudding,” as the charges would repulse each other.
Rutherford invoked Nagaoka’s alternative proposal of Saturn as a
metaphor, with a positive charge surrounded by negatively charged
rings. Rutherford proposed a positively charged nucleus around
which negatively charged electrons orbited, in what became
the briefly dominant solar model of the atom. One staggering
implication of this model was that atoms were composed primarily
of empty space.
In the period from the late 1890s through the birth of quantum
mechanics, even though this understanding of the subatomic
world was not nearly as radically strange as it would become in
the 1920s, it nevertheless involved a radical paradigm shift in the
understanding of the fundamental particles and energies of the
universe. That change and its implications were partly shaped by
and interacted with literature and the arts.
Material histories of science

Recent work in the history of science and in modernist studies
complicates this fairly clean narrative of science occurring in
laboratories and through the hermetically sealed set of scientific
labors by heroic scientists—including the turn to the material,
nonhuman actants in actor-network theory by Latour, Callon,
Law, and others in the anthropology and sociology of science.
Scientists and their instruments do not exist only in labs, and both
humans and nonhumans exist within their cultural contexts.
The cathode ray tubes with which J. J. Thomson did his research
on the electron were modifications of the tubes Sir William Crookes
had fashioned thirty years earlier, which, in turn, were preceded by
tubes made by the German glass blower and traveling instrument
maker Heinrich Geissler. Geissler tubes were not only used by
universities but also became so popular that they were used in homes
for entertainment. After 1895, X-ray devices, too, quickly jumped
out of purely scientific and medical uses into such uses as shoe-
fitting fluoroscopes, “shadow photographs,” and “bone portraits”
that were demonstrated at high schools and department stores.9
The sense of the presence of an unseen universe, of invisible rays
making unseeable structures of space visible, was felt in popular
culture as well as within the history of scientific instrumentation.
The material history of technologies in atomic science has
produced some fascinating research in recent years. Peter Galison,
for example, offers a history of nuclear physics through an account
of its major instruments—the Geiger counter, scintillation counter,
cloud chamber, cyclotron, and bubble chamber—and argues for
microhistories of disciplinary cultures around instrumentation
(Galison, Image and Logic). The ability to “see” invisible particles
through their trails in condensation lines or bubble lines in C. T. R.
Wilson’s 1895 cloud chamber and Donald Glaser’s 1952 bubble

chamber allowed important breakthroughs in low-energy and
high-energy particle physics and won both men Nobel Prizes for
the inventions. But, as Galison shows, there were two contrasting
traditions of instrumentation in twentieth-century nuclear physics:
“One embraced the visual detectors, such as the cloud chamber
and the bubble chamber, which etched onto film the fine details of
individual events. Quite another tradition formed around electronic
detectors” (Image and Logic, 248–49). Perceiving an invisible
world of radiation and particles was central not only in the popular
reception of physics (and the modernist interaction with it) but also
in the development of the physics itself.
Modernism and radioactivity

As modernist scholars and historians of science have noted, a
key interpretation of the phenomena of radiation and the host
of recently discovered rays—cathode rays, X-rays, and the alpha,
beta, and gamma rays given off by radioactive elements—involved
metaphors of porosity and solidity, of permeability and continuity
shared among the physical sciences, psychology, occultism, and
modernist art and literature. As Henderson notes, although “the
science of radioactivity would contribute to the determination of
the substructure of the atom (and thereby verify the discontinuous
nature of matter), initially the discovery of radioactivity
augmented the view of the physical world as fluid and continuous
interaction between matter and ether, form and space” (Duchamp
in Context, 7). X-rays and the emissions of radioactive elements
highlighted the sensitivity of the registering photographic plate,
of tools more sensitive than the eye, and this tied together occult
claims of spiritual connection, psychic projection, and the like, that,
as we have seen in Henderson’s work on the ether, were elaborated
in the modernist art of Kupka, Boccioni, and others. In the Large
Glass, Duchamp went so far as to document in his notebooks
the work’s relationship to physical chemistry and to the early
years of radioactivity. Henderson explores Duchamp’s significant
engagement with the work of Perrin, Rutherford, and many other
nuclear physicists and chemists in the Large Glass, and she argues
that “Duchamp contemplated or actually played the role of chemist,
just as his placement of the netting [resembling a photograph of a

netted mantle taken by Becquerel rays published in the Century
magazine] of the Air Current Pistons onto the Large Glass seems to
have rehearsed Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity” (Duchamp in
Context, 132). Whitworth explores the frequent allusion to X-rays,
radiation, and atomic theory in modernist work, positing the origin
of Eliot’s line “as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns
on a screen” in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in an 1897
newspaper article on X-rays, and exploring the comparison of
Gerald in Lawrence’s Women in Love to “a piece of radium,” or
the appearance of radium in a draft of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
(“Physics,” 208). Whitworth sees in these many allusions to atomic
structure and radiation confirmation of a much more significant
point, that the shared resources of physics and modernist literature
were metaphors that touched multiple realms of modern culture:
“Knowledge of atomic structure would be of little use to a novelist
or poet were it not for the circulation of metaphors between
scientific discourse and the discourse of everyday life. The early
developments in the theory of matter acquire greater significance
because of the ubiquity in everyday speech of half-forgotten
metaphors of opacity and transparency, stability and instability,
and solidity and porosity” (208). Another dominant metaphor was
alchemical transmutation.
Radioactivity and alchemy

Historians of science have greatly enriched our understanding of
the sciences themselves, along with their elaboration across modern
culture, through a careful examination of images and tropes through
which scientific knowledge emerged and by which it circulated
through society. Radioactive transformation, or “transmutation,”
was commonly understood in alchemical tropes (“modern
alchemy” was an extremely common term in books and articles
about the chemistry and physics of radioactivity) from Rutherford
and Soddy’s initial laboratory experiments in McGill through
the mid-1940s, when the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki changed the terms in which nuclear physics was
understood (see Weart, Nuclear Fear, and Morrisson, Modern
Alchemy). Weart relates a much-quoted exchange between Soddy
and Rutherford in their lab at McGill in 1901 when they realized

that radioactive thorium was transforming into an inert gas: “Soddy
recalled, ‘I was overwhelmed with something greater than joy—I
cannot very well express it—a kind of exaltation.’ He blurted out,
‘Rutherford, this is transmutation!’ ‘For Mike’s sake, Soddy,’ his
companion shot back, ‘don’t call it transmutation. They’ll have our
heads off as alchemists’” (5–6). As I have argued elsewhere (Modern
Alchemy), the tropes and images of alchemy from this original
moment shaped the discussion of radioactivity in texts by scientists
themselves,10 journalists, pulp fiction writers—the Gernsback pulps
published several stories about nuclear scientists with alchemical
themes in the 1920s and 1930s—and modernists. They fostered
connections among scientists interested in the history of alchemy
and the spiritual possibilities of the new study of radioactivity and
occultists who saw in the new science confirmation of their occult
and alchemical beliefs and projects. (Several gold manufacturing
transmutation schemes by quacks and the deluded made newspaper
headlines during the period.)
This surprising understanding of modern atomic science had
a context of its own. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, German historians of chemistry had begun to examine
alchemy as an ancestor of chemistry, but they primarily portrayed it
as an intellectual error. By the mid-nineteenth century, some authors,
such as Hermann Kopp and Ernst von Meyer, began to acknowledge
alchemy’s technical contributions to laboratory practice. But in the
last few decades of the nineteenth century, historians such as the
French chemist Marcellin Berthelot began to publish research on
original alchemical texts themselves. This period also witnessed a
major occult revival that brought alchemical texts back into print in
widely disseminated translations and inspired serious grappling not
only with the laboratory methods but also with the tropes, images,
and even spiritual dimensions of alchemy.
In its vast network of spiritual and physical correspondences,
its metaphor-laden language, and its hermetic images, alchemy
embodies what Fleck would call a “thought style” quite different
from that of twentieth-century science. Yet just as Pound turned
to the resources of history, of past thought styles, to make it
new (even writing poems invoking the alchemists), what I have
loosely been calling “modernist science” also could bring different
thought styles to bear on very modern, very scientific problems.
Soddy himself saw alchemical thinking as a disciplinary marker of

modern chemistry, as opposed to modern physics, and attributed to
it his immediate ability to see what Rutherford could not in their
laboratory at McGill—that the thorium was not just giving off the
rays that interested Rutherford as a physicist, but was doing so by
transmuting into other elements. As he put it, “I was, of course,
tremendously elated to have discovered transmutation—the goal
of every chemist of every age” (Howorth 82), but he added that
his thoughts were “always occupied with transmutation. That is
natural: I was a chemist. . . . I only want to show how our brains
were working, mine on transmutation and gases, Rutherford’s on
thorium and alpha ray emission” (Howorth 82, 84).
At this moment of radical paradigm shift, alchemy became
not just an ancient thought style appropriated and retooled
for contemporary science and culture, but also an actant in the
dynamics that sociologists of science have theorized. Concepts such
as “boundary-work” (Gieryn and Hess) or “sanitization” (Wallis)
tend to focus on skirmishes over the boundaries between science
and “pseudoscience” (between, say, occult and scientific beliefs)
or between different scientific disciplines, ultimately showing how
widely these demarcation strategies can extend. Hess shows
not only how scientists engage in boundary-work to distinguish

science from nonscience, but also how a variety of other
groups construct boundaries (and consequently themselves
as groups) not only with respect to more orthodox scientists
and skeptics but with respect to each other. In short, scientific
boundaries are recursive, nested, and multiple; there are layers
of scientificity that become clearer as one unfolds levels of
skepticism and “pseudoscientificity” both within and across
discursive boundaries. Boundary-work therefore is going on
in all directions, not just in the direction of orthodox science
toward religion and “pseudoscience.” (Hess, Science in the New
Age, 145–46)
Traweek’s work emphasizes more creative and fluid negotiations

in what she terms “borderlands” in her anthropological work on
modern particle physics. Star, Griesemer, and Bowker approach
these dynamics from yet another perspective, emphasizing the
use of “boundary objects” that break down discourse boundaries
and facilitate interactions of actors with very different sets of

interests and objectives, and Galison turns to linguistics and
anthropology for the concept of “trading zones” as a context
for collaboration. All of these conceptual approaches inform my
research on the alchemical tropes by which radioactivity was
explored; on the institutions, such as the Alchemical Society in
London (1912–15), that brought together occultists from Yeats’s
circles with academically trained chemists and psychotherapists;
on the research agendas of radio-chemists and nuclear physicists;
on the writings of the so-called money cranks (like Pound, Soddy
was a devotee of Kitson, Douglas, and other monetary theorists) at
a moment when the very real possibility of transmuting elements
threw the basis of money, especially the gold standard, into radical
question; and on the broader culture of popular science writing,
pulp fiction, and modernist literature.
Relativity and quantum mechanics

As we have seen, the stable normal science of Victorian physics
and chemistry, as Kuhn would argue, planted the seeds of its own
instability and necessitated the new paradigms that set twentieth-
century particle physics and chemistry on their modern courses.
But the relationship of newly conceived matter and energy would
soon make still more radical demands on the scientific imagination.
Over the first quarter of the new century, another set of interrelated
paradigm shifts would mark an even more complete break with
classical Newtonian physics. Relativity and quantum mechanics
seemed to question the very nature of scientific inquiry in ways
that resonated across the “high modernist” period of the 1920s
and beyond. In (over)simplified form, here is a basic narrative.
A young Albert Einstein, while a student at the Swiss Federal
Polytechnic school in Zürich between 1895 and 1900, reflected
upon the velocity and propagation of light. While these issues
had been investigated as far back as Galileo, nineteenth-century
work on electromagnetism by Maxwell and others led Maxwell
to predict the propagation of electromagnetic energy in a vacuum.
(Remember that Victorian physics had stipulated the need for a
medium through which light could propagate—thus the luminiferous
ether.) Heinrich Hertz, in the late 1880s, demonstrated Maxwell’s
claims and was able to show that electromagnetic waves traveled

at the speed of light, suggesting that light was an electromagnetic
energy and could propagate in a vacuum. Reading the work of
Hendrik Lorentz and writings by Ernst Mach and Henri Poincaré,
Einstein tossed over classical mechanics and electrodynamics
entirely through his thought experiments about the speed of light
in relationship to moving perceivers. His September 1905 paper
on special relativity titled “On the Electrodynamics of Moving
Bodies,” published in Annalen der Physik, argued that the laws
of nature were consistent from one frame of reference to another,
and that the speed of light was constant regardless of the motion
of its source. The ether hypothesis was simply unnecessary, and,
lacking experimental verification, it began to lose credibility among
younger physicists. The most famous fruit of special relativity was
the equation E = mc2, which showed that matter and energy were
interchangeable, with mass increasing at higher velocities, and with
E (the quantity of energy) associated with m (any mass), being
fantastically large—multiplied by the square of c (the velocity of
light). Einstein continued to work on these issues in relationship to
gravity. His former math professor in Zürich, Hermann Minkowski,
provided a mathematical formalism that allowed Einstein to
translate the Lorentz transformation equations of relativity into
a four-dimensional space-time, and Einstein’s notions of a four-
dimensional space-time continuum were born. Einstein expanded
his work on relativity to include his theory of gravitation in the
general theory of relativity of 1916, theorizing gravity not in the
old terms of force, which Newton used, but rather in terms of the
geometry of space. One prediction of general relativity was that
the gravity of massive bodies could modify both time and space in
measurable ways.
And Einstein was also busy on another issue that would help
launch quantum mechanics. In 1900, Max Planck discovered that
the emission and absorption of black body radiation was not
continuous, as would be predicted in classical physics, but occurred
in discontinuous, discrete units, or “quanta.” Einstein, in turn,
used Planck’s work to propose that light itself was not composed
of waves but of quanta, which would later be called “photons.”
Gavin Parkinson notes that both Planck and Einstein were deeply
uncomfortable with their new theories’ resistance to the older
models (21).
Yet assaults upon classical Newtonian physics continued rapidly.

In his position at the University of Manchester, Rutherford in 1911
proposed the solar system model of the atom, in which negatively
charged electrons orbit a positively charged nucleus. But classical
descriptions of these orbiting electrons could not account for the
stability of atomic structure or for the patterns of radiating energy
given off by orbiting electrons. In 1913, the Danish physicist Niels
Bohr, working with Rutherford at Manchester, then proposed using
Planck’s work on the discontinuous energies of radiation to propose
that the electrons could only exist in specific energy levels, specific
orbits allowable by quanta. Then, in 1923, the American physicist
Arthur Compton at Washington University demonstrated that the
scattering of X-rays, when fired at electrons, was also a quantum
phenomenon.
At the Cavendish Lab, Rutherford and his fellow researchers
continued to expand the stable of subatomic particles, with
Rutherford adding the proton in the atom’s nucleus in 1919, and
his assistant director, James Chadwick, adding the neutron in 1932.
But the key elements of a fully elaborated quantum physics were
coming into place on the Continent. In 1923 and 1924, the French
physicist Louis de Broglie used Einstein’s theory that photons
exhibit properties of both waves and particles to suggest that
electrons, too, have such dual properties. De Broglie argued that
electrons should not be thought of as localized particles in space
around a nucleus, but rather as something like a cloud of negative
charge. Following de Broglie’s theories, Austrian physicist Erwin
Schrödinger developed an equation allowing him to predict the
future behavior of electrons. German physicist Max Born used the
wave functions of electrons to calculate the possibility of finding a
particle at a specific region at a specific time. Bohr and the German
physicist Werner Heisenberg began working on quantum mechanics
in 1924, and, in 1927, Heisenberg propounded his uncertainty
principle—the theory that one cannot simultaneously know a
particle’s exact position and velocity. Quantum physics was thus
fully elaborated between 1924 and 1927, mostly as an achievement
of young men. Wolfgang Pauli styled it Knabenphysik, or “boys’
physics” (Parkinson 23).
What a standard chronology like this can do is simplify an
enormously complicated and specialized set of ideas in physics,
many of which were derived from very complex mathematics
beyond the abilities of most readers (including myself) at the time,

or even today. Ideas of space-time, reference frame, mass-energy
conversion, and geometries of space with macrocosmic implications
stood out during the high modernist period as they do now. And
key ideas from quantum physics likewise caught the attention of an
educated audience—quanta, uncertainty, and duality, for example.
Such a thumbnail sketch can also highlight the complete break with
classical physics that these ideas represented. So much did the new
paradigms eclipse the old that the new physics garnered a great deal
of attention in the media and popular culture.
New research on the new physics

Recent research in modernist studies on the massive paradigm shifts
accomplished by relativity and quantum mechanics has done for
those paradigms what the works of Henderson, Clarke, and others
have done for the ether, thermodynamics, and geometrical shifts at
the turn from Victorian to early modernist art and literature. This
scholarship has situated relativity and quantum mechanics within
the larger print culture of the period and has carefully calibrated
the textual and epistemological strategies of the new physics. One
immediate difference between these two components of the new
physics was that relativity was much more widely disseminated
across nonspecialist reading publics than was quantum mechanics.
At a moment when modernism was inextricably caught up in an
emerging twentieth-century celebrity culture,11 relativity had its
celebrity in Albert Einstein, who became the face of genius, of the
new science. And it had a newsworthy event to put it on the map.
Several significant explorations of popular science writing, other
forms of journalism, and popular literature have recently taken up
the vogue for Einstein and relativity in the 1920s and 1930s. As Katy
Price notes at the beginning of Loving Faster Than Light: Romance
and Readers in Einstein’s Universe, “On November 7, 1919,
newspaper readers in Britain awoke to a ‘revolution in science.’ . . .
Announced to the public just four days before the first anniversary
of the Armistice, relativity theory made headlines in Britain because
Newtonian physics had apparently been overthrown by a German
Jew” (1). Arthur Eddington had confirmed some predictions of
Einstein’s theories on his 1919 expedition to observe a total solar
eclipse, and as director of the Cambridge Observatory, Fellow of

the Royal Society, and Secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society
during the Great War, Eddington was among the first British
scientists to receive communications about Einstein’s general theory
of relativity. He was perfectly positioned to bring relativity to a
fascinated if baffled British public. Eddington was an astrophysicist,
mathematician, Quaker, and pacifist; he objected to military service
on religious grounds but was granted an exemption during the
war due to the scientific importance of his work at Cambridge,
including his role in organizing an expedition in May 1919 to
Principe, off the coast of Africa, to attempt to confirm Einstein’s
predictions about the effects of a massive object (in this case, the
sun) on the path of light (from the stars behind it only observable
during the eclipse). As Peter Bowler notes, after the headlines about
Eddington’s findings,
Even the popular newspapers picked up on a theory, which,

they were told, was the basis for a conceptual revolution
that would upset both the scientific and the commonsense
worldview. Much nonsense was talked around dinner tables
by people who equated relativity with the general idea that all
knowledge and values were relative. By the end of 1922, the
craze was beginning to abate, by which time the public had
been regaled with a host of newspaper and magazine articles
and books attempting (with varying degrees of success) to
convey the gist of the new theory to the nonscientist who had
no mathematics. (40)
The London Palladium even tried to engage Einstein for a three-

week stage show (41). The popular papers and magazines were
swept up as well: to a newspaper’s assertion that every Englishman
knew Einstein’s theory of relativity, Punch replied, “it can now be
sung in public without fee or licence” (qtd in Bowler 193).
The masses of writings in genres ranging from popular science
writing to popular romance fiction that engaged relativity in this
British postwar context reveal much about the class politics of
the interwar years and the heady expansion of newspaper-reading
publics that Price examines in her study. She adopts Roger Cooter
and Stephen Pumfrey’s call to avoid viewing popular science writing
“as a one way process in which knowledge is transferred from
experts to public audiences, with an inevitable distortion along the

way” (10). Instead, she uses their concept of
enrollment, as an alternative description of what happens when

“representatives of learned science” appeal to an audience’s
interests in order to enlist support for scientific work: When the
lay audience accepts the appeal, it allows itself to become (indeed
makes itself) part of a network of alliances which sustains that
scientific enterprise. While the scientists have enrolled a public,
so too have the public enrolled the scientists. According to its
position and influence in the “network,” the public alters the
kind of science pursued in the future. (10)
But this process of enrollment, Price shows, is exceedingly

“messy,” and can create networks other than those intended by
the representatives of science (10). Relativity was discussed widely,
even if understood rarely, and was immediately caught up in class
struggle: “A reader between the wars was a voter, and reading
about Einstein was caught up with concerns about how the newly
enfranchised masses would determine Britain’s future” (4). The term
itself brought baggage. Price writes that these “political associations
were compounded by the new theory’s familiar name: the concept
of ‘relativity’ already had distinct philosophical connotations, and
Einstein’s theory was inevitably perceived through the Victorian
debate about absolute versus relative values. A nineteenth-century
relativist was a radical philosopher or scientist upholding secular
values against the more conservative believer in absolutes” (4).
In addition to participating in the sociopolitical dynamics of the
media, the new physics also raised serious epistemological issues
across the modernist period. The young scientists who generated
quantum mechanics were acutely aware of the revolutionary nature
of these epistemological issues. “The implications of Heisenberg’s
Uncertainty Principle were vast for both physics and philosophy,”
Parkinson argues. “If the location and velocity of a particle could
not now be measured with precision, then the epistemology
inherited from the Newtonian-Kantian causality—insisting on the
universe as a teleological mechanism, the future state of which
could in theory be predicted from measurement of the location
and velocity of a particle and any outlying conditions—was now
obsolete” (Parkinson 34). And Heisenberg gleefully proclaimed it at
the end of his paper on the uncertainty principle: “Invalidity of the

law of causality is definitely established by quantum mechanics”
(qtd in Parkinson 34).
While physicists of the older generation, as we have seen in
Kelvin, required mechanical and visualizable models as rhetorical
prerequisites for the construction of scientific facts, and many
could reject the new physics for its mathematical and theoretical
abstraction, key architects of quantum mechanics saw their approach
as rigorous. As Paul Dirac noted of Heisenberg’s empiricism:
Heisenberg’s idea was that one should try to construct a theory

in terms of quantities which are provided by experiment, rather
than building it up, as people had done previously, from an
atomic model which involved many quantities which could not
be observed. By this brilliant idea Heisenberg really started a new
philosophy, a philosophy that physics—physical theory—should
keep close to the experimentally obtained data and should not
depart into the use of quantities which are only very remotely
connected to observation. (qtd in Parkinson 29)
Keep in mind how quickly the terrain could shift. In 1908, Soddy
had emphasized that the material fact of radium would inevitably
have swept away all the old chemistry that could not explain it.
In 1897, J. J. Thomson’s experiments to probe the nature of the
electrical discharge in the vacuums of cathode ray tubes showed
that the rays were deflected by magnets and electric fields,
suggesting that they were negatively charged particles—electrons.
Rutherford’s 1911 gold foil experiments had suggested a positive
particle nucleus of the atom with orbiting electrons, and, a few
years later, Bohr had attempted to use Planck’s quanta to provide
the stability of the orbits needed in the solar model. To a classical
physicist, the solar model would at least provide a mechanical
explanation, even if only through analogy, to experimentally
observable events. To Heisenberg’s empirical mind, the entire
model, along with its concepts of electrons and orbits, was already
misleading. The model drove the theory derived from it, rather than
allowing the experimental data to suggest the theory. As Parkinson
notes, Heisenberg then rejected “electrons” and “orbits” entirely:
“Instead, he opted to attend to the associations between energy
states given numerically, developing in the summer of 1925 a tabular
mathematics that allowed the description of pairs of states of the

atom with a finesse unachievable using ordinary numbers” (29). An
obscure nineteenth-century noncommutative matrix calculus Born
provided to Heisenberg to refine his algebraic formula then became
a key part of Heisenberg’s “matrix mechanics.”
The new physics of modernism

What these standard chronologies of progressive discovery do
not show is the broad circulation and even interrelationship of
scientific ideas within the broader cultures of modernism in which
they emerged and which they helped shape. Panning out from a
narrow focus on successive laboratory results and theoretical
refinements enriches both the history of science and of modernist
culture. But it can also highlight conceptual and methodological
differences still not always acknowledged even in recent scholarship
on modernism, science, and technology. In short, in this area of the
new physics of relativity and quantum mechanics in particular, the
nature of claims about the relationship of a scientific concept to
modernism has run quite a range: from fairly facile resemblance to
provocative and significant resemblance, from simply anachronistic
to self-consciously historicized relationships between current and
past reading practices and scientific frameworks, from broad
“zeitgeist”-type claims to careful constructions of networks and
processes of dissemination, from simple annotations of allusions to
sophisticated engagement with the historiography of science.
Anachronistic or overly vague assertions of connections and
influences have at times undermined research on modernism
and science. The problem with anachronistic interpretations isn’t
simply that they are anachronistic—not all scholarship need be as
historicist as the new modernist studies has tended to be. Rather,
it is that they can obscure the wealth of understanding available
through more careful attention to the scientific contexts of the
period. For example, there is more than half a century of research
on James Joyce’s use of science in his fiction, some of which has
made fairly extreme claims for its relationship to relativity and
quantum mechanics—even though Joyce himself had a very limited
scientific education, performing badly in the physics, chemistry, and
mathematics curricula at Belvedere College and failing on more
than one occasion to launch his studies in medicine (Salvadori and

Schwartzman 339–40). As S. B. Purdy puts it, “There is . . . little
evidence that Joyce knew more of the revolution going on in physics
and cosmology during his lifetime than the newspapers would have
told him, or that he read deeply in any other field of science” (207).
While some scholars have interpreted Joyce’s Ulysses in
relationship to relativity and even quantum mechanics and styled
it an “epic of relativity,” others, looking more carefully, have
noted that the mechanics of Ulysses are “constructed on a fairly
Newtonian model” (Landon 360). Salvadori and Schwartzman
assert that the novel is “totally Newtonian with a strong emphasis
on the importance of Newton’s gravitational law” (354). Still
others have observed the provocative affinities between Ulysses and
relativity while remaining cautious about the nature of these claims.
Alan David Perlis, for example, notes that “the characters’ multiple
perceptions of the same event and their wildly various internal time
clocks in general suggest that Joyce is an exemplar of relativity”
(191), but he also cautions that
if Joyce needed a predecessor or a contemporary to establish his

credentials for demonstrating how different individuals perceive
the same duration of clock time as different spans of internal
time, he did not need to go to Einstein and the Special Theory of
Relativity. Bergson’s “durée” and Proust’s “moment privilégié”
could have served Joyce’s fictional purposes better, their notions
of perception being far less restrictive than Einstein’s. (191)
While similarly critiquing what he calls the “conceptual affinity

approach” of much earlier work on the subject, Jeffrey Drouin
has recently launched a new examination of Joyce’s relationship to
relativity through periodical studies (5).12
Claims about quantum mechanics in Ulysses face even greater
problems. Physicist Alan J. Friedman and Joyce scholar M. Keith
Booker have both noted that the major implications of quantum
theory were announced between 1924 and 1927, while Ulysses was
published in 1922. Nevertheless, Booker maintains the significance
of the general similarities between Ulysses and some aspects of
quantum physics, seeing the resemblance as “symptomatic of
important philosophical trends fundamental to Western thought in
the twentieth century” (585).
Sometimes charges of anachronism leveled by historicist scholars

can be brushed aside in the service of the creative possibilities
allowed by our own admission that no reader is without his or her
own present frame or orientation, or horizon of expectations. Jill
Clark’s use of chaos theory to interpret Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent
serves as one example, as does Bruce Clarke’s look backward from
a contemporary understanding of postmodernity and information
theory to see in D. H. Lawrence an occasional suggestion that
entropy may not always be a threat but can rather be, as Clarke put
it, “the partner of information.” “At times,” Clarke notes, Lawrence
“grasped both the promise of anarchic creativity and the positive
energies to be derived from entropic processes of ‘waste’” (Dora
Marsden, 169–70). Similar arguments have been made in favor of
reading Joyce’s work in relationship to the nonlinear dynamics of
chaos theory that clearly postdate Joyce’s writing career. Thomas
Jackson Rice, for instance, has argued that “if the rehistoricization
of the literary work ultimately affects the present reading of that
work, the historicization of the present reader, positioning this
reader within the cultural field of the work, will likewise open new
possibilities for reading in a ‘different world’” (10). Rice and Peter
Francis Mackey have applied chaos theory to Joyce’s work, seeing
it as providing insight into the emergent order within dynamic
systems in Ulysses.
For strongly historicizing critics, claims for Ulysses’s invoking
relativity and quantum mechanics are based on little to no evidence.
But Joyce’s last novel, Finnegans Wake, clearly demonstrates
his fascination with the new physics. Chemistry and physics are
the sciences most frequently invoked in the Wake (Burrell 194).
Rutherford’s splitting of the atom and Joyce’s process of splitting
the “etyms” of language in the Wake are drawn together in
the “abnihilisation of the etym by the grisning of the grosning
of the grinder of the grunder of the first lord of Hurtreford
expolodontonates through Parsuralia” (Finnegans Wake [hereafter
FW] 353.22–24). Andrzej Duszenko has shown that, through
frequent allusions to Einstein himself (as “Eyeinstye” for example),
and through conflations of special and temporal references
(bringing the four-dimensional space-time of Einstein’s cosmos
together in the Four Old Men, “facing one way to another way
and this way on that way, from severalled their fourdimmansions”
(FW 36.26–27), Joyce brought relativity into his text to emphasize
themes already emerging in the novel, such as the unity of opposites

and the joining of space and time (Duszenko, “Relativity Theory,”
62). Andrzej Duszenko similarly finds allusions to quantum physics
in the Wake: “The writer’s resolve to break up the smallest units
of meaning and experiment with subsemantic particles strikingly
paralleled the goals and methods of quantum physics” (“Joyce
of Science,” 274). Yet Duszenko also freely admits that Joyce had
not read deeply in any of this physics: “His method consisted of
selecting those elements that had a direct bearing on his work and
disregarding whatever did not suit his purpose. . . . [Joyce’s] method
of composition was accretive. He constantly added to Finnegans
Wake, but those additions rarely involved new ideas. Rather, they
were meant to enrich the texture of the book by providing new
points of view, or commenting on the text, or even contradicting it
to bring out its meaning” (“Relativity Theory,” 62). These lines of
argument—that the similarities between Joyce’s fiction and the new
physics simply demonstrate the rather vague claim that they share a
Western intellectual development, or that Joyce’s direct allusions to
specifics of the new physics are appropriative, one might even say
idiosyncratic, efforts to reinforce his own already existing concerns
in the novel—might be further enriched by the approaches to the
new physics in recent modernist studies.
Michael Whitworth’s Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor,
and Modernist Literature and art historian Gavin Parkinson’s
Surrealism, Art and Modern Science explore art and literature that
have been seen as part of international modernist movements, and
they both focus to some extent on fairly local networks. Whitworth
explains that
while most readers and critics have argued that modernism was
an international movement, I have foregrounded the local and
British aspect of its networks and publications. This divergence
here is perhaps more apparent than real: after all, this study has
examined theories which were mostly developed in continental
Europe; if local networks have been emphasized, it is because
even an international movement must manifest itself in local
and material media. To speak of the international character of
modernism without recognizing this is to come close to speaking
of a zeitgeist that transmits its force instantaneously without
regard to national or social boundaries. (233)
Parkinson, too, while taking up an art movement and scientific

ideas that were international in their origins and scope, focuses
on the French surrealist milieu of the 1920s and 1930s (with its
Parisian epicenter) and the French reception of the new physics
during that period.
Periodicals and the new physics

A second key decision by both Whitworth and Parkinson is the
emphasis they place on periodical research in their interpretation
of networks and the construction and circulation of scientific facts.
In order to avoid the nebulous excesses of zeitgeist claims, both
Whitworth and Parkinson attempt to construct networks and to
highlight the metaphors, tropes, and conceptual terrain of those
networks by appealing to popular science writing and periodicals.
As Whitworth puts it, his project is “not so much examining
relativity and modernism as examining certain metaphors in their
textual and historical context,” and these metaphors “may be found
in both scientific theories and in descriptions of modernist literary
form” (1). Popular science best sellers such as Arthur Eddington’s
The Nature of the Physical World and James Jeans’s The Mysterious
Universe play a role in Einstein’s Wake, but Whitworth finds the
most useful resource for reconstructing the “conversation” about
the new physics in the “particular social networks responsible for
modernism” to be generalist journals, such as the Athenaeum,
in which J. W. N. Sullivan’s writings on the subject were read by
modernists, or the Nation (and the New Age and Criterion, famous
for their espousal of modernism). Periodicals are similarly crucial
to Parkinson’s account of the networks that brought together
surrealism and the new physics. He turns to interdisciplinary
journals, such as Arnold Berliner’s Die Naturwissenschaften, where
Max Ernst read about quantum physics; the French physics and
chemistry journals that published in the new physics; and popular
science and philosophy journals, such as Scientia and the Revue de
Métaphysique et de Morale, which featured writing by Planck, de
Broglie, Pauli, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger as well as Bachelard in
the 1930s.
For both Whitworth and Parkinson, approaching these local
networks around modernism and the new physics through
periodicals helps highlight the limitations of Snow’s “two cultures”

claims. Though the Great War may have strengthened distinctions
between applied and pure sciences for British audiences, Whitworth
argues that “the pure sciences provided a language—though by no
means the only one—in which British modernist writers expressed
their response to modernity. Because this ‘language’ consisted of
scientific models and metaphors, it does not manifest itself primarily
as a specific vocabulary, though certain key images recur in novels
and poems, and more frequently in essays and reviews. Rather, it
manifests itself as literary form” (234). Moreover, as the paradigm
shifts of the new physics became better known in the literary
culture of the 1920s, the period suggests an “Entente Cordiale”
between literature and science, at least during that period in Britain.
Parkinson likewise shows that the surrealists were already viewing
the logic of Enlightenment skeptically and, in the 1920s and 1930s,
were deeply engaged with relativity and quantum mechanics, even
if they later rejected nuclear physics during the Cold War (8).
Perhaps most significantly, though, both Whitworth and Parkinson
use their careful elaboration of networks and contexts to show
epistemological concerns shared by modernist authors and artists
and the scientists of the new physics that registered in linguistic and
even aesthetic terms for both.
It is worth noting the significant emphasis on British and
European modernism in my presentation of the new physics here.
While significant work has been done on the evolution of the tropes
and images concerning radiation and nuclear energy in the United
States, and on the issue of American popular science writing, much
research is needed to elaborate the relationships between modernism
and the new physics in the United States in the 1920s. Indeed, the
context of popular science writing looked different in the United
States. It was often not written by scientists, and the relationship
between science and technology and the issue of science in public
policy looked rather different in the United States than in Britain or
France during the same period. Similarly, research on these issues in
the context of German-language modernism, and the heavily German
and Austrian genesis of much of the theoretical work in both the
physics and the philosophy of science, has not yet been brought into
strong conversation with the scholarship on American modernism.
But let me briefly return to Joyce, whom we left drawing together
the new physics, the splitting of atoms and linguistic “etyms,” and
the new understanding of space and time, matter and energy in

Finnegans Wake. In spite of his provocative title, Einstein’s Wake,
Whitworth notes up front that Joyce “is less prominent than might
be expected [in his study], because he was less closely connected with
the literary periodicals I have examined, and because, compared to
Eliot and Woolf, he was unproductive as a critic and theorist” (x).13
Given Joyce’s continuing significance in modernist studies, perhaps
it is time to take the methodological approach of Whitworth’s and
Parkinson’s studies and apply them to Joyce’s engagement with the
new physics. As Whitworth explains, Joyce in the 1920s and 1930s
was not closely connected to the British periodicals (his British and
Irish periodical outlets, after all, had been primarily little magazines
before the collapse of the Egoist), and he was not present as a critic
or theorist in British circles. But perhaps this is simply the wrong
conversation for a closer understanding of the new physics in his
work. Joyce’s “Work in Progress,” which became Finnegans Wake
when it at last saw publication as a book in 1939, was a sensation
in the Parisian modernist and avant-garde world of the 1920s and
1930s and its little magazines such as transition and Tambour,
and it was also taken up by broader-circulation French periodicals
as well, such as the Mercure de France. In other words, perhaps
Finnegans Wake belongs more to the conversation of Parkinson’s
book than Whitworth’s. Moreover, the appeal of Joyce’s late work
to twentieth-century atomic physics might itself be explored in
more than trivial detail. Murray Gell-Mann found in the Wake a
name for his new trio of very strange particles among Joyce’s rich
“etyms”: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” (FW 383.1). And the
name of an early experimental laser fusion reactor experiment,
“solase,” was derived from the phrase “their solase in dorckaness”
(FW 470.7). Perhaps it is time to explore in more depth the appeal
of Finnegans Wake to post–Second World War particle physicists.
Ihab Hassan noted in the early 1980s that modern science and
technology and Finnegans Wake were part of a “trend toward
dematerialization, the dispersal of languages, thus the (near)
immanence of mind” (187). Rather than simply seeing Finnegans
Wake as the first postmodern text, as Hassan did, we might instead
pay careful attention to the interrelationships of the new physics
and modernism, following them forward into the later period in
ways that challenge the temporal and conceptual boundaries of
much Anglophone modernist studies. As we shall see in the next
chapter on the life sciences, scholars of literature and science have

increasingly explored the role of literature in the construction and
representation of science.
Notes
1 Recent strong contributions to the study of modernist culture in
these areas include Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned
Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton, and Marey;
Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The
Aesthetics of Astronomy; and Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook:
Velocity, Pleasure.
2 As Elizabeth Leane has explained, writings such as Auguste Comte’s
about the developmental order of the sciences (mathematics,
astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and, finally, the social
sciences) popularized in the Anglophone world by Harriet
Martineau’s translations in The Positive Philosophy of Auguste
Comte (1853), augmented a perception of the preeminence of
physics and mathematics, and the increasing mathematical rigor and
difficulty of physics further gave it status (Leane 6). Leane notes that
“Ernest Rutherford’s famous dismissal of all scientific disciplines
except physics as equivalent to ‘stamp collecting’ is a notorious
example of this attitude” (6).
3 The arrival of these disciplines at a professional critical mass
might loosely be correlated with the emergence of major societies,
associations, and institutions organizing and facilitating their growth,
development, and public reception. Of course, the oldest such
society—the Royal Society, founded in Britain in 1660—predated the
modern disciplinary lines that emerged later. But just to take a few
nineteenth-century examples from the United Kingdom and United
States, notable British societies included the Royal Astronomical
Society (1820), the British Association for the Advancement of
Science (1831), the Chemical Society (1841), the Physical Society
of London (1874), the Society for Analytical Chemistry (1874),
and the Institute of Chemistry (1877). In the United States, the
nineteenth century witnessed the birth of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science (1848), the National Academy of
Sciences (1863), the American Chemical Society (1876), the American
Mathematical Society (1888), and the American Astronomical Society
(1899), among others. The century also saw the founding of several
engineering institutions. In the UK, these included the Institution
of Civil Engineers (1818), the Institution of Mechanical Engineers

(1847), and the Institution of Electrical Engineers (1871), and, in the
United States, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (1880).
4 Clarke’s list of those who helped formulate the key principles includes
Kelvin, James Joule, Robert Mayer, Macquorn Rankine, Hermann
von Helmholtz, James Clerk Maxwell, and Rudolf Clausius (Energy
Forms, 2–3). One should add to this list the French military engineer
and physicist Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, whose 1824 work on the
efficiency of steam engines influenced Clausius’s and Kelvin’s thinking
about entropy and make him a kind of father of thermodynamics.
In her exploration of the mid-Victorian culture of thermodynamics,
Choi reminds us that Kuhn had proclaimed that “history of science
offers no more striking instance of the phenomenon known as
simultaneous discovery” (qtd in Choi 301).
5 For an example outside of the authors most commonly discussed in
these terms—Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf, or Eliot, for instance—recent
scholarship attempting to specify Katherine Mansfield’s contributions
to modernist aesthetics has focused on the thermodynamic tropes
and themes of her fiction, seeing heat transfer as not just a theme,
but a central structural dynamic in her experimental short fiction
(Moffett).
6 Paul Laporte’s 1949 article “Cubism and Science” serves as the classic
exemplar.
7 While admiring its ingenuity and the possibility of adapting some
of its aspiration to work in quantum fluids, Nobel Prize–winning
physicist Frank Wilczek has recently written about Kelvin’s ether
vortex atoms and Peter Guthrie Tait’s efforts to find ether knot
structures for atoms: “Alas this beautiful and mathematically fruitful
synthesis is, as a physical theory of atoms, a Beautiful Loser. Its
failure was not so much due to internal contradictions—it was too
vague and flexible for that!—but by a certain sterility. Above all, it
was put out of business by more successful competitors. Eventually
the mechanical Ether was discredited by Einstein’s relativity, and the
triumphant Maxwell equations for electric and magnetic fields do not
support vortices. The modern, successful quantum theory of atoms is
based on entirely different ideas” (Wilczek).
8 As a testament to Marie Curie’s celebrity as a scientist, perhaps
eclipsed only by Albert Einstein in the first half of the twentieth
century, Irene Dunne and Greta Garbo were both considered to play
her in the 1943 MGM movie Madame Curie, ultimately starring
Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon in its box office–friendly heroic
scientific romance.
9 Leslie Brown explains, “After Thomas Edison’s invention of the

fluoroscope in 1896 (a kind of hood camera fitted with a screen),
many X-rays were performed as demonstrations. People lined up
at department stores, high schools, and other public venues to get
‘bone portraits.’ Dubbed ‘shadow photographs,’ X-rays soon after
needed no camera, a capacity shared with some of the earliest forms
of photography, and no film” (1517). But the little understood risk of
overexposure led to many amputations, burns, and even deaths, and
concern grew when Edison’s assistant died in 1904 (Brown 1518).
10 Including several by Soddy, and even Rutherford titled his last book
The Newer Alchemy.
11 For a few of the many strong works on the subject, see Hammill,
Goldman, and Jaffe.
12 Drouin notes that Dora Marsden’s article in the Egoist, which was
serializing Ulysses and which Joyce was known to have read, was the
first article about Einstein in a British literary periodical (11).
13 Drouin has recently criticized Whitworth’s portrait of a Joyce far
removed from Anglophone periodical culture (3–4). However, the
periodical networks in which Drouin has definitively shown Joyce to
have participated are those created largely through modernist little
magazines at first, rather than the larger generalist journals at the
heart of Whitworth’s study. Both locate periodical studies as a key
tool of their historicizing research.
3
The life sciences
Just as modernist culture participated in the reconceptualization

of the physical sciences during the period, so, too, it became an
imaginative laboratory for the constellation of disciplines clustered
around the capacious term “life sciences.” As the physical sciences
probed the nature of matter and energy, the life sciences similarly
offered new paradigms for understanding cells—their organization
and roles in communication across systems—and, indeed, the
nature of life itself. The organism came to challenge the machine
as a guiding metaphor for biology, and the generative instability of
biological paradigms in the process of shifting marked the culture
of modernism profoundly. This chapter will explore the resonance
for modernism of major paradigm shifts in the life sciences. With
the renewed attention to and reinterpretation of Mendel’s work
in 1900,1 the twentieth century witnessed the exponential growth
of genetics and embryology, among other areas of research, and
this chapter will explore the modernist culture of these renewed
life sciences, as well as topics such as cell culture, germ theory,
epidemiology, neuroanatomy, nonvitalist organicism, medicine,
biocentrism, and new ecocritical interpretations of modernism and
nature study.
A word about the porosity of scientific

disciplinary boundaries
If the disciplinary boundaries in twenty-first-century science
had not yet been fully constructed in the modernist period and
if they tended to blur even when they existed (take the case of
electrovitalism, discussed in Chapter 2, for example), most of the
scientific and technological issues discussed in this chapter exist at
the porous boundaries between the life sciences and what we now
call the social sciences. I will treat psychology in the next chapter
on the social sciences, though anyone familiar with the rise of the
discipline in the nineteenth century will immediately recall the
research programs and conceptual and methodological cross-traffic
at the nebulous boundaries between physiology and psychology in
the work of such pioneers as Wilhelm Wundt and William James.
While one could with justification ascribe to the realm of psychology
the concerns with subjective vision and selfhood or identity, for
example, or the neurophysiological basis of Stein’s composition
practices in Tender Buttons, I include those topics in this chapter
as they significantly originated in the disciplinary discourse and the
material experimental practices of biology. Sexology, eugenics, and
the “back to nature” response to fears of national degeneration in
the United States could have been treated in this chapter, as they
have a decidedly biological basis, but I shall address them in the
next chapter, on the social sciences, as they all take as their subject
the human in his or her social environment.
My decision about the basis for discussing some concerns in this
chapter and others in the life sciences chapter that follows should
not signal a rigid clinging to disciplinary demarcation. On the
contrary, the methodological tools and perspectives many current
modernist studies scholars have learned from the scholarship of
science studies, contemporary philosophy and history of science,
and the wide field of literature and science have highlighted the
porosity of disciplinary boundaries, the border crossings frequently
at work, the stakes and strategies of erecting boundaries (thus
proscribing some knowledge as outside the sanction of a scientific
discipline), and the ways in which sciences and technologies exist
within broader social, cultural, and linguistic fields rather than
comfortably insulated from them.
We have explored some conceptual approaches to modernist
culture’s wide-ranging circulation and sharing of metaphors,
scientific analogies, concepts, and technologies in the introduction
and in the previous chapter on the physical sciences, for instance,
in Bruce Clarke’s neologism “technoscientism.” Allow me to add
another term to the conceptual tool kit related to scholarship in
The life sciences 85
modernism, science, and technology: “domaining.” Susan Merrill

Squier, a scholar of literature and feminist science studies whose
work beginning in the 1990s on reproductive technologies of
the modernist era and beyond is foundational for much of the
material covered in this chapter, adopts “domaining” from British
anthropologist Marilyn Strathern. In her 1992 volume Reproducing
the Future: Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Reproductive
Technologies, Strathern explains,
In cultural life, in those habits of thought about which for most

of the time we are very much unaware, the ideas that reproduce
themselves in our communications never reproduce themselves
exactly. They are always found in environments or contexts
that have their own properties or characteristics. . . . Moreover,
insofar as each is a domain, each imposes its own logic of
“natural” association. Natural association means that ideas are
always enunciated in an environment of other ideas, in contexts
already occupied by other thoughts and images. Finding a place
for new thoughts becomes an act of displacement. (qtd in Squier,
Babies in Bottles, 26–27; emphasis in original)
Squier’s work, as we shall see, focuses on the domaining that is a

feature of the construction of scientific knowledge in the modernist
period and beyond: “I believe that reproductive ideas circulate
through the overlapping realms of literature, popular culture, and
science via the operations of analogy, and that an understanding
of the domaining effect, as it functioned in that circulation of
ideas in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, can illuminate our
present understanding of reproductive technology” (Babies in
Bottles, 27). This understanding of domaining is both attentive to
disciplinary boundaries but also fully aware of the creative effect
of their frequent transgression. We shall see in this chapter the
extent to which contemporary scholarship on modernism, science,
and technology locates in the domaining effects and boundary
crossings of modernist scientific culture the seeds of contemporary
conceptions, whether of reproductive technologies, affect theory, or
the numerous other issues this chapter will address. But first, we
must look further back into the nineteenth century to understand
some of the basic paradigms of the life sciences that were increasingly
unstable during the modernist era.
Nineteenth-century cells
Standard histories of biology credit the German biologists M. J.
Schleiden and Theodor Schwann in 1838 with the general statement
of cell theory that all animals and plants are made up of cells or the
products of cells (Gardner 314). Such histories all acknowledge the
crowded field of research, from the seventeenth century onward,
that contributed to this understanding of the basic structural units
of life. And most accounts acknowledge the centrality of advances
in material practices, and, in particular, in instrumentation.
Increasingly sensitive and accurate balances, such as those made
by the French instrument maker Jean Nicolas Fortin for Antoine
Lavoisier, or the ice-calorimeter Lavoisier used in experiments on
guinea pig respiration, for instance, were key to late-eighteenth-
century biological research. But no single laboratory instrument
could rival the role played in that history by the microscope. As
Isaac Asimov puts it, “The discoveries of the microscope in the
mid-seventeenth century seemed to blur the distinction between
living and nonliving matter. It reopened a question that had seemed
on the verge of a settlement. That question involved the origin of
life or, at least, of the simpler forms of life” (31). The microscope,
and the developments in lens making and optics that improved it,
contributed to the development of the cell paradigm: “The basic
discovery that bodies of animals and plants were organized around
small units that were eventually called cells gave biologists new
direction. Theorizers, who suggested the broad significance of
isolated observations and postulated a unity among all living things
with reference to their fundamental organization, came into their
own. Then numerous investigators tested such generalizations and
extended the theories. Thus the cell eventually came to be recognized
not only as a unit of structure but as a unit of function (metabolism),
reproduction, and growth and differentiation” (Gardner 311).
Scientists such as the Dutch “father of microbiology,” Antonie
van Leeuwenhoek, or the English scientist Robert Hooke, could use
the microscope—as primitive as it was in the seventeenth century—
to catch a glimpse of a strange world of tiny structures. In his 1665
volume Micrographia, Hooke called the tiny chambers in a slice of
cork he saw through his microscope “cells,” since they seemed like
the small rooms denoted by the word at the time (Asimov 30). For
Asimov, the limitations on this early modern biology were in part
simply those of its instruments. More than a century passed before

the Danish microbiologist Otto Friderich Müller had an instrument
capable of seeing bacteria clearly. By the nineteenth century, with the
development of the “achromatic microscope,” the distorting effects
of color in primitive lenses were finally resolved (Asimov 30–31).
Vitalism, mechanism, organicism,

and the new biology
The cell theory elaborated in the 1830s, though two centuries in the
making, was certainly a paradigm shift, and it provided conceptual
tools still significant to biology. But the elaboration of cell theory
could not answer all questions about the nature of living organisms.
What, for example, distinguishes living cells from inanimate matter?
For mechanists, the animate and inanimate realms—the worlds
of biology and of physics and chemistry—were governed by the
same natural laws. The living organism is essentially a machine.
Vitalists, on the other hand, argued that the living and nonliving
were fundamentally different and operated under two different
sets of natural laws. Yet these conceptual lines were not always so
clear. We saw in the previous chapter, for example, these seemingly
antithetical understandings brought together in the metaphors of
the physics of energy in ways that complicated vitalist thinking
during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
By the end of the nineteenth century, not only was the vitalist/
mechanist dichotomy showing its limitations for biological
paradigms, but cell theory itself, as used by “elementalist”
biologists to explain biological development in terms of cells alone,
was unpersuasive for developmental biologists and especially for
embryologists. In what one might term a “new biology” to parallel
the “new physics” discussed in the previous chapter, biology
became a laboratory science concerned with processes of life that
could be explained only through the functioning together of all
the cells and organs of an organism through developmental stages
in its environment. In the Silliman Memorial Lectures he gave at
Yale University in October 1916, the Scottish physiologist J. S.
Haldane (not to be confused with his son J. B. S. Haldane, whom
we shall encounter momentarily) argued that “neither the vitalistic
nor the mechanistic theory of the relation between organism and
environment is tenable” (2). Haldane chose a different word for

the alternative perspective he and other biologists were offering:
“It has been suggested to me that if a convenient label is needed
for the doctrine upheld in these lectures the word ‘organicism’
might be employed” (3). Convinced of the conceptual problems of
the elementalist perspective on ontogeny, the American zoologist
William Emerson Ritter offered a fully articulated theory of
biological organicism in The Unity of the Organism; Or, The
Organismal Conception of Life (1919). In this two-volume
magnum opus, Ritter assailed the “miscarriage of the elementalist
mode of reasoning” (2:229) not only in biology but in other areas
of scientific thought as well, such as in psychology.2
We saw in the previous chapter how the resources of language—
those resonances accruing to particular words, the power of
metaphors—played roles in the shifting paradigms and cultural
transmutations of the physical sciences in the modernist period as
concepts spread across multiple domains. Recall, for example, the
telling presence of mechanistic and Newtonian resonances even
in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century vitalism in the phrase “life
force,” or the unhelpful presence of Newtonian conceptions in the
planetary or solar models of the atom proposed by Nagaoka and
Rutherford that made those models ultimately problematic during the
development of quantum mechanics. Similarly, metaphors of porosity
and solidity in atomic physics, of curvature of space in Einsteinian
relativity, and the tropes of alchemical transmutation in the early
years of radiochemistry and nuclear physics played roles not only
in the paradigm shifts of their fields but also in the boundary-work
between the occult revival and the science of the period (Morrisson,
Modern Alchemy). The microscope gave the life sciences a powerful
tool that, in turn, privileged observational methods and fine-tuned
description as part of its empirical method. But to recent scholars,
those processes of observation, description, and theorization have
suggested the need for careful attention to the cultural and linguistic
resources of cellular biology. Indeed, Evelyn Fox Keller’s argument
discussed in the introduction to this volume, that “the ways in
which we talk about scientific objects are not simply determined by
empirical evidence but rather actively influence the kind of evidence
we seek (and hence are likely to find)” (35), was developed explicitly
in the context of twentieth-century biology.
The special difficulty in identifying the nature of life itself, much
less scientists’ roles in understanding or manipulating it, brought
particular urgency to the guiding metaphors and paradigms of the

life sciences in the twentieth century. In spite of the explanatory
limitations of vitalist and mechanistic conceptual approaches to
biology, both persisted in various forms from the early modern
period into the twentieth century. In 2004, from his vantage at the
beginning of the twenty-first century, microbiologist Carl R. Woese
has called for a “new biology for a new century” that rejects the
fundamentalist reductionism of twentieth-century biology that
was marked by the Watson-Crick work on the structure of DNA
that gave molecular biologists a tool of understanding genes (175).
Molecular biology had essentially embraced a mechanistic mode of
thinking about cells after the modernist period. At the beginning
of the twentieth century, classical physics boldly imagined that it
had solved all of the important problems, only to go through the
major paradigm shifts away from classical physics that our previous
chapter discussed. But, for Woese, later-twentieth-century molecular
biology’s reductionist mechanistic perspective represented an
allegiance to only one aspect of the legacy of nineteenth-century
biology—its focus on the cell and what came to be understood as the
gene—at the expense of issues of emergence, form, and evolution.
He quotes physicist David Bohm’s 1969 complaint that “just when
physics is . . . moving away from mechanism, biology and psychology
are moving closer to it. If the trend continues . . . scientists will be
regarding living and intelligent beings as mechanical, while they
suppose that inanimate matter is too complex and subtle to fit
into the limited categories of mechanism” (qtd in Woese 175). In
other words, physics left its classical nineteenth-century mechanics
behind long ago, but molecular biology—quite unexpectedly—only
strengthened it.
But in between that nineteenth-century emergence of modern
biology and the entrenched molecular biology paradigm (about
which Woese complains) came the organicist movement during the
interwar modernist period. Daniel J. Nicholson and Richard Gawne
have called the organicist movement “neither logical empiricism nor
vitalism” but “the most important tradition within early twentieth-
century philosophy of biology” (345). Biological organicism
emerged during the modernist period as a serious challenge to both
mechanism and vitalism. As Donna Haraway puts it in Crystals,
Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors That Shape Embryos, the first half
of the twentieth century was “a time of basic crisis in which the
age-old dichotomy between mechanism and vitalism was reworked
and a fruitful synthetic organicism emerged, with far-reaching

implications for experimental programs and for our understanding
of the structure of organisms” (2). In this most Kuhnian of Haraway’s
books, she explores the shifting metaphors and discontinuities
marked by the emergence of organicism as a competing paradigm,
testing its relationship to the machine metaphors of mechanistic
thinking and arguing that organicism is not simply a modern form
of vitalism, as some had argued (193).
While much of Haraway’s interpretation is beyond the scope
of this book, it is worthwhile to rehearse some of her conclusions
about the clash of categories and metaphors in the early years
of organicism, as it sets on the table key positions alive in the
modernist era that inform contemporary modernist studies
scholarship. Following the research of key proponents of interwar
organicism—particularly the American embryologist Ross G.
Harrison, British biochemist Joseph Needham, and Austrian
biologist Paul Weiss—Haraway assesses the shifting understanding
in their work evident in, for example, the change in images and
metaphors in Needham’s writing “from automotive gear shifts to
fields, organizers, and liquid crystals” (202). Organicism, Haraway
concludes, “transcended the dichotomies of mechanism and
vitalism but maintained a special place for the whole organism by
proposing unique biological laws of integration and organization”
(194). Organicism resists efforts to reduce biology to the laws
of chemistry or physics, but also the occasionally metaphysical
claims of vitalism: “Organicists of every hue have averred that it
is not appropriate to look outside science for an understanding of
organisms. Vitalists were, at the very least, not so sure. Therefore,
although both vitalists and organicists share a devotion to the idea
of wholeness and a rejection of mechanistic physics and chemistry
as adequate to the solution of biological problems, they diverge
on a very critical issue. Organicists declare that it will be possible
to state positive, unambiguous, empirically grounded laws for all
aspects of the behavior of organisms. Form and organization are
not mysteries, but challenges” (197).
Recent work in art history has explored in great detail some of
these challenges at the intersections of the organic and inorganic,
vitalism and mechanism, the life sciences and physical sciences,
and the aesthetic, technological, and scientific. In his wide-ranging
monograph, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture,
and the Extension of Life, for instance, Spyros Papapetros explores

early-twentieth-century art, aesthetic criticism, biological and physical
sciences, technology, popular science writings, anthropology, and
psychology and suggests that “empathy, the ability to identify with
the objects of the external world, was not erased but repressed by
modernist subjects; thus, it had to return metamorphically projected,
objectified, and finally reified in the inorganic form of the animistic
artifacts of twentieth-century modernity” (vii), such as automobiles
and other machines, skyscrapers, and the crystalline structures of
modernist art and architecture. “One could indeed describe the
fin de siècle as the time when artifacts start having cataclysmic
effects on people,” Papapetros continues. “Real and textual subjects
collapse at the sight of these new mesmerizing objects. Although
glacial and inorganic, modern artifacts are radiant and electric; they
emanate magnetic powers and vibrate with energy, life, and desire
of their own. In all their metallic coldness and austere sublimity,
the industrial artifacts of the early twentieth century do not lack
either pathos or sexual appeal” (viii). His argument takes into
account many of the sciences, technologies, and aesthetic practices
that existed at that intersection of the living and inorganic, such
as those demonstrated in Ernst Haeckel’s final publication, Crystal
Souls: Studies of Inorganic Life (1917), for instance. Haeckel used
the microphotographs of liquid crystals taken by Otto Lehmann
to demonstrate the lifelike qualities of form, and something like
respiration and reproduction, to posit something like inorganic
life, just as his earlier exploration of the crystalline animals—
the zooplankton called radiolarians—ultimately broke down
distinctions between the organic and inorganic. No wonder, then,
that Needham, in Haraway’s account, would turn to liquid crystals
for metaphors of organicism. As Papapetros summarizes Haeckel,
“All matter was animate; all substance was one. This was the main
principle of Haeckel’s doctrine of monism, which encompassed
physics, biology, ethics, and religion. All matter had force and
energy. In the organic, this force was active; in the inorganic, it was
latent yet potent, and much more potent than the matter we call
living” (125). Similar ideas were developed in key modernist works,
whether of monism or critiques of humanism, in writings such as
Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy as well as the works
of T. E. Hulme and those of his protégé Herbert Read. In Read’s
novel The Green Child, a utopian community lives in caves, aspiring
only to cultivate crystals in their form of “inorganic collectivity,” to

use Papapetros’s phrase (147). The liquid crystal, which was used
to negotiate so many discourse boundaries, had an extraordinary
place in the aesthetic and scientific debates from the later nineteenth
century through to the later twentieth century, enjoying a revival of
interest in György Kepes’s The New Landscape in Art and Science
(1956) and beyond (150).
At the heart of Papapetros’s work is an extended exploration of
Fernand Léger’s 1911 work Nudes in the Forest (see Figure 3.1),
which drew together the biological and physical sciences, mineral
and organic forms, the primitive sacrifices to vitality enumerated
in the anthropology of Durkheim and others, and the pneumatic
technologized French landscape of velocipedes and cars—in
short, of the colonial world of rubber trees and the technologies
of Michelin tires and travel guides. Papapetros concludes that
“Nudes in the Forest proposes a pictorial model equally methodical
and arbitrary to concocting histories of the world. By collecting
fossils and other mineral specimens, the painter ultimately creates
Figure 3.1 Fernand Léger, Nudes in the Forest, 1910-1911. Collection

Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands.
an Histoire naturelle or a condensed version of the Création du

monde—an encyclopedia of the natural sciences in its modernist
redaction into a four-by-six-foot canvas” (208). While we have seen
the thermodynamic nightmares of physics offering an end of the
world and all biological systems in Chapter 2, the new biology of
organicism and monist, vitalist, or other conceptions of inorganic
life offered a new, expanded sense of the proliferation of life that
turned to epistemological more than metaphysical concerns. The
vibratory modernism of the unseen, pulsing ether that we saw in
Chapter 2 is complemented by the latent energies of inorganic form.
While Papapetros’s study sees in Haeckel, Worringer, Hulme,
Read, and others a destruction of the boundaries between organic
and inorganic and a concern with the animation of the inorganic,
another strong but very different engagement on this terrain is Jessica
Burstein’s innovative study Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion,
Art (2012), which highlights a current of modernism engaged not
with the psychology of mind and its libidinous embodiment, but
rather with a cold exteriority of the body, of the world of matter.
Burstein’s “cold modernism” is not so much concerned with the
mechanist/vitalist paradigm that was ceasing to suffice in biology of
the period. Turning to the literature of Wyndham Lewis and Mina
Loy, the art of Hans Bellmer and of Balthus, and even to the fashion
of Coco Chanel, Burstein’s cold modernism does not attempt to
animate the inorganic or seek the distinctive nature of humanity
but rather to emphasize cold, inhuman, mechanical exteriority for
its own sake:
By saying that cold modernism valorizes exteriority, I mean that

the body is taken as the start and finish of all explanation. What
precisely cold modernism explains, however, is not the question
of what it is to be human, but what it is simply or merely to be;
the status of the human has no especial purchase, and thus the
human form is on par with seemingly dissimilar entities in the
world: clothing, cars, and curtains, for example. . . . The body
is a machine to be toyed with, one that toys or ticks, or tics. In
its most extreme form, cold modernism offers an account of the
human form in which the mind plays no role; or, in a slightly less
extreme form, in which the mind is so physicalized as to have no
more or less purchase than pure anatomy. (13; emphasis in the
original)
Early-twentieth-century proponents of biological organicism

focused their research on areas that have become key to recent
scholarship on modernism and biology. Embryology was among
the subfields that captivated these researchers. Ross Harrison,
for example, turned to the development of the nervous system to
explore issues of form, complex relationships, and integration, and,
as Haraway notes, he fused an aesthetic appreciation of organic
form with an insistence upon the dynamic developments of matter:
“Organic form is the product of protoplasmic activity and must,
therefore, find its explanation in the dynamics of living matter, but
it is the mystery and beauty of organic form that sets the problem
for us. Structure is a product of function, and yet at the same
time, is the basis of function. The activities of an organism may be
nothing more than the continuance of those changes that produce
development” (qtd in Haraway 43–44). As Harrison emphasizes in
this 1913 paper, “Organic form must find its explanation in the
dynamics of matter, and the distinction between living and non-
living must fade” (qtd in Haraway 44).
The neuron doctrine and nonvitalist organicism

Laura Otis, whose work on nineteenth-century literature and
science has yielded rich results, notes that “changing understandings
of personal and national identity encouraged people of the 1830s to
see living things as associations of independent units. In the 1880s,
this concept of boundedness helped people to associate diseases
with invasive microbes violating individual and national borders”
(Networking, 7). But the dominant metaphor of the nervous system
during the Victorian period, Otis argues, was the continuous net.
“In 1887,” Otis explains, “when some neuroscientists proposed that
the body’s communications system consisted of independent cells,
bitter debates arose between ‘neuronists’ and ‘reticularists.’ Clearly,
the notions of boundedness and continuity coexisted in time,
leading to conflicting visions of the body. In nineteenth-century
Western culture, a discourse celebrating individuality collided with
an ideology of connectedness, and the interference pattern they
created can be seen in scientists’ and novelists’ representations of
communications systems” (Networking, 7). Otis draws together
nineteenth-century science, literature, and communications systems
such as railroads, the telegraph, and, ultimately, neurological

systems to suggest the early origins of current comparisons of
computer networks and nerve networks.
The “neuronist” position was to be especially significant for
modernism. Just as painstaking research by increasingly sophisticated
microscopes had generated and refined the cell theory, so, too, the
neuron doctrine emerged from careful microscopical observations
by Santiago Ramòn y Cajal. The Spanish histologist’s observations
of the nervous system established that it comprised individual,
distinct cells—neurons—separated from each other by the gaps
that would come to be known as “synapses.” This undermined the
rival reticular theory, which hypothesized the nervous system as a
continuous network (Allan 88). Cajal’s work then allowed Charles
Scott Sherrington and others during the modernist era to map the
actual pathways of nerve impulses.
New directions in biology could clearly be registered in the
neuron doctrine and the recently honed theories of organicism to
which neurological research contributed. In his groundbreaking
2001 monograph titled Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and
the Correlations of Writing and Science, Steven Meyer notes the
tendency of key recent studies of science and modernism to map
“modern literature along coordinates derived chiefly from the
new physics, whether in terms of late nineteenth-century wave
theory, or the quantum theory contemporaneous with Stein, or
the physics-inflected chaos theory of our own day” (74–75).3
Meyer offers modernist studies a detailed understanding of Stein’s
importance to modernism not simply as an experimental writer, but
as a modernist whose writing emerged in the cutting-edge biology
of the period, rather than physics: “Stein’s extensive exposure to
the New Biology offers an invaluable opportunity to consider
the influence on literature of modern biological theory, with its
distinctive experimental praxis, as well as the related question of
the extent to which literature may be regarded as an appropriate,
and perhaps inevitable, domain for physiologically based scientific
experimentalism” (75; emphasis in the original). Asking such
questions of Stein’s relationship to the new biology inevitably leads
Meyer to portray her work as neither divorced from her training in
neuroanatomy nor simply inherited from it (54). In his rich study
of the multiple domains in which her writing participated—literary,
philosophical, psychological, and neurophysiological—Meyer
argues that the way Stein drew these contexts together marks the
distinctive nature of her modernist practice (xvii).
Stein was perfectly positioned at a moment of major paradigm
shift in neurology. She had begun her studies at Radcliffe in 1893,
two years after the articulation of the neuron doctrine, and took
philosophy and psychology classes from William James. She also
worked with his assistant, the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg.
While much scholarship has focused on William James’s legacy in
Stein’s work (see Hawkins or Olson, for example), James had not
made the leap to the neuron paradigm. In 1897, as Stein entered
medical school,
the English neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington introduced

the concept of the synapse as “an anatomical and functional
explanation for the mechanism by which the individual neuronal
units could communicate with each other.” Hence Stein, in
her first two years at Johns Hopkins, much of the time spent
conducting laboratory research, found herself in the midst
of a paradigm shift if ever there was one. The crucial thing to
note here is that in taking neurons, as described by the neuron
doctrine, as paradigmatic of organic life (and thereby presuming
that nerve cells, like other cells, don’t form “actual unions,”
or organic unities, but are only exceptional in that they “do
something very different from other cells of the body,” namely,
they “process information”), it becomes necessary to reconceive
organicism as a function of contact or contiguity, rather than of
organic connection. (Meyer 79–80)
Cutting-edge laboratory training and theoretical innovations like

these taught at medical schools informed the experimental writing
of modernism in diverse ways.
Medicine and modernist writing

Like the other sciences discussed in this chapter, medicine, too, was
undergoing significant changes during the modernist period. Yet it is
also something of an outlier: it was the site of numerous intersections
among institutions, technologies, and scientific paradigm shifts,
but also followed a somewhat different trajectory from the other
sciences we have considered in this volume. Mark S. Micale has

noted of many modernist sciences, arts, and philosophical positions
that “the revolution of Modernism entailed an increasing separation
of representation from ‘the real.’” Yet, Micale continues,
the medical sciences in Europe and North America experienced

their high, positivist period precisely during the later nineteenth
century. In France, the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s were the heroic
age of Claude Bernard and Louis Pasteur, an era during which
the causes and courses of one infectious disease after another
were discovered. The intellectual prestige of the homme de
science reached a historic high point. Throughout the period,
the orthodoxies of medical positivism remained firmly intact:
in sickness and health, the human body and mind were to be
studied, understood, and eventually mastered through precise
and detailed observation by a community of experts. Pathology
was seen to have rational causes, subject to immutable and
ascertainable patterns of laws. . . . Positivist medical science
was the ultimate “discourse of the real,” seeking to produce an
authoritative account of an unproblematically real world of the
human body and mind. (“Discourses of Hysteria,” 89–90)
We shall leave Micale’s widely influential work on the “mind of

modernism” to the next chapter, but the recent engagement of
modernist studies with science studies and enriched work in the
history of science has also left its mark on the exploration of
modernism and medicine. During the later nineteenth century, the
era during which Micale charts the triumphs of positivist medicine
and germ theory, the authority of doctors in the United States was
somewhat different. As Hugh Crawford explains, skepticism toward
doctors and toward institutionalized power in general in nineteenth-
century America, and infighting among different medical “sects,”
led many to turn to home remedy books and medical self-reliance
(13–14). But during the early years of the twentieth century, as
the American Medical Association expanded its membership from
eight thousand physicians in 1900 to seventy thousand a decade
later, the nature of medical authority changed:
Physicians now controlled hospital privileges and referrals, and

they instituted a code of ethics that resembled a code of silence.
In the space of thirty years American medicine was transformed

from a hack profession anyone with one or two years’ education
or an apprenticeship could enter to an exclusive club that
rigorously controlled both the admittance and the behavior of
its members. These medical initiates were privy to the sacred
and henceforth generally unavailable truth of health. (Crawford
14–15)
“Germ theory, aseptic surgery, professionalized hospitals, and an

increasingly effective pharmacopeia not only raised respect for the
medical profession but also rarefied its knowledge and reified its
practitioners,” Crawford adds. During this period of ascendancy
and institutional legitimization of the medical profession in the
United States, William Carlos Williams became a doctor—and a
modernist poet.
In order to test the implications of Williams’s profession for
modernist poetry, Crawford turns to the insights of several of
the theorists and epistemological explorations surveyed in the
introduction to this volume. Other readers of Williams have
emphasized his estrangement from his dual roles as doctor and
poet (e.g., Bernard Duffey’s Poetry of Presence), but Crawford
seeks to explain the relation of medicine to Williams’s poetry by
turning, for example, to Ludwik Fleck’s concept of “thought style”
in The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, arguing
that Williams participated in two different thought collectives,
those of medicine and literature, internalizing them but also
encountering contradictions in their ways of knowing (7–8).
Williams could claim that to him, poetry and medicine essentially
amount to the same thing (5), and Crawford’s work explores the
common concepts of clarity and cleanliness that inform Williams’s
poetry and medical practice, looking with equal interest at
medical texts of the period and issues of clarity in Imagism, for
example. Bruno Latour’s Pasteurization of France, with its critical
analysis of the construction of scientific authority and its key
concept of reproducibility, informs Crawford’s understanding of
the construction of networks across the various dimensions of
Williams’s practice: “Williams’s work can be viewed as a node
through which pass numerous overlapping lines of force—poetry,
modernism, science, medicine, technology, aesthetics, gender, and
visual arts. They create a network that is strengthened through
various associations” (10–11).
Indeed, much of Williams’s struggle over concepts of clarity

involves a central tension in the medical profession at the time,
between authority, tradition, and abstraction and the empirical
experiences of the individual doctor. In Crawford’s account, the
microscope and other technologies privileged sense over erudition,
and the rise of empiricism and the clinical method in later-
nineteenth-century France, along with the laboratory revolution,
led to the rise of scientific medicine, of hospitals with laboratory
equipment and scientific floor plans, of medical schools such as
the Johns Hopkins Medical School and the Medical Laboratories
Building at the University of Pennsylvania, which Williams attended
(33–37). Crawford sums up the views of medical education
reformer Abraham Flexner and others of the day, noting that “The
history of modern medicine can be seen as the systematic rejection
of abstraction” (37), a view also found in Williams’s reflections
on writing in The Embodiment of Knowledge. The “contact”
(Williams’s phrase, and the name of his little magazine) Williams
sought and the embodied knowledge of his poetics put him at
odds with the forces of abstraction and tradition in science. Both
Williams and Thomas Kuhn saw the necessity of paradigms for
the production of knowledge but also saw how much is lost by
subordinating the particularities of specific bodies and things to
conceptual categories. Williams’s critique of science is explicit in A
Novelette: “Science is impotent from all the viewpoints from which
in its inception it seemed to promise enlightenment to the human
mind. It is going nowhere but to gross and minute codification of the
perceptions” (qtd in Crawford 41). Hence, Crawford does not read
Williams as rejecting science and technology, but rather as aligning
himself “with that medical tradition whose business is the rejection
of medical tradition” (41). Crawford shows us a Williams who
is deeply aware of the opportunities and limitations afforded his
practices, both medical and poetic, by his profession. The rhetorical
construction of medical authority—the performances of it in the
diagnostic exchanges with patients—also leaves Williams uneasy.
If Williams’s medical training and practice and his poetics of
clarity and his critique of abstraction went hand in hand, the neuron
doctrine and the nonvitalist organicism it supported informed Stein’s
experimental writing after her departure from medical school and
led, in Tender Buttons and elsewhere, to a “self-organizing” form
of writing “premised on and exemplifying an organicism divorced
from traditional notions of organic form” (Meyer xviii). This
writing exemplifies what Meyer calls Stein’s “neurophysiological

imagination” (xviii).
Meyer emphasized Stein’s writing not as simply reflecting
neurophysiological science, but in fact serving as “a form of
laboratory science, descending, by way of the psychological and
anatomical laboratories at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, from the
medical laboratory” (81). Stein’s developing practice can be traced
in the evolution of her writing: “The shift from writing in what
Stein termed her ‘first manner’ to the Mannerism of Tender Buttons
(from ‘It is a simple thing to be quite certain that there are kinds in
men and women. It is a simple thing and then not anyone has any
worrying to be doing about any one being any one’ to ‘Suppose it
did, suppose it did with a sheet and a shadow and a silver set of water,
suppose it did’) occurred because James’s scientific psychology, as
she understood it, had ceased to interest her” (Meyer 5–6).
Meyer describes Stein’s practice of attention and sensitivity to
the functioning of her own nervous system through her writing as a
“neuraesthetic” (58), and argues that her middle-period dissociative
writing requires the reader
to reproduce the recursive act of reading which, in line with

the parameters under investigation, was part and parcel of the
original process of writing. Such experimental reading, as it were,
is not a matter of reductively decoding Stein’s writing word for
word or phrase for phrase but of neuraesthetically reproducing
her “stud[ies] of the relation of words in meaning sound and
volume” in ways specified by the compositions themselves. (83;
emphasis in original)
Hence Stein’s writing does not offer the reader tools for thinking
about its objects, but rather “permits one to become increasingly
attuned to the complex interrelations that actually compose the
objects of one’s thought (as well as one’s sense of oneself)” (295).
Stein’s middle period compositions set lines, words, and even
interspaces within the composition’s syntax in vibration with each
other, in a way that Whitehead would articulate as “vibratory
organicism” in the following years (Meyer 4). Ultimately, then,
Meyer points out that, in Stein,
writing and the biological sciences are not merely correlated.

Viewed from one direction, biological investigation (like all
scientific investigation) involves ever more complex extensions

of writing practices, ever more broadly distributed technologies
of writing; viewed from the other direction, writing is itself
an extension or externalization of the human central nervous
system. Writing, then, is a function of neurology; the life sciences
are a function of writing; and investigations such as Stein’s of
the organic mechanisms involved in writing ought to prove no
less suggestive for biological research than Stein found James’s
biocentrism to be for achieving her own experimental objective
of an ever “fuller” understanding of her “self-understanding”
compositions. (320; emphasis in original)
The freshness of Meyer’s approach has borne addressing in some

detail, but it has not been without its critics. Following Haraway’s
path lauding the achievements of nonvitalist organicism, Meyer
is careful to distinguish Stein’s organicism from other varieties
available to modernism, such as D. H. Lawrence’s “social
organicism, as against the more strictly biological organicism that
informed Stein’s writing, as well as the tendency to a Bergsonian
vitalism, so widespread in the early decades of the century and
from which Lawrence, in particular, suffered greatly” (56). Yet
other scholars exploring Stein’s scientific engagements have sought
a more positive interpretation of vitalist modernism and the
thought of Henri Bergson, one of its most prominent proponents.
Omri Moses, for example, has recently argued that Meyer
“associates Bergsonian vitalism, quite misleadingly, with models of
organicism that succumb to ‘temptations to totalization (aesthetic
and political)’” (227, note 50). Indeed, the waters are muddied by
the late-nineteenth-century emergence in France of an organicist
sociology that was often tied to developments in the biology of cell
theory (see D’Hombres and Meddaoui).
Still, despite real differences of interpretation, Meyer and
Moses are both engaged in a similar project, seriously exploring
the interrelationships of modernist experimental writing and the
emerging scientific engagements among biology, philosophy, and
psychology. Moses turns to Darwin, Bergson, William James, and
Nietzsche, for example, for their vitalist investigations of change in
biological systems, and he offers a reading of Stein’s early fiction
rooted more in Bergson and in Darwin’s work on the nervous
system, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,
than in the more commonly explored context of William James’s

thought. For Meyer, the payoff of Stein’s work in the laboratories
at Johns Hopkins and her move away from William James and
Hugo Münsterberg was the neurological experiment of Stein’s
composition practices and aesthetics during the period, beginning
loosely with Tender Buttons. Moses focuses instead on the early
writings, such as Three Lives, and her experimental work on
automatism at Radcliffe: “It seems clear that the repetitiousness
of the prose in ‘Melanctha’ is meant to mirror the patterns and
forms that habits acquire as they develop over time, as they gather
duration and move in a progressive direction” (131). Focusing on
Bergson’s understanding of habit as “a form of memory created
by repetition” (132), and on Darwin’s conjectures on the role of
sympathetic or conflictual interactions in the development of
character, Moses emphasizes Stein’s nonmechanistic understanding
of biology: “Nature may regulate life, but it also deregulates
it. Biology does not put a fundamental limit on the capacity for
inventiveness, and, as regards habit, it works in combination with
choice” (131). Where Meyer emphasizes a nonvitalist organicism
in Stein’s neurological approach to writing, Moses gives us a Stein
grounded in vitalism: “By using a vitalist lens, however, we can
begin to see how much Stein’s ideas connect to something beyond
thematized pragmatist social policy. Stein’s well-known interest in
repetition and time, along with her early fascination with Darwin,
points in the direction of nonmechanistic ‘life’ philosophies and an
interest in the nature of psychic change” (133). What we see at play
here is a resurgence of interest in exploring vitalism in the past few
decades of modernist studies as well as the fact that vitalism itself
came in multiple forms and was connected widely to many different
areas of modernist culture, having perhaps always been an example
of the technoscientism discussed in the previous chapter.4
Optics and physiology

The “neurophysiological imagination” that Meyer locates in Stein
has also been the focus of new modernist scholarship on the senses.
Art historians have long debated the impact of optical technologies
and theories in the development of modern art. Impressionism in
particular has been explored in relationship to nineteenth-century
theories of optics and color, such as those in Eugene Chevreul’s On the

Law of Simultaneous Contrast of Colors (1839), and as a response to
the rise of photography.5 But the rise of neurology and physiological
psychology, new developments in the physiology of vision, and a
thriving technoscientific visual culture in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries brought vision and physiology together
with modernist literature in transformative ways that have only
recently been strongly articulated in scholarship. Christina Walter’s
Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, and Literary Modernism
reopens a very old subject in modernist studies—impersonality—
and significantly broadens our understanding of that key concept.
Walter locates a “new visuality” in later-nineteenth- and early-
twentieth-century culture not only in the rise of photography and
film but also in the many popular optical devices of the period,
noting that inventions such as “stereoscopes, kaleidoscopes,
phenakistoscopes, kinoras, cinema” had their origins in the
laboratory. “These gadgets,” she writes, “exploited the embodied
limits of the eye in order to produce their effects and also offered
an image that was fragmented and that unfolded temporally as
those effects” (14–15). X-rays, explored in Chapter 2, showed that
the light spectrum extended beyond the light visible to the naked
eye, and the early twentieth century saw a rise in popular vision-
care manuals as well as in illusionistic performances based on
new scientific knowledge and technologies. Walter suggests that
a new model of vision was at play that subverted the venerable
understanding of vision passively collecting images of the physical
world for a disembodied mind to contemplate: “In the new model
of vision . . . a rational subject no longer actively reflected upon
visual percepts that passively recorded the physical world. Instead,
the perceiving subject was itself part of that physical world, and
its embodied processes, structures, and defects shaped perception,
including the ocular apparatus, visual cognition, and visual memory”
(3). This led to a modern “optical impersonality,” through which
“modernists developed a vernacular science in aesthetic form, and
they used this form to consider how the new physiology of vision
affected notions of selfhood and identity. The attempt to interrogate
these notions and indeed to turn them into a social politics is the
defining work of modernist impersonality” (3). Various versions
of the “imagetext,” which Walter defines as “works that blend
the respective territories of the seeable and the sayable” (2–3),
become the key aesthetic laboratory for optical impersonality in

modernism. Walter thus challenges older critical assumptions about
the discourse of impersonality in modernist literature—that it was
committed “to a self-contained ‘I’ removed from social reality,” that
“modernists used impersonality to oppose embodied experience,
including emotion, and that modernism was solipsistically devoted
to an autonomous, coherent ‘I’” (3).
Walter’s reading of this embodied optical impersonality allows us
to reconsider a key passage in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End that
might have served as a strong example of the literary impressionism
and impersonality that thread their way through the tetralogy. At
the front during the Great War sits Ford’s protagonist, Christopher
Tietjens, who is writing (in a detached, scientific manner) a report on
“his own case” in his notebook while thinking about his estranged
wife and a recent conversation with another soldier. When he looks
back at the white page, he perceives “thin films of reddish purple,”
which become “fainter” and “luminous green” as they float toward
the darkness beyond the top right of the page. Walter explains that
Tietjens is experiencing what scientists of the period were calling
“subjective color,” an experience of color originating in the eye
and brain rather than in the world of external objects. Indeed, she
notes how much Tietjens’s experience resembles an experiment in
biologist T. H. Huxley’s Lessons in Elementary Physiology (1866;
reprinted until 1930) (Walter 5). Tietjens is thinking about a fellow
soldier, O Nine Morgan, who was recently killed. Tietjens believes
that “his retina [is] presenting him with the glowing image of the
fellow’s blood” (qtd in Walter 5). The rest of the passage Walter
analyzes is worth quoting at length:
But that was as far as Tietjens got in uninterrupted reminiscence

of that scene. He was sitting in his flea-bag digging idly with
his pencil into the squared page of his note-book which had
remained open on his knees, his eyes going over and over again
the words with which his report on his own case had concluded—
the words: So the interview ended rather untidily (emphasis in
original). Over the words went the image of the dark hillside
with the lights of the town, now that the air-raid was finished,
spreading high up into the sky below them. . . .
But at that point the doctor’s batman had uttered, as if with a
jocular, hoarse irony, the name:
“Poor—O Nine Morgan! . . .” and over the whitish sheet

of paper on a level with his nose Tietjens perceived thin films
of reddish purple to be wavering, then, a glutinous surface of
gummy scarlet pigment. Moving! (qtd in Walter 6, ellipses and
emphasis in the original)
Walter sees in this passage an example of the imagetext in Ford’s

optical impersonality’s “blended visual and verbal representations”
that “broadly blurred the borders of the seeable and the sayable
and at their strongest highlighted how the interaction of images
and texts is in fact constitutive of all representation” (7). In Walter’s
account, Ford “overwrites Tietjens’ record of ‘his own case’ with
subjective visual images, he isn’t weighing an impersonal social
science against a personal impressionism; he’s making optical
science a window onto the impersonality that already resides within
the human subject” (5).
But Ford is just the tip of the iceberg in Walter’s expansive study.
She connects T. S. Eliot’s long canonical espousal of impersonality to
his studies of the science and philosophy of vision and his exchanges
with J. W. N. Sullivan, the science writer whose work in the
Athenaeum we encountered in Chapter 2, and she greatly expands
the range of authors whose work can fruitfully be understood in
terms of what she calls “optical impersonality” to include Pater,
Michael Field, Lawrence, Woolf, Loy, and H. D., among others. In her
reading of the social and political critiques afforded by engagements
with an embodied personality, Walter shows that the issue did not
have a specific politics. Loy and H. D., for instance, turned their
engagements of impersonality toward progressive political causes,
while Lawrence’s impersonality supported a more conservative
vision of gender and race. But what these writers all shared was an
aesthetic and formal, rather than thematic, engagement with the
new embodied optics that they turned upon notions of identity in
the self central to modernist literature.6
Reproductive technology
While Gertrude Stein was in the new medical school at Johns
Hopkins—attending between 1897 and 1902, just a few years
after the medical school’s founding in 1893—the embryologist and
proponent of biological organicism Ross Harrison was serving as an

instructor in anatomy there (from 1896 to 1907). Their paths must
have crossed. But three years after Stein left Hopkins without taking
her degree, Harrison began work on one of his most significant
laboratory contributions—performing the first successful tissue
cultures between 1905 and 1907.7 In order better to understand
the development of embryonic nerve cells, he took portions of frog
nerve tube at an early stage of embryonic development and grew
them in a drop of frog lymph, thus observing their development
directly. Harrison went on to become professor and head of the
Department of Zoology at Yale in 1907 and continued to improve
his tissue culture techniques to aid his embryological research,
while his Johns Hopkins colleague Florence Sabin used his tissue
culture techniques there and in her later headship of a department
at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City.8
Of course Harrison’s frog nerve cells were a long way from
growing human tissue outside of the body, but it would not be
long before tissue culture techniques would become a key element
of fantasies about ectogenesis, or extrauterine gestation, that
fired debates among sexologists, eugenicists, scientists in several
fields, and the broad reading public of the modernist era. Squier’s
groundbreaking Babies in Bottles (1994) led the way in studies of
analogy, literature, technology, science, and gender in the modernist-
era roots of debates about reproductive technologies still relevant
today. Using scientific texts, popular science writing, and literary
works by Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley, Charlotte Haldane, and
several other writers, she explores the evolving conceptions of fields
and possible techniques of reproductive technologies imagined in the
1920s—endocrine treatment (artificially using hormones to initiate
development or alter an organism), experimental embryology (which
explored the processes of transformation and differentiation during
physiological development), artificial parthenogenesis (techniques
for causing cell division by an egg in the absence of sperm), and
tissue culture (processes for keeping cells alive after they have been
removed from an organism) (Squier 39–42).
These nascent scientific techniques had far-reaching social
consequences. Squier’s study charts the key process of domaining
and some of the roles played by literature in the development and
understanding of these new sciences through a series of detailed case
studies. For example, she describes how, in 1892, a four-year-old
Julian Huxley read Charles Kingsley’s Victorian children’s classic
The Water-Babies (published serially in Macmillan’s Magazine in

1862–63 and in book form in 1863), marveling at an illustration
featuring two prominent biologists—T. H. Huxley (Julian’s
grandfather) and Richard Owen—looking at a “water baby” in a
bottle of water. Kingsley’s pro-Darwinian but also highly moral fairy
tale features a Mother Carey, who “makes things make themselves,”
and explores individual human embryological development in
relationship to the development of the human species and the broader
biological world. Julian’s reading provoked a charming exchange of
letters about water babies with his grandfather, T. H. Huxley. In
1919, Julian, by then a zoologist, read the work of J. F. Gudernatsch,
who caused a premature metamorphosis of tadpoles into froglets by
feeding them thyroid hormone, and Huxley successfully performed
a similar experiment feeding minced thyroid to his own water
baby, a Mexican amphibian called an axolotl. In his experiment,
the axolotl, which naturally lives permanently as a tadpole or eft,
artificially and astonishingly matured into a large salamander-like
creature capable of breathing air. Connecting his work with the
axolotl and the development and birth of his own child, Huxley
published his experiment in Nature and was quickly greeted by
sensationalized newspaper headlines in the mass-circulation Daily
Mail: “Young Huxley has discovered the Elixir of Life”; “A Great
Discovery. Thyroid Gland Marvels. Control of Sex and Growth.
Renewal of Youth” (Squier, Babies, 36). Huxley received so many
letters that he wrote an article to clear up misconceptions and thus
launched his career as a popular science writer. Squier explains,
The axolotl experiment . . . illustrates the domaining effect:

the subtle shift that takes place in ideas when they move from
one cultural or social context to another. As the ideas moved
from Kingsley’s fairy story to Huxley’s adult scientific work,
they continued to reflect Kingsley’s interest in development and
differentiation. But—and here’s the domaining effect—reflecting
the new instrumental preoccupation of the scientific realm,
Huxley did more than observe development and differentiation.
He tried to reconstruct it. Moreover, as he transferred those
principles—embodied by the water-babies and Mother Carey—
from fiction to fact, what got lost was Kingsley’s warning against
meddling in nature’s secrets. A fictional affirmation that there
are limits to human knowledge became a scientific assertion that
there should be no such limits. (38)
Further, as Squier documents, Huxley continued in 1922 to explore

possible reproductive technologies from scientific experiments,
publishing an essay provocatively titled “Searching for the Elixir
of Life” in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. In the piece,
he speculates about human tissue culture, immortality, and how
“primitive man” might use such technologies if they were available.
Huxley refers to the research of French surgeon and biologist Alexis
Carrel at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, a hotbed of tissue
culture research.9 Highlighting the work of analogy in science,
Squier explains, “The tissues cultured by Carrel were not human,
but avian. But when Huxley addressed the implications of tissue
culture, he characteristically worked by analogy, shifting to consider
the implications of the tissue-culture process for the human being.
He also shifted the context for considering tissue culture from
science to fiction in the course of his essay, mirroring a process of
discursive drift common in the culture at large” (42).
That movement into fiction led Squier to an archive now rich for
the new modernist studies: the wildly popular science fiction pulp
magazines of the 1920s. In August 1927, Huxley published “The
Tissue-Culture King,” a fictionalization of the issues his Century essay
addressed, in Hugo Gernsback’s quintessential sci-fi pulp, Amazing
Stories. The issue also featured a reserialization of H. G. Wells’s The
War of the Worlds and another story, by A. Hyatt Verrill, entitled
“The Ultra-Elixir of Life,” that, as Squier explains, “fictionalizes the
process of developmental reversal through endocrine treatment that
Huxley discussed in ‘Searching for the Elixir of Life’” (Squier 43).
Francis Flagg’s “The Machine Man of Ardathia,” published in the
November 1927 issue of Amazing Stories, “not only anticipates the
machinery for embryo culture as part of in vitro fertilization, but
is an uncanny anticipation of our dominant current representation
of the product of IVF—the test-tube baby—in the sketch of a
dome-headed, naked creature enclosed in a transparent oblong
glass tube” (Squier 45–46). Huxley’s “Tissue-Culture King” has its
roots in the descriptions of king worship in West Africa in James
Frazer’s The Golden Bough; it shifts tissue culture into the human
realm of imperial adventure, scientific experiments on life, and
primitivist religious fantasy; and it moves the horrors of Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness into the biological realm (Squier 49). Huxley’s
protagonist, Hascombe, is a medical researcher who saves his own
life by giving an African king the secrets to culturing his own tissue,
thus deliberately grafting tissue culture, experimental embryology,

endrocrine treatment, and artificial parthenogenesis onto the tribal
religion of his captors.
Environmental science
This chapter has largely been concerned with the emerging sciences
of life at the level of the organism or even the cell. But global warming,
mass extinction, environmental toxicity, precarious food supplies,
and other imperatives of early-twenty-first-century ecological crises
have led scholars to focus on nature and the environment in the
modernist period. Seeking methodologies for addressing these
broad concepts, over the last decade scholars of modernism have
registered the considerable impact of ecocritical and ecofeminist
concerns on their work. While most of the sciences and technologies
we have examined in this volume were in considerable flux or even
undergoing paradigm shifts during the modernist period, much
of the ecocritical turn in modernist studies stems from unsettling
changes in our own era; nevertheless, this research has produced
stunning new views of the culture of modernism. Let us turn here to
a few examples grounded in the biological and ecological discourses
of the modernist period.
Biocentrism
Along with concepts of “nature” and the “natural,” the
Enlightenment and modernity also bequeathed us an industrial
capitalist society and economy that now imperils the natural world
and the ecosystems that sustain life on our planet. There has long
been a propensity to view modernist culture in association with
industrial and urban modernization, and, indeed, with some of the
ideologies and forces that most militate against the flourishing of
the natural world. Recently, scholars have sought to balance those
aspects of modernism with a neglected current of modernism
rooted in nature-centric ideologies. Oliver A. I. Botar and Isabel
Wünsche’s edited collection Biocentrism and Modernism (2011),
for instance, includes work that explores the many strands of
nature-centric modernism under the rubric “biocentrism” (derived
from the German term Biozentrik, from German philosophical and

popular science writing of the period):
In defining “nature-centrism” or “Biocentrism,” what we have

done is to identify a series of discourses which, while differing
from each other in certain respects, shared a set of themes,
attitudes, and topoi relating to nature, biology, and epistemology.
While distinguishable from each other, these discourses held in
common a set of tenets that included a belief in the primacy of
life and life processes, of biology as the paradigmatic science of
the age, as well as an anti-anthropocentric worldview, and an
implied or expressed environmentalism. (2)
In short, Botar and Wünsche, and the several art historians whose
research is represented in their volume, are not arguing that there
was a formal Biocentrism movement, like Surrealism or Futurism,
or even a single set of ideologies or origins to the work they explore.
Rather, they chart the “pervasive interest on the part of many early
to mid-twentieth-century Modernist visual cultural practitioners in
this particular set of ideas” (3). The volume’s research ranges from
the concept of the city as an organism in German urban planning and
gardening (Haney and Sohn), or on how microbiology influences
the natural forms in the late work of Kandinsky, or on Hans Arp,
Max Ernst, and Joan Miró (Barnett), or the organic and biological
in the Russian avant-garde (Wünsche) to essays on a “Nature
Romanticism” or “Neo-Romantic tradition” in modern art, such
as that of Paul Klee (Wucher; Henry). Other contributors expose
the anarchist politics of biocentrism in Herbert Read’s modernism
(Antliff) and provide a keen account of the meanings of the term
“biocentrism” (Botar). The research in Biocentrism and Modernism
shows an impressive critical mass emerging in art history to
rebalance accounts of modernism to include this biocentric current
as deserving the attention that, say, technology or pure abstraction
have received in the scholarship.
Nature study, ecocriticism/ecofeminism

Moving from the wide-ranging scholarship on biocentrism in
modernist art history, we now turn to a much more narrowly
focused example of the influence of current ecologically based
methodologies on modernist studies: the proliferating research

on Virginia Woolf and the study of nature. Though this critical
inquiry has been sharpening over the last decade, it has resulted
in a number of key conference papers, impressive monographs,
and edited collections in the past few years, such as the papers in
Kristin Czarnecki and Carrie Roman’s collection, Virginia Woolf
and the Natural World: Selected Papers of the Twentieth Annual
International Conference on Virginia Woolf (2011), Christina Alt’s
Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature (2010), and Bonnie Kime
Scott’s In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist
Uses of Nature (2012).
The confluence of modernist studies and science and technology
studies that has been the subject of this volume may productively be
broadened to include developments in ecocriticism and ecofeminism
that are animated by similar concerns in many areas. Often, even the
same scholars serve to inspire or elucidate arguments in all of these
arenas. In her 2012 volume, In the Hollow of the Wave, Bonnie
Kime Scott, for example, turns to the writings of Haraway, whom
we have encountered in the modernist scholarship of Squier, Meyer,
and others in this chapter. Invoking her as an ecofeminist, Scott
adopts Haraway’s term, “natureculture,” for its rejection of the
binary commonly held since the Enlightenment (In the Hollow, 2).
Haraway, as Scott points out, “began blurring the borders between
nature and culture with ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ in Simians, Cyborgs,
and Women,” but Haraway’s more recent work, When Species
Meet, “concerning dogs and humans, develops the concept most
deliberately” (In the Hollow, 221, note 1). As Haraway herself puts
it in When Species Meet, “I am a part of the Kindred Spirits human
and non-human animal community in many of the same ways in
which I have been part of the ecofeminist world, in response to
whom I wrote the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ in 1985. I also was and am
part of the experimental biological science community to whom that
cyborg paper was equally addressed” (86). But these communities
have all developed and shifted since Haraway’s first book, Crystals,
Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors That Shape Embryos (1976), that has
been so relevant to later science and literature work in modernism.
What one might see in recent scholarship on Virginia Woolf and
nature study are two impulses that, at times, proceed comfortably
in company, and at others times less so. Scott’s volume is a strong
example of the confluence. She draws upon and further work on
Woolf’s life and writings in the context of key scientific issues of

her day, citing not only the emerging scholarship on Woolf and
biological and natural history traditions changing during her lifetime,
but also work grounded squarely in the physical sciences, such as
Holly Henry’s work cited elsewhere in this volume on Woolf and
astronomy. Scott’s is a project perhaps best described by a chapter
titled “Toward a Greening of Modernism” in her book. In the
Hollow of the Wave takes on a range of entries into the cultures and
ideologies of “natureculture” in Woolf’s work, from its relationship
to Darwinian and other natural history traditions that emerged in
Woolf’s childhood and early adulthood—the Stephen family, as
Scott compellingly points out, had many connections with Darwin
himself and his work and family—to landscape and gardening,
collecting, and species barrier crossing. She ultimately makes an
argument for turning to Woolf for ideas of “environmental holism.”
Like much of her earlier feminist work, Scott’s volume takes
a stand against what she sees even in the new modernist studies
(and even by key Woolf scholars) as an ongoing dismissal of
nature and the natural world: “Despite their growing critique of
the old modernism, proponents of the new modernist studies, and
even feminists writing recently on Virginia Woolf, seem little more
interested than their predecessors in modernist uses of nature” (2).
Cultural studies itself, still informing the new modernist studies,
seems to Scott to continue the nature/culture binary and focus
upon only one of that pair. While attempting a “greening” of
scholarship on several modernist figures—looking at the natural
world as it touched writers from Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis,
and D. H. Lawrence to H. D., James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and
Djuna Barnes—Woolf ultimately takes the central position in
her study, in part because she is seen as a kind of ecofeminist
avant la lettre. From the conception of holistic order evident in
Woolf’s texts, to her interest in breaking down species barriers,
even in Woolf’s focus on goddess figures and reappropriation of
“classical and pagan myths to explore the ideas of balanced and
sustainable order” (12), Woolf is shown as, essentially, a modernist
ecofeminist. Scott’s goal is clearly focused on the present in its turn
to the resources of the past: “Undeniable global warming, costly,
diminishing supplies of oil, and the global spread of technological
modernity contribute to our present cultural and natural crisis. One
way to reach toward a sustainable future is to develop awareness
of previous uses of nature” (12). Scott concludes that she hopes

her book will “demonstrate that Woolf’s writing is both sustaining
and renewable. Sustaining and renewing require questioning
and resisting discourses and practices of the past, leading to a
creative, concerted effort to apply to new circumstance what
we find of use” (12). Scott’s call to use the emerging ecofeminist
consciousness of a writer such as Woolf to augment our resources
for understanding the present is akin to Squier’s efforts, discussed
earlier in this chapter, to look at the early history of the images and
discourse of contemporary reproductive technologies in order to
better understand the complexities of controversies that can all too
easily seem settled or more simple than they really are.
Other key voices in this recent turn in Woolf studies have
been more cautious about the ecocritical orientation of Woolf’s
writings toward contemporary ecofeminism. Though sharing the
salutary interest in Woolf’s engagements with the natural world
and discourses of science of her period, Alt nevertheless cautions
against the reading of Woolf as a proto-ecofeminist: “the arguments
of Woolf’s prescience can be disputed through reference to Woolf’s
contemporary scientific context” (9). Alt’s carefully and meticulously
researched Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature augments the
case I have been making in this volume that modernism emerged
during and contributed to major paradigm shifts in virtually all of
the sciences and many technologies. For Alt, the important shift
occurs from Victorian to twentieth-century attitudes and methods
involved in the study of nature. She thoroughly documents with
Woolf’s letters, diaries, and other writings her own engagement with
and shifting understanding of Victorian-era taxonomic sciences
of nature study toward newer disciplines and systems of ecology,
ethology, the science of animal behavior, and laboratory biology of
the living environment, in its complexity and vitality, rather than
in the dead specimens of her Darwinian and specimen-collecting
childhood. Alt relies upon revisionist historians of science, such as
Adrian Desmond and Paul White, who “assert that modern biology
is as much a product of the nineteenth-century displacement of
taxonomic museum work by the new biology of the laboratory as a
result of disputes over evolutionary theory” (11).
As Alt explains, Woolf uses analogies from the study of nature in
her understanding both of criticism and writing: “Woolf employs
analogies drawn from the study of nature as a means of articulating
not only the fictional method under critique but also the alternative
approaches possible. These alternatives take different forms and
might be variously described as a protectionist, an ethological, or an
ecological perspective, regardless of the specific alternative that she
chooses in a given situation, however, Woolf describes each through
reference to contemporary trends in the study of nature” (174).
The tensions among these different forms of nature study and the
shifts in the ethics and discourse of science that they embody can
nowhere be more compellingly seen than in Alt’s brilliant work on
the revisions Woolf made in her most famous essay, “Mr Bennett and
Mrs Brown,” in 1924 (174–79). Her criticism of the “Edwardian”
approach to fiction (seen in Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy) leads to
her affirmation of a new “Georgian” approach in modernist writers,
including, of course, herself. The taxonomic approach of ranged
static specimens set out for display gives way to an emphasis on the
living, mutable subject. The impulse to classify, with which Woolf
fought in herself, led her to revise the language about Mrs. Brown
from one of “capture” to one of “protection” (176–77). Even with all
of the collecting of specimens that goes on across Woolf’s novels, for
Alt, Woolf participates in the shift toward contextual observation—
rather than detached classification—that was sweeping the nature
study of the period. Rather than making Woolf a proto-ecofeminist
of a later period, Alt shows us a Woolf very much of her period, but
more richly interesting in these areas than we might have suspected:
Reading Woolf’s representations of nature and its study with

modern developments in the life sciences as a frame of reference
reveals the complexity and coherence of her use of imagery
taken from the study of nature. Woolf drew upon the scientific
understanding of nature to enhance the particularity and
power of her own representations of the natural world, but her
engagement with the life sciences was not limited to a sampling
of biological facts. She was alert to disciplinary disputes that
divided practitioners of the life sciences and conscious of the
shift in focus and approach that altered the study of nature
during her lifetime. These tensions and trends provided her with
analogies through which to juxtapose contrasting approaches to
the representation of life in fiction and metaphors with which
to describe the shifts in method and objective that characterized
literary modernism. (191)
Beyond a doubt, the life sciences had come into their own in
the nineteenth century. After some seven decades of successes,
though, even the paradigmatic cell theory and other nineteenth-
century orthodoxies were in need of paradigms capable of
handling the complexities of organisms and ecosystems, of form
and development. Moreover, the amateur naturalists or natural
historians of the early nineteenth century had given way to the
professional biologists and neurological researchers working in
modern laboratories in university graduate and medical schools
at the fin de siècle. We have been exploring modernist culture’s
emergence in the collective ferment of the scientific, technological,
and social changes of the period. In this chapter, we have seen the old
vitalist/mechanist binary breakdown, yielding revolutionary results
not just in organicism and neurology, or in our understanding of the
boundaries of the body or even the species, but also in modernist
experimental writing practices and visual arts. What remains for us
to consider are the results for modernism when the lens of rapidly
professionalizing science focused sharply on the human mind and
the human in its social and cultural environment. We now must turn
to the modernist-era social sciences, whose diversity of approaches
and whose subject matter might cause us to question whether they
espoused new paradigms or simply operated without paradigms
altogether.
Notes
1 Historians of science have recently made clear the inaccuracy of the
mythology that Mendel’s work was neglected as ahead of its time
when originally published but then “rediscovered” in 1900. Rather,
revisionists have shown, Mendel’s work was known and discussed
upon its publication as a contribution to the understanding of
hybridization and speciation (neither “heredity” nor “inheritance”
was mentioned in the publication, which was, in fact, fairly typical
science of its period), and Mendel’s work was reinterpreted with an
understanding of its current significance as the result of a priority
dispute between two scientists in 1900 (Moore 13–24).
2 Ritter invokes William James’s critiques of associationist psychology,
and argues, “Now the objection to the doctrine of ‘atomistic ideas’
does not so much concern the conception of ideas as atoms as the
nature attributed to these atoms, namely in assuming them to be

immutable, and sufficient in their isolate capacities to account for the
thought and other products arising from their ‘association’” (2:229).
3 He cites the important work of the previous decade, including
Gillian Beer’s Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996),
Daniel Albright’s Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the
Science of Modernism (1997), and Ira Livingston’s Arrow of Chaos:
Romanticism and Post-modernity (1997).
4 Tellingly, a review of Moses’s Out of Character laments that
he misses opportunities to develop vitalism further as a critical
framework (Posman E3).
5 See, for example, Van Deren Coke’s The Painter and the Photograph
(1964) and Aaron Scharf’s Art and Photography (1968), and also
Kirk Varnedoe (1980) for a critique of Coke’s and Scharf’s arguments.
6 Connecting her scholarship on the modernist period to the work of
Brian Massumi and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Walter even suggests
that we might recognize “modernist impersonality’s afterimage in
something like contemporary affect theory,” but also that “affect
theory’s understanding of the political as a force that operates
both within and beyond ideology may help to explain modernist
impersonality’s political nature and why its diverse politics have long
been overlooked” (31).
7 Harrison had focused his research in two areas that would be swept
up in modernist literature of the period: the new neuron doctrine and
his laboratory technique of tissue culture that, as Haraway notes,
“inaugurat[ed] study of parts of the organism outside the body of the
animal” (71).
8 Harrison’s tissue culture techniques inspired his colleague at Hopkins,
Florence Sabin, to undertake her research into blood cells using
Harrison’s tissue culture techniques with cells from chicken embryos.
Incidentally, it was Sabin who worked with Stein on a project
mapping the anatomy of a newborn brain. Stein’s anatomy professor,
Franklin Mall, asked Sabin to unravel a wax model of a brain and
brainstem he’d asked Stein to make to salvage her medical degree.
Stein flunked out of Johns Hopkins medical school over this project,
but Sabin went on to promotion to full professor at Hopkins and
ultimately to be head of a department at the Rockefeller Institute
in New York City where tissue culture began to make the press
headlines (See Nicholas 407; Firkin 7).
9 In 1912, Carrel published a scientific article, “On the Permanent Life
of Tissues outside of the Organism,” that reported on his experiments
to maintain tissue in culture media.
4
The social sciences
Sociology, anthropology, psychology

One might see sociology and social psychology, anthropology, and
psychology as quintessential sciences of modernism. Across the later
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the social sciences rapidly
professionalized and began to consolidate authority in academia.
These developments suggest that the social sciences had reached a
critical degree of professional self-awareness during the modernist
period—and that the institutionalization of the nineteenth-century
physical sciences in the university and its attendant academic
associations had offered a strategic model for the new social
scientists, who sought to legitimate themselves to other scientists
and to the broader public. Perhaps there was additional urgency for
institutional structures to confer the imprimatur of science upon
these relatively young fields, as they all confronted thorny issues of
the nature of evidence in scientific claims about the human mind,
society, and culture, and they increasingly informed responses to
some of the most difficult issues in modernist culture. Following
physician and social commentator Max Nordau’s 1892 book
Degeneration (Entartung) and similar works by others, many
began to fear that a technologically frenetic urban modernity and a
decadent fin de siècle culture, coupled with the seemingly merciless
logic of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory—now transferred
to the domain of the human psyche and society—would inexorably
lead to the biological and mental degeneration of the human species.
Moreover, an unimaginably violent world cataclysm—the Great
War—maimed and destroyed not just the bodies but also the minds
of its survivors and provoked many to ask how civilized humans

could have reached such “primitive” levels of violence, aided by
advanced technologies of destruction that seemed to deprive those
survivors of the narratives of valor and honor that had given
meaning to previous wars. Changing views of human sexuality were
transforming society and culture in ways that liberated some and
incensed or frightened others. And the fact of physical and cognitive
difference in human life erupted into public spaces in new ways.
Given the very subject matter of the emerging fields of modern
psychology, sociology, and anthropology, these sciences were
inseparable from social and cultural conflict. Their newness and
lack of strong paradigms led to public controversy about the
legitimacy of their claims. (By comparison, the physical and
biological sciences had not faced such controversy since the advent
of evolutionary theory in the mid-nineteenth century.) The lack of
established paradigms forced the social sciences to engage directly
with the world outside the academy. Moreover, their extraordinarily
permeable disciplinary boundaries demonstrate the phenomenon
of “domaining” discussed in the previous chapter. Indeed, the
confluence of the political and social turbulence of the period (which
helped inspire theories of crowd psychology); evolutionary and
developmental paradigms of the life sciences; literary interchange;
and re-envisioning of human nature in terms of the primitive,
irrational, and unconscious (as well as by cultural, racial, and
shared social determinants) defines much of the social sciences of
the modernist period. Sexology, eugenics, and the American back to
nature movement emerged from this environment, and these areas
have drawn the most interest in modernist studies in recent decades.
Institutionalizing sociology
and anthropology
Sociology sought its own professional identity within an already
existing field of other social science disciplinary organizations.
The American Sociological Association was founded in 1905 by
C. W. A. Veditz of George Washington University. Respondents to
his survey of prominent American sociologists (all at universities)
suggested the possibility of simply forming a new section of the
The social sciences 119
Economic Association, to which many of the sociologists belonged,

or of forming a society like the Historical or Political Science
Association. Ultimately, they decided to form their own separate
association. Beyond the concern about the public perception of
sociology as a science, as Veditz explained, “sociologists have been
so largely accustomed to working along divergent lines, and so
frequently hold radically different views, that there seems to be
peculiar justification for some sort of an organization which shall
bring together at regular intervals those interested in the same
group of problems, and permit of that interchange of ideas and
comparisons of projects which in other fields of knowledge has
so frequently contributed to the advancement of science” (qtd in
Rhoades, Chapter 1).
American sociology in 1905 had neither a “paradigm,” in
Kuhn’s sense, nor really even the institutional infrastructure for the
functioning of “normal science.” The situation was much the same in
anthropology. There were already several anthropological societies
in the country, and the American Anthropological Association was
founded in 1902 to provide a national organization “to promote
the science of anthropology, to stimulate and coordinate the efforts
of American anthropologists, . . . and to publish and encourage
the publication of matter pertaining to anthropology” (“A Brief
History of Anthropology”). While sociologists and anthropologists
of this generation in America and Britain were successfully building
their profession within university departments and academic
associations, they also kept abreast of important claims coming
from European intellectuals, such as those about the psychology of
crowds made by Gustav Le Bon or about the degeneration caused
by urban modernity according to Max Nordau.
Studying crowds and peoples

Gustav Le Bon’s most important book, La psychologie des foules
(1895), translated into English as The Crowd: A Study of the
Popular Mind (1896), serves as a prime illustration of the porous
boundaries of these newly emerging sciences. Trained in medicine,
but exploring archaeology, anthropology, and ultimately the
confluence of psychology and sociology, Le Bon became a key voice
in the fin de siècle and modernist period’s effort to conceptualize
the “crowd” in scientific terms (see McClelland 151–81). As Mark

Micale notes, “Le Bon was trained medically but made his career in
social commentary. . . . Le Bon was strongly nationalistic, fearful of
the new social egalitarianism, and rabidly antisocialist. He was also
highly impressed by recent scientific research on animal magnetism,
somnambulism, hysteria, and hypnosis” (“Discourses of Hysteria,”
80). Le Bon conceptualized crowd behavior in terms of atavism,
primitivism, and irrational influence, noting that the individual is no
longer an individual in a crowd, but an “automaton.” “Moreover,”
he continues,
by the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man

descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he
may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—
that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity,
the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism
of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the
facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words
and images—which would be entirely without action on each
of the isolated individuals composing the crowd—and to be
induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests
and his best-known habits. (19)
In other words, the individual in the crowd loses his or her self-
control and is susceptible to some kind of shared primitive racial
unconscious.1 Le Bon’s argument synthesized the biological theories
of Lamarck, Darwin, and Haeckel on heredity and the human with
the anthropology of primitivism and the psychological discourse of
hysteria (which also influenced the new criminology represented by
Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Mind of 1893). As Micale explains,
“Le Bon drew the building blocks of his psychology from Lamarck’s
evolutionary biology, Charcot’s theory of hysterical pathology,
and Hippolyte Bernheim’s ideas about hypnotic suggestion”
(“Discourses of Hysteria,” 80). Moreover, The Crowd was to
become a key source of fascist theories of leadership. Both Hitler
and Mussolini read it for its insights into the use of the myths of the
masses in the manipulation of the mass mind (Mosse 192).
The example of The Crowd demonstrates a key tension between
conceptions of the self in the modern period. Some modernists
envisioned the individual as discrete from and able to resist the
crushing weight of mass culture, social influence, and political

and ideological determination. (See, for instance, the echoes of the
Egoist philosophy of Max Stirner in early Anglophone modernism
via Dora Marsden in prewar London.) Others understood the self
as ineluctably formed by forces well beyond the conscious control
of the individual ego—whether the primitive unconscious force of
the drives, or of an evolutionary inheritance, or the social, cultural,
and even aesthetic construction of the self in a matrix of discourses.
The historicizing turn of modernist studies scholarship over the
past two decades has produced sophisticated accounts of those
slippery and recursively defined boundaries between the biological
and social, the scientific and humanistic that have focused on the
complex nature of the self in society in early social sciences. In
Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology, and Psychology
(2014), Paul Peppis situates his work as “a provisional work of
cultural archeology that aims to contribute to a broader and ongoing
culturalist effort to recover, re-view, and reassess” the relations
between modernist literature and science (13). Peppis thereby signals
his work’s rootedness in the so-called new modernist studies, even
while noting his debt to “an old modernist/new critical sense that
modernism is a literature of disjunction and disorientation” (12)
and appealing to close readings of individual modernist texts—in
his case, works by Claude McKay, E. M. Forster, Mina Loy, Rebecca
West, Wilfred Owen, and others.
But Peppis’s archaeological close reading also demonstrates the
“analytic attention to the performative effects and affordances of
literary and linguistic dimensions of science” (557) that we have
seen Bono and others identify as a hallmark of the recent, or
second, generation of literature and science. Peppis also focuses his
literary lens on the scientific texts themselves, rather than simply
using them as contexts or references for modernist literature. And,
perhaps signaling the crucial significance of early anthropology and
its wrestling with the role of the observer in fieldwork, Peppis begins
his account of the sciences of modernism not with the more settled
participant-observer classic of British anthropological fieldwork,
Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922),
or with Franz Boas’s studies (which influenced, among others,
Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston), but rather with Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness and an extended reading of Alfred Cort Haddon’s
Head-Hunters: Black, White, and Brown (1901). Later becoming
Cambridge University’s first chair in ethnology, Haddon’s major

early fieldwork was as a member of the Cambridge Anthropological
Expedition to the Torres Straits in 1898–99 (coinciding with the
publication of Heart of Darkness in Blackwood’s Magazine in
1899). As Peppis notes, what distinguishes Haddon’s work from
that of other anthropologists of his time also most closely aligns
it with “early works of modernism in literature concerned with
cross-cultural encounters at empire’s outposts, especially Heart
of Darkness and Woolf’s The Voyage Out” (20). “The form and
vision of Head-Hunters,” Peppis continues, “are considerably less
holistic than those of Argonauts; Haddon’s text is more disjointed
and varied. . . . A generic mongrel, Head-Hunters draws extensively,
like Heart of Darkness, on the late nineteenth-century ‘amateur
productions’ that Malinowski disdains—travel ethnographies,
adventure fiction, popular science books” (21). What Peppis shows,
ultimately, is the extent to which “a popularizing science book
written by a recognized white scientist . . . uses literary tools to
justify a new science and set of scientific methods” (55).
Mass-Observation
On the other side of Malinowski, another focus of modernist
studies has been on the work of the 1930s Mass-Observation
movement associated with the anthropologist Tom Harrisson,
documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, and surrealist poet
(later turned sociology professor) Charles Madge. The project,
created in 1937 to enlist hundreds of volunteers to observe and
record the daily lives of the British, resulted in a number of research
projects and publications, the most famous of which was the first:
its survey report on the coronation day of George V, entitled May
the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937 by over two
hundred observers. Emerging from the rise of anthropological
observation, sociology, literary modernism, documentary film, and
British surrealism, Mass-Observation’s special role in interwar
British modernism continues to preoccupy modernist studies.
Recent scholarship sees Mass-Observation arising at a moment
when, as James Buzard puts it, modernism in Britain had “made its
peace with nationalism” in late Eliot and early Auden, in Pound’s
departure, and in the supplanting of Lewis’s early avant-garde
rebellion. Anthropology, too, “had passed through its militant

self-advertising stage and taken its place among the accredited
disciplines; it too had gone from stressing its boundary-defying
aspects to stressing its boundary-securing ones” (Buzard 98). The
tension in the Mass-Observation project and in literary modernism
emerges in the position of the ethnographer, or the observing
subject: “One account implies a narrative sequence in which the
successful ethnographer proceeds into the alien culture and then
out again; the other invokes a single image of the ethnographer’s
simultaneous appearance on either side of the subject/object
divide, a splitting of the self that increases rather than diminishes
its authority” (Buzard 104). Mass-Observation’s May the Twelfth
began its mass observation of the quotidian life of British citizens in
February 1937 in anticipation of the coronation to take place three
months later. Of it, Buzard concludes that
Madge and Jennings seem to have been unable to avoid giving

about half of their energy to the task of completing the one great
national portrait or story, the one grand auto-ethnography, rather
than to the single-minded construction of the picture or story of
difference-within-the-nation, of difference that would never need
or tend to become “nation.” In this they aligned themselves once
more with the latter-day modernism of their time. This was an
aesthetic whose newly learned hospitality to national traditions
and resonances was impelling it toward figurations of cultural
authority from the perspective of which a nation’s factions might
appear, as T. S. Eliot would put it, “united in the strife which
divided them.” (117; emphasis in original)
Building on the work of James Hinton and Mike Savage, Nick

Hubble further clarifies this moment as one of “middlebrow”
modernism, or, more specifically, “intermodernism,” exploring
“the dissemination of the ideas of imagism and surrealism by the
Mass-Observation founders to its lower-middle class membership
as an example of the interaction between modernist techniques
and middlebrow culture, which transformed that culture in the late
1930s and contributed to the wider socio-cultural changes that took
place in mid-twentieth-century Britain” (202). Sociologist Mike
Savage sees the methods of social science as allowing the Mass-
Observers to break the constraints of the class categories (461).
Indeed, Harrisson, Jennings, and Madge, in a letter of January 30,

1937 to the New Statesman, offered the tools of the social sciences
not for the sake of academic research itself, but rather for social and
cultural transformation:
Mass Observation develops out of anthropology, psychology,

and the sciences which study man—but it plans to work with a
mass of observers. . . . It does not set out in quest of truth or facts
for their own sake, or for the sake of an intellectual minority,
but aims at exposing them in simple terms to all observers, so
that their environment may be understood, and thus constantly
transformed. Whatever the political methods called upon to effect
the transformation, the knowledge of what is to be transformed
is indispensable. (qtd in Hubble 204–05)
Tracking the role of early modernist Imagism and later British

surrealism in the social science research of the movement, Hubble
shows that Mass-Observation can “be seen as a paradigmatic example
of the manner in which the 1930s middlebrow transformation from
a defensive anti-working-class culture to a confident progressive one
was due in part to the extension and incorporation of modernist
techniques” (208). Mass-Observation, then, was
an organization that recruited the type of younger lower-middle-

class progressive individuals that were attracted to Penguins and
the Left Book Club, while promoting examples of modernist
imagism . . . deliberately seeking to bring art and science
together. By calling for an anthropology of British life, it invited
its respondents to think about the extent to which they were
both part of, and part outside, that society. It thereby reconciled
individualism to the collective without subsuming it, diminishing
potential feelings of isolation and alienation while supporting
self-reflection and promoting its development into a conscious
self-reflexivity. (210)
Historicizing psychology and its practices

The American Psychological Association (APA) was founded in
1892, and psychology expanded rapidly inside academia and, even
more so, in a new class of applied clinicians that gained admittance
to the APA as associate members in 1926.2 The British Psychological

Society was founded at the University of London in 1901, by,
among others, W. H. R. Rivers, who would then found the British
Journal of Psychology in 1904. As an academic and laboratory
discipline, psychology had already emerged in the mid-Victorian
period against the backdrop of legislation such as the Criminal
Lunatics Act of 1860. Often interpreted in modernist studies
through the lens of Michel Foucault’s “biopower,” psychology was
a willing participant in the modern state’s “explosion of numerous
and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and
the control of populations” (History of Sexuality 1:140, 1976).3
But these British and American psychological societies also had
institutional competition from the rapidly emerging institutional
infrastructure for psychoanalysis. Freud himself had founded
the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1910, and
Ernest Jones had founded or cofounded several other institutions
serving the Anglophone world—the American Psychopathological
Association in 1910, the American Psychoanalyticial Association in
1911, the London Psychoanalytical Society in 1913, and the British
Psychoanalytical Society in 1919. Continental psychiatric and other
medical journals were early publishers of psychoanalytic texts, but,
in 1920, Jones launched the International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
and Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press would eventually
publish the definitive English translation of Freud’s works: James
Strachey’s Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, in twenty-four volumes.
Psychology has perhaps been the social science that has
received the most attention in modernist studies for many decades.
Until recently, I would argue, psychology (and, in particular,
psychoanalysis) has been more prominent as a theoretical tool in
literary interpretation than it has been as a historicized aspect of
modernist science. It would be well beyond the scope of this volume
to address the vast literature of Freudian, Lacanian, Kristevan,
and other psychoanalytic readings of modernist literature. Recent
efforts have begun to consider neuroscience and neuropsychiatry in
this mix of psychoanalysis and modernist aesthetics.4
Two trends that I would identify with the new modernist studies
have emerged in the exploration of psychology and psychoanalysis.
First, the approach to psychoanalysis has shifted from seeing it
primarily as a contemporary critical methodology—from using
psychoanalytic concepts as tools for interpreting modernist work
in a largely ahistorical way—to historicizing psychoanalysis itself

as a feature of modernism. For example, Dana Seitler, in Atavisitic
Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity
(2008), provides a fascinating exploration of the psychoanalytic
case study and of psychoanalysis’s broader project. She turns to
science studies scholarship, such as Latour’s We Have Never Been
Modern, and the work of Isabelle Stengers and Foucault, as well
as to Lorraine Daston’s practice of “historical epistemology”—
“the history of the categories that structure our thought” (qtd in
Seitler 34). Psychoanalysis was undoubtedly popularized during the
modernist period—emphasizing an alienated conscious “in need
of cognitive restoration (in the idiomatic forms of ‘finding oneself’
or ‘getting in touch,’ for example)” (Seitler 35). Seitler then sees
this psychoanalytic project of self-restoration as part of the “deep
architecture of modernity,” and, indeed,
as a continuing discourse in the enterprise of the modern

liberal subject. Precisely by refusing enlightenment concepts
of unmediated consciousness, self-identical personhood, and
self-possession, the therapeutic process proffers itself as both
the discoverer of the split self and the bridge between its parts,
thus restoring the self to the self as a self. And by positing the
psychoanalytic subject as the transhistorical, transgeographical
subject of modernity, Freudian psychoanalysis participates in
the insistence of the universality of the human subject more
generally. (36)
More common than this philosophical historicization of

psychoanalysis, though, has been the historicizing turn of many
scholars to a broader range of contexts for a mutually developing
modernism and psychology. A key work in this growing line of
inquiry is Judith Ryan’s The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology
and Literary Modernism (1991), which takes Franz Brentano, Ernst
Mach, and William James, rather than Freud, as key figures for
early modernism, and explores a growing detachment of the idea
of consciousness from a personal self. More recently, Micale and
the scholars whose work he collects in The Mind of Modernism
show an even broader range of significant figures, emerging from
schools of hypnotism in the 1880s (Charcot in Paris, for example)
and elsewhere. For Micale, who explores both a very literary,
novelistic form of the psychological case history and also a wide

field of interaction among modernist literature and psychology, a
defining guideline has been “the need to move beyond Freud. An
astonishing share of the scholarship about this subject continues
to take the form of influence studies of psychoanalysis in which
Freud—and occasionally Jung—are presented as the sole
exemplars of psychological modernism. In contrast, this volume
reflects a growing scholarly desire to explore the larger world of
ideas, attitudes, and practices around Freud. Recent psychiatric
historiography establishes unmistakably that, for all of its eventual
cultural influence, which was immense, psychoanalysis was only
one of many emerging models of mind that comprised the coming of
early dynamic psychiatry and that contributed to the constitution of
the modern psychological self” (“The Modernist Mind: A Map,” 7).
Indeed, as Eric Kandel has noted, “Unlike the Copernican and
Darwinian revolutions, the realization that our mental functioning
is largely irrational was arrived at by several thinkers at the same
time, including Friedrich Nietzsche in the middle of the nineteenth
century. . . . Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele also
discovered and explored new aspects of our unconscious mental
life” (14–15). Ascribing a paradigm shift to one individual, Freud,
would be problematic—though Kuhn was well aware that science
does not function on this kind of great man theory. The historicism
of the new modernist studies has produced some highly significant
accounts of a much more diverse field of psychological research—
some of it crucial for the development of psychoanalytic theories
of hysteria, some of it demonstrating very different disciplinary
assumptions, all of them important as we try to account for the
rise of both psychology and modernism. Micale notes several
areas of “cultural affinities between aesthetic and psychological
Modernism” (2). These include a “turn inward,” an “ongoing
psychologization of . . . methods,” an engagement “beneath surface
reality of reason in order to uncover deeper irrational or nonrational
levels of human experience and cognition,” an understanding of
multiple levels of mental life (conscious, unconscious, and other
supposed dimensions), a destabilization of the self, a response
to the “subjectivity of individual consciousness and its relation
to the external world,” a concern with the “nature and structure
of individual personality,” an investigation of the psychology
of sexuality and states of psychopathology and of the so-called
savage or primitive mind, an antirealist turn in response to the

epistemological problems of positivism, and “new techniques of
narration to capture the inner workings of the human mind and the
moment-by-moment experience of individual consciousness” (2).
As Micale concludes, “The links between the arts and psychiatry
are closer than those between the arts and any other branch of
medicine; and arguably, in no period were they closer than during
the turn of the last century” (2).
Even as the professional organizations and academic institutions
increasingly insisted upon professional credentials, during the
modernist period a number of self-trained practicing therapists
drew together a mixture of psychoanalysis (usually Freudian- and
Jungian-inspired), self-help and lifestyle coaching (advocates of
vegetarianism, meditation, and country retreats), and occasionally
even ritual magic or hermetic alchemical ideas. A psychoanalytic
interpretation of alchemy, for example, informed not only Jung’s work
but also that of Freud’s protégé Herbert Silberer, whose 1914 book
Probleme der Mystik und Ihrer Symbolik (Problems of Mysticism
and Its Symbolism) was criticized by Freud (possibly contributing
to Silberer’s suicide). Silberer’s psychoanalytic interpretation of
alchemy influenced Jung, whose substantial engagement with
alchemy in turn inspired Israel Regardie’s practice and writings.
And Elizabeth Severn’s prominent role in the Alchemical Society of
London during the war preceded her controversial mutual analysis
with Sándor Ferenczi.5 Many of these alternative therapeutics aimed
either at a kind of spiritual self-transformation of the psyche or at
an epistemological insight gained through the experience of ritual.
As could be said of psychoanalysis, these therapies became an
epistemological practice, a form of knowledge production, though
they often gestured outside of the mind of the patient for the source
of this new knowledge and self-transmutation.6 Indeed, the very
range of therapeutic approaches spoke to the difficulty of reducing
the mind to the imperatives of scientific medicine.
The challenge for psychology emerging in the late nineteenth
century was, essentially, the problem of hysteria, which, as Micale
notes, did not lend itself well to the reigning positivist understanding:
Throughout the period, the orthodoxies of medical positivism

remained firmly intact: in sickness and health, the human body
and mind were to be studied, understood, and eventually mastered
through precise and detailed observation by a community of

experts. Pathology was seen to have rational causes, subject
to immutable and ascertainable patterns or laws. Conversely,
nonempirical methods of investigation and sources of insight were
to be rejected as corrupting, contaminating forces in the quest
for objective value-neutral knowledge. Positivist medical science
was the ultimate “discourse of the real,” seeking to produce an
authoritative account of an unproblematically real world of the
human body and mind. (“Discourses of Hysteria,” 90)
For Micale, modernism “entailed an increasing separation of

representation from ‘the real’” (“Discourses of Hysteria,” 89), and
the inability to fix an identity or medical interpretation of hysteria
made it a key challenge to the psychology of the period and made
it especially relevant to modernism: “Shapeless and ever-changing,
unfixed and indefinable, endlessly open to interpretation, a signifier
without a signified, hysteria is Modernism” (Micale, “Discourses of
Hysteria,” 90; emphasis in original).
Shell shock
One of the most noted phenomena of the Great War was both a
product of the age’s technologies and, in many ways, invisible in
comparison to the missing limbs, gas-ravaged faces, and destroyed
bodies coming home from the front. The diagnosis of shell shock
brought together several technologies and differing areas of
psychiatric discourse. As Wyatt Bonkowski highlights in Shell
Shock and the Modernist Imagination: The Death Drive in Post-
World War I British Fiction (2013), the British press noted as early
as 1916 that soldiers were being wounded by invisible forces (of
concussive shells) in body but also in the mind. One such report
noted that the new technologies of war produced “a force which
killed without injuring, which seemed to unseat the mind itself, and
to deprive a man of all his faculties while yet not a scratch could
be detected upon his skin” (qtd in Bonkowski 17). Papers such as
The Times were not allowed to publish photos of the dead, but
could focus, instead, upon those wounded, physically (gas victims,
for example) or mentally: “Photographs of shell-shocked soldiers,
on the other hand, were printed for public consumption, showing
blank faces and twisted limbs, suggesting a haunting excess written

on the surface of the body but pointing to a deeper, invisible
disturbance” (2). For Bonkowski, the return of these soldiers
“presented a problem of representation and memorialization” (2).
They also marked an infusion of psychoanalytic thought into the
British medical establishment, Bonkowski argues (21), and he reads
the novels of Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf
as seeking modes of expression for trauma that he reads in largely
psychoanalytic terms. The ethical dimension of his monograph
culminates in a reading of Freud’s notion of the death drive, in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and later works, as “a concept for
what remains unknowable and unthinkable in human experience
[that] serves to mark the limit of knowledge that we must pursue . . .
[and] encourages us to remain wary of ideologies, both political and
aesthetic, that reinforce illusion and reclaim fantasies of health and
wholeness or that insist on a notion of ‘cure’ as a return to normalcy”
(176). This turn to Freud’s psychoanalytic understanding of shell
shock elaborated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is still a common
feature of modernist studies accounts, even as they bring them into
conversation with more recent trauma-theory frameworks.
Modernist studies has increasingly complicated the institutional
histories of medicine, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis that Bonkowski
sees coming together in psychoanalytically inflected responses, even
within British psychiatry, to shell shock. Exploring the founding of the
London Psychoanalytic Association in 1913 and the launch in 1920
of the London-based International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, along
with the notions of madness in psychiatry during the interwar period,
Kylie Valentine argues in Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry, and Modernist
Literature (2003) that, while it would be an oversimplification
in the history of interwar English psychiatry to see an absolute
polarization between somatic and mentalist approaches, those
dynamics were part of the institutional struggle that shaped their
fields: “Very few of even the most ardent somaticist psychiatrists
rejected altogether any psychological factors; most psychoanalysts,
including Freud, noted the primacy of physical processes in certain
kinds of mental distress.” But, she continues, “during this period
the struggle for dominance between somaticist and mentalist
approaches was important to the formation of modern psychiatry,
and psychoanalysis played an important role in this struggle” (8–9).
Jeffrey Sconce tracks the confluence of nineteenth-century ether
physics, technologies of wireless transmission, imaginings about

occult telepathy, and psychoanalysis, noting that Freud’s postwar
works on telepathy “placed psychoanalysis in implicit dialogue
with wireless as the era’s other mysterious new science of occult
agency and communication. Underlying all of these phenomena—
psychoanalysis, telepathy, wireless—was a shared foundation in
energetic speculation about the transference of thought, an attempt
to explain seemingly occult phenomena in the air and in the mind
through the language of scientific naturalism” (34).
Viewing Grafton Elliot Smith and Tom Hatherley Pear’s claims
in Shell Shock and Its Lessons (published in 1917 by Manchester
University Press) as a shot across the bow of Victorian hereditarian
interpretations of mental illness and an institutional defense
of “psychiatric modernism,” Paul Peppis emphasizes that the
book contributed to a modernism that blurred the lines between
sanity and insanity and “diagnos[ed] modernity as a condition of
psychological trauma” (197). As Peppis shows, that project had
begun even before the first troops returned from the front with the
seemingly intractable condition at first diagnosed (by the military)
as cowardice and weakness and finally by the rising psychiatric
medical field as shell shock, a psychological condition that could
be caused by both physical and emotional trauma. Moreover, Smith
and Pear made the provocative claim now widely accepted today
about Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): it is not confined to the
battlefield. The lessons of Shell Shock and Its Lessons, its authors
argued, are “not only for our soldiers now, but also for our civilian
population for all time” (qtd in Peppis 197; emphasis in original).
Peppis reads together Bernard Hart’s early psychiatric modernist
volume, The Psychology of Insanity (1912), and Rebecca West’s early
modernist classic of shell-shock literature, The Return of the Soldier
(1918), as contributing “sometimes similarly, sometimes differently,
to two significant and intertwined cultural shifts crucial to what
modernism would become after the war, shifts in relations between
literature, science, and modern minds: the psychologizing of fiction
and science and the rendering of modernity as a psychologically
traumatizing historical condition” (198). The public judgment of the
new psychiatry emerging before the war, but gaining momentum in
part as a result of the frightening demands of shell shock, would in
part depend upon just how “scientific” the field could claim itself to
be. Hart knew this, and argued forcefully that the new psychology
was based upon the scientific method: the “scientist who devotes
himself to psychology proceeds in exactly the same manner as the
scientist who devotes himself to chemistry” (qtd in Peppis 201). The
most common claims for the new social sciences, however, would
be for their relationships to biology.
Intersections of biology and

the social sciences
Intervening in the “natural” processes of life—the material of science
fiction as far back as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—became
tenable in the laboratory and thus changed the stakes in efforts to
apply biological concepts to larger questions of social and cultural
organization. It is no doubt clear by now that what might seem like
a demarcation problem—the ineluctable entanglement of the “life
sciences” and “social sciences” during the modernist period—is not
so much a problem as a common and almost defining feature of
the science. These “human” or “social” sciences, often rooted in the
discoveries of biology (psychology and neurology, for example) and
often reflecting Victorian evolutionary theory as adapted to the ever-
increasing technological modernization of the early twentieth century,
could manifest themselves in issues that crossed multiple disciplines,
ideologies, politics, and even aesthetics. Since all of these sciences
dealt with human behavior, subjectivity, and identity, they also, even
more than the others this volume has examined, hotly engaged with
the social conflicts and shifting social mores and ideological struggles
of modernism. The concern with “degeneration,” for example, was
so omnipresent and variable that endless books and articles and
even political agendas were launched over it.7
The sciences that understood their subjects in terms of biology,
or the interaction of the cellular/biological and technological, social,
and cultural realms—early sexology, eugenics, and degeneration
theories—were arguably as significant to the modernist period as
psychoanalysis and anthropology were. In the face of advances in
laboratory science, even the most seemingly biologically determined
phenomena came to seem potentially alterable—intervention, or
tinkering with the machine, to use the mechanist’s favorite trope,
seemed within the grasp of the modern scientific thinker—and writers,
scientists, and an excited if anxious population could imagine a jump
from selective breeding of livestock or even tissue culturing of frog

neurons or chick embryonic tissue to experiments on human subjects.
In Chapter 2, we saw John Canaday lay out the sequence
of transformations from Soddy’s scientific lectures in The
Interpretation of Radium, to H. G. Wells’s fictional account of
nuclear bombs in The World Set Free, to the real bombs of the
Manhattan Project, where Leo Szilard and his colleagues were
reading Wells’s novel. Similar dynamics can be found that cross the
fields of biology, sexology, and eugenics. Susan Squier, for example,
traces the lineage from Julian Huxley’s reading of Charles Kingsley’s
The Water-Babies, his scientific research on endocrine treatments,
the scientific work on tissue culture, and his fictionalization in “The
Tissue Culture King,” to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World five
years after Julian’s story, and on to John Rock and Arthur Hertig’s
foundational work on in vitro fertilization of human ova, as both
Rock and Hertig acknowledge that they were partially inspired in
their work by reading Brave New World (55). Again, though, in
the process of domaining, “The dystopian vision of reproductive
technology embodied so forcefully in both Julian and Aldous
Huxley’s texts did not travel along with the technology” (Squier 55).
The domaining effect that Squier and Canaday discuss is especially
prominent in sciences that circulated widely across multiple social,
cultural, and historical contexts. One such science emerging from
the intersection of biology, social science, and sociopolitical debates
of the modernist period was sexology.
Sexology
Many modernist scholars, such as Anna Katharina Schaffner and
Shane Weller and others with essays in their collection Modernist
Eroticisms: European Literature After Sexology, find it necessary
to discuss sexology and psychoanalysis together, highlighting the
late-nineteenth-century secular shift from understanding “sexual
deviance” not in ethical or religious terms but rather in terms of
pathology (1). But Schaffner and Weller note an important distinction:
Most of the early sexological studies either embraced biological

(or what might now be seen as biopolitical) models, positing
degeneration and the inheritance of contaminated genetic
material as the origin of sexual perversion, or else argued that
the particular cultural conditions of modernity, and the adverse

effects of a decadent culture in rapid decline, were responsible for
the perversions that they encountered and sought to classify. In
the case of the latter interpretation, Max Nordau’s Degeneration
(1892–93) proved to be a powerful influence. It was only with
the publication in 1905 of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality that a theory transcending the innate-acquired binary
emerged. (2)
Freud’s volume, they note, drew upon the earlier sexological work
but also “rejected both the notion of biological determinism and
the degeneration paradigm, shifting the emphasis onto the terrain
of Oedipal struggles in childhood and arrested psycho-sexual
development” (2).
Much of the recent modernist studies scholarship on sexology
and eugenics emphasizes the active role of literary resources—
specific texts, tropes, or metaphors—in the development and
dissemination as well as critique of these sciences. The first volume
of Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976) inspired and continues
to influence the scholarship on sexuality in the modernist period.
Nineteenth-century efforts, such as those in Richard von Krafft-
Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), to combat perversion by
scientific classification of sexual deviance, instead, as Schaffner and
Weller summarize Foucault’s argument, “facilitated their discursive
proliferation” (1). “In effect,” they continue, “the sexologists
invented the homosexual, the masochist, the fetishist and a host
of other perverse types who, significantly, would soon go on to
populate in ever greater numbers naturalist, decadent and, above
all, modernist literature” (1). The major turn in recent modernist
studies has been not simply to see these sexological classifications
played out in literature, but rather to chart the role of literature
in the development of sexology itself. For Schaffner and Weller,
“the discursive traffic was . . . far from being simply one-way.
Just as sexological and psychoanalytic works impacted on the
literary imagination, so literary examples of perversion influenced
the sexologists. Krafft-Ebing, for instance, drew on a wide range
of literary texts to support his arguments, the works (and the
reputation) of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-
Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1869) playing particularly important roles
in sexological concept-formation” (2).
Paul Peppis’s Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology,

and Psychology (2014) argues that “the modernizing sciences of
ethnography, sexology, and psychology should be viewed as no
less integral to modernism as a cultural movement and set of self-
consciously modernizing texts and linguistic techniques than the
literary and artistic movements of Imagism, Vorticism, or Bloomsbury,
and their ‘experimental’ textual and artistic productions” (11).
Building on research by Jeffrey Weeks, Joseph Bristow, and others,
Peppis focuses on one of the most prominent modernist-era works
of sexology, Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds’s Sexual
Inversion (1897), as “confirming the text’s participation in period
collaborations between social-political liberalism and psychosexual
biologism” (108). In his chapters on sexologies, Peppis reads together
pairs of texts, including Sexual Inversion and E. M. Forster’s Maurice,
the (posthumously published) novel in which Forster directly
engaged with homosexuality, as well as the seemingly disparate texts
of paleobotanist Marie Stopes’s best seller Married Love, and avant-
gardist “modern woman” Mina Loy’s aesthetically and sexually
radical Songs to Joannes, both of which Peppis reads as actively
participating in the sex reform debates of the day. Invoking Bruno
Latour’s calls for examining “science in the making” and returning
to those moments before a scientific concept has been “blackboxed,”
Peppis argues against a tendency to see “modernist literature’s use
of science as always metaphorical, as chiefly a defensive rhetorical
strategy of cultural legitimation,” in order to “adequately acknowledge
or account for the range of ways that relations between modern
science and modernist literature were actually configured” (2).
“Reading Sexual Inversion alongside Maurice,” Peppis argues,
“elucidates the powerfully literary and politically interventionist
nature of Ellis and Symonds’s putatively disinterested science”
(103). Ellis and Symonds used the scientific approach of sexology
to normalize homosexuality as a congenital condition rather than a
moral failure (Peppis 104), but they also resisted the pathologization
of homosexuality in eugenic accounts of heredity and degeneration
by insisting in some case histories (including Symonds’s own
veiled third-person account) on the physical and social health of
the subject’s family (113). Unlike Squier’s readings of the direct
interconnections among the literary and scientific realms in Julian
Huxley’s life, Peppis illuminates a shared cultural field informing
both Ellis and Symonds’s work and Forster’s. Though Maurice
at times seems almost to be a fictionalization of a case history

in Sexual Inversion, what they share is not only a recoil against
Victorian moral outrage against homosexuality (an outrage that
destroyed Oscar Wilde, among others) but also a reworking of a
literary inheritance of the Enlightenment concept of bildung and
its novelistic genre, the bildungsroman. Emerging from this literary
heritage, Sexual Inversion presents its case studies as narratives
of homosexual bildung, offering a vision of homosexuality not in
terms of degeneration but of harmony with English society, in an
effort to “balance the claims of homosexual liberation with those
of socialization” (105). In spite of the limitations both of Sexual
Inversion and Maurice (both largely ignore lesbianism; Maurice falls
into a sentimental ending in which the lovers reject conventional
English society entirely; Ellis and Symonds asked for much restraint
and conformity from gay men in the name of social harmony),
both works use the discourses of science and literature to legitimize
same-sex desire and understand homosexuals as modern subjects
(103). But Peppis also argues that “what makes Sexual Inversion
most interesting, most modernist, is its inclusion of testimony
from subjects less socially accommodating than the volume and
its authors, homosexuals less willing to minimize their sexuality
and limit their sexual practices in favor of social acceptance. These
less-compliant voices and narratives anticipate the more dissident
position that Forster’s Maurice will later articulate—but which
Forster will closet for nearly sixty years” (105).
Even when the sexology of the pre–First World War era and the
advent of Freudian psychoanalysis were both decades old, later
modernist writers continued to push against the still-common
legacy of late-nineteenth-century sexology’s cataloguing of types
and varieties of sexuality. Sexology itself demonstrated conflicting
motivations for its scientific project—Krafft-Ebing could question
the normativity of sexual desires while still pathologizing types of
“perversion” and sanctioning sex only for procreation, whereas
Ellis and Symonds eschewed both moral and hereditary views
of nonnormative sexuality, and Freud, in later years, would
reconfigure the entire debate about the innate or acquired nature
of sexual desire—and the taxonomizing of sexuality at the heart
of sexology, as Foucault noted, both contributed to a discursive
proliferation of “perversions” but also continued to reinforce
the binary logic of normal/perverse and inside/outside subject
positions from which to assess sexuality. If, as recent modernist
scholarship has argued, writers such as Forster and Loy could

both participate in contemporary sexological debates in their work
while using literary genres and linguistic experiments to undermine
the normative assumptions of their day, that project, and its
necessity, continued into later modernism as well. Daniela Caselli,
for example, has recently argued that Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood
(1936), while not directly engaging with Freud or specific
sexological texts, explored female and male “inversion” through
its linguistic experiments: “Normality and deviance in Nightwood
are not simply themes that can be read as historical reflections on
contemporary sexological and psychoanalytical discourses, but are
instead constitutive properties of a writing that boldly engages with
eroticism while unapologetically performing a demanding linguistic
experimentalism” (152). Caselli notes that critics within and outside
of queer studies have not always agreed whether the novel parodies
sexological discourse, critiques it, or even displays some form of
homophobia (154), but she argues that the language, multiple points
of view, and other modernist literary experiments push against the
language of perversion and of normality, suggesting that “authentic
love is fashioned as the outcome of stories, so that gender is no
longer a point of origin and authenticity” (155).
But even as the nascent science of female sexual desire could
be expressed in sexological texts, normative bourgeois manuals
of birth control such as Stopes’s Married Love, and radical avant-
gardist challenges such as Loy’s Songs to Joannes or Barnes’s
Nightwood, some of the realms into which sexology traveled could
pose formidable challenges for modernism. For example, the activist
projects that drew eugenics and sexology together confronted
female modernists with acute quandaries. Drawing on Suzanne
Clark’s work in Sentimental Modernism (1991) to unpack the
gender politics of sentimentalism (used by some male modernists
and critics as grounds to reject female writers), recovering a strategy
within modernism itself often explored by female writers, Squier
reads the writings of Charlotte Haldane, wife of J. B. S. Haldane, in
terms of their strategic use of the romance genre. Of Haldane’s 1926
novel Man’s World, in which reproductive technologies allow male
scientists to control the gender of babies (the novel was published
six years before Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World), Squier argues,
Fundamental to the structure of Man’s World is the double bind

of female modernism. Charlotte Haldane adopts a romance
plot centered on the (otherwise aesthetically unrepresentable)

embodied female subject in order to confront from a woman’s
perspective the social implications of the scientific control of
reproduction. And she adopts the discourse of modern science,
in particular its valorization of an empiricist perspective, in order
to legitimate her main agenda: a celebration of female maternal
agency. (121; emphasis in original)
But, Squier argues,
there are dramatic contradictions of effect between these two

strategic positions. Casting her advocacy of female agency within
the discourse of masculinist science, she seems to devalue gender-
role atypical women, especially in relation to the scientifically
authorized position of so-called normal motherhood. Using
the trajectory of the romance to organize her narrative, she
articulates female subjectivity at the price of trapping it within
a love-and-marriage plot. But even in these strategic choices,
“double-binding” as they are, Haldane’s novel reveals the
resistant doubling of meaning through which female modernist
writers managed to find voice. (121)
If sexology as a response to fears of biological and cultural

degeneration can be seen both as a point of intersection between
science and literature, and as a compelling proof that the two
domains are not so neatly separable but are always generatively
intermixed, so, too, has eugenics become a central focus of modernist
studies of literature and science.
Eugenics
Sexology, as Weeks, Bristow, and Peppis have shown, demonstrates
what Peppis has styled as “period collaborations between social-
political liberalism and psychosexual biologism” (Peppis 108). Such
collaborations are nowhere more stridently demonstrated than in
the eugenics movements in the United States and Europe during the
modernist period. (The term “eugenics” was coined by Darwin’s
cousin Francis Galton in 1883 to name “the science of being well-
born.” It became recognized by many as untenable and morally
abhorrent only with the atrocities of the Second World War.) For
modernists, eugenics was essentially the promotion of human
genetic engineering to breed “better” humans, and in it we see the
confluence of varying racial ideologies and political agendas of the
period with the newly institutionalized social sciences, social and
cultural interpretations of evolutionary biology, recently developed
technologies such as photography and film, and, ultimately,
modernism across domains and genres.
Most recent work on eugenics sees it as a response to fears of
degeneration that Nordau was articulating in his 1892 volume
(Seitler 3; Turda 24–25), a response both made possible by and
contributing to the social and psychological imperatives of a
modern scientistic society. Indeed, Marius Turda argues that
“eugenics should be understood not only as a scientistic narrative of
biological, social and cultural renewal, but also as the emblematic
expression of programmatic modernism” (2). Turda borrows the
term “programmatic modernism” from Roger Griffin’s 2007 book,
Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini
and Hitler, to describe a modernism that “encourages the artist/
intellectual to collaborate proactively with collective movements
for radical change and projects for the transformation of social
realities and political systems” (Griffin 62, qtd in Turda 2). For
Dana Seitler, atavism, eugenics, and degeneration are dynamics of a
history that “is not a concrete, observable thing; it has no material
existence outside its manifestations in culture. An ineffable source,
history is only to be grasped by way of its various mediations, and
even then imperfectly” (3).
In the striking “eugenics tree” logo from the Eugenics Record
Office with which Tamsen Wolff opens her compelling study of
eugenics in modern American drama and performance, Mendel’s
Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century
American Drama (2009), eugenics is defined as “the self direction
of human evolution.” It proclaims boldly, “Like a tree, eugenics
draws its materials from many sources and organizes them into an
harmonious entity” (see Figure 4.1). Those “many sources” are, in
part, key organizing principles of modern society. The tree’s roots
bear the labels of “law,” “politics,” “geography,” “economics,”
“education,” “genealogy,” “biography,” “history,” and “religion,”
but they also include most of the new social sciences—“psychology,”
“psychiatry,” “anthropology, “archeology,” “ethnology,” and
Figure 4.1 Eugenics tree logo, Eugenics Record Office, Cold Spring

Harbor, NY.
“sociology”—and the life sciences that authorized them, “biology,”

“genetics,” “anatomy,” and “physiology” (and even an outlier
on the list, the sole physical science, “geology”). The roots also
name the attendant practices of modern medicine and biopower
that supported the enterprise, “mental testing,” “anthropometry,”
“statistics,” “medicine,” and “surgery.” Wolff explores the
nineteenth-century origins of eugenics in various efforts to
understand heredity, but notes that hereditarianism itself became
prominent only after Mendel’s mid-nineteenth-century work on
the transmission of hereditary material in garden peas received
renewed attention: “The resurrection of Mendel’s theory in 1900
was electrifying to its early proponents for several reasons: it was
predictive, generalized, experimentally defensible, and applicable to
all living organisms, including humans” (2).
Wolff’s account, though, uncovers the major factors in the
American eugenics movement that the tree logo leaves unmentioned
(though perhaps implied in the general categories of law, history,
and politics). Eugenics, as Wolff explains,
reached the height of its popularity in the United States in

the years just preceding and following World War I. Pressing
historical and social contingencies helped produce American

eugenics. They included the emergence of the United States as
a dominant world power; unprecedented levels of immigration;
mass African American migration to Northern cities; the
women’s rights movement and especially the related issue of
reproductive rights and sexual freedom; rapid urbanization; and
World War I. (3)
In response to these “historical and social contingencies,” eugenics

offered “tyrannical public policies, like coercive sterilization, and
provided scientific rationalizations for class and race prejudices” (4),
and it became a dominant subject in print culture. Wolff mentions
more than 500 American popular science books being published
between 1900 and 1925, and more than 4,000 publications
appearing in a 1924 Bibliography of Eugenics (4). Moreover,
eugenics appears as a major issue in the works of many of the most
significant modernist and other writers of the period.
This explosion of eugenics in print culture and modernist
poetry and fiction has been discussed by other scholars,8 but
Wolff’s major insight is that eugenics inhabited the social and
cultural spaces created by modern drama and performances
of many varieties. If the modern European drama of Ibsen,
Strindberg, and Shaw variously addressed heredity, modern
drama and performance in America, from Eugene O’Neill and
Susan Glaspell to the fairground exhibits and performances of
“Mendel’s Theatre” for the masses, occurred in a specifically
eugenic context: “American theatre and the American eugenics
movement both enjoyed unparalleled popularity from about 1910
to 1930. Linked by their investment in the relationship between
performance and heredity, each of these phenomena galvanized
the other. American eugenicists relied on theatre to promote the
message that biological heredity is visible in the embodied present
and that it is controllable” (1).
Another key dimension of the development and dissemination of
eugenics in American and Britain and beyond was technology—in
particular, film and photography. Though the revolution in social
science methodologies and research programs that academic
computing initiated was decades away, and it might at first glance be
easier to identify the interplay between technology and the physical
and life sciences, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
the social sciences also emerged in the context of technological

developments that are often seen as crucial to modernism. Tamsen
Wolff shows that the performance of eugenics was an important
component of film in the period: “Beginning around 1910, all
types and sizes of film companies produced full-length and one-
reel movies that addressed eugenics, including pro- and anti-eugenic
dramas, anti-eugenics farces, and educational medical films” (4).
But one technology in particular has been especially crucial to
that confluence of modernist science and art: photography. More
than three decades ago, art historian David Green argued that the
photograph achieved an important position in the emerging sciences
of the later nineteenth century because of “its apparent consistency
with the empiricist assumptions and methodological procedures
of naturalism” (3). Photography, understood as a passive process
for recording external reality, made it a significant tool of scientific
inquiry. Yet more important, Green argued, was “the assertion of a
seamless relation between the photographic image and appearances
whereby, under certain conditions, the image could function as
reality itself” (4).
The interpenetration between the early social sciences and natural
sciences came at a key moment in the development of the modern
state, Green argues. One might add “imperialist,” “nationalist,” or
even “liberal” to capture the specificity of that modern state in the
modernist era. Though the modern social sciences had their origins
as far back as the eighteenth century, Green argues that “their
establishment as discrete and legitimate scientific disciplines needed
the reorganisation of an existing field of intellectual and academic
activity which did not properly take place until the middle of the
nineteenth century” (6). Moreover, the developing modern state and
its modes of authority and social control (6) became central to the
social sciences in that later period. The technological development
of photography entered the social sciences “at a moment when the
demand for modes of empirical observation and documentation,
and techniques of quantitative measurement and analysis, were
uppermost. The belief in the objectivity of the photographic
process was the prerequisite to photography’s eventual success, but
this was also dependent upon a series of discursive and technical
transformations which resulted from a unique conjuncture of
the natural and social sciences” (6). The photographic evidence
contributed to what Green calls a “biologisation of history” visible
in the photographs of the human body (6). In short, physiology,

or, more precisely, photographs of human bodies, came to define
characteristics of race, class, or social group (8). Key to Green’s
project is his investigation of eugenics through Francis Galton’s
photographs—a project that continues to inspire art-historical
research.
In the case of eugenics, the technologies of photography and film
converged with the nascent modern social sciences and modern
state in ways that gave a scientific imprimatur to racial and social
attitudes and created new types of humans, just as sexology had
created new types of sexuality. In Europe and the United States, the
new technologies and sciences responded, with eugenics, to the new
scientifically established problem—degeneration. But, in perhaps
one of the major distinctions between the modernist cultures on
opposite sides of the Atlantic, following Progressive Era concerns
about national degeneration and the waning frontier character
imagined to be at the heart of American national identity, many
Americans heeded a scientifically sanctioned call of the wild that, as
we shall see, was more modernist than antimodernist.
Back to nature
In the introduction to this volume, we looked at the most
technologically euphoric stance toward modernity in the manifestos,
art, and literature of the Italian Futurist movement, which lauded the
extension of the human imagination by fusing it with technology,
the control over nature exacted by industrial modernity, the hygienic
rigors of war, speed, and energy that the Futurists imagined would
cure the moribund decadence of fin de siècle aesthetic culture. To
these Futurists, the worship of nature signaled a soft, weak, passé
Romanticism. Mastering and reshaping the natural world, now
subordinated to the energies of industrial modernization, would
be the salvation of modern civilization: this was what the age
demanded.
I would like to close this chapter with one of the most radical
revisions of the new modernist studies to emerge from the intensive
historicizing of modernism in relationship to science and technology,
and that is Robin G. Schulze’s exploration of modernist American
poetry and the back to nature movement of the early twentieth
century, The Degenerate Muse: American Nature, Modernist

Poetry, and the Problem of Cultural Hygiene (2013). Rather
than follow the common understanding that a desire to return to
nature cannot be modern—and thus only signified an antimodern
dimension of some of the literature of the period—Schulze argues
that a distinctly modern sense of nature emerged from Progressive
Era scientific and political discourses and the modernist poetry
animated by its concerns. This interdisciplinary research serves
as something of a bridge between ecocritical and new modernist
approaches to the literature of the early twentieth century, even
as Schulze notes that it “is not itself a work of ecocriticism as the
field is commonly understood”; rather, her “approach is historical
rather than ecocritical in that it makes no effort to draw lessons
about either current or past environmental praxes. Like many
studies that fall under the rubric of the New Modernisms, this book
attempts instead to demonstrate how a variety of literary texts are
productively read as reflections of, and responses to, the dominant
currents of modernity” (37).
Schulze’s capacious exploration of American responses to
the fear of the degeneration of the “American race” highlights a
scientific and Progressivist understanding of nature as a distinctly
modern choice in the battle against that degeneration:
Overlooked in the accounts of the “Back to Nature” movement

in America are the ways in which white upper- and middle-
class Americans imagined the return to nature as itself a vital
tool of national progress. The full force of the progressive
ideology underlying America’s seeming yearning for the simple
life becomes clear when the nature craze is pitched against
the backdrop of the scientific discourses of social reform that
dominated the early years of the twentieth century. . . . The
villain in the piece for Progressive reformers, however, was not
modernity, per se, but the potential decay of the American nation
and the decline of its unique racial stock, the degeneration that
followed in the wake of over-civilization. Degeneration was a
product of the excess cultivation that followed in modernity’s
wake. As such, American Progressives could envision a cure
for degeneration that did not contradict their drive to be
modern. . . . The specter of degeneration fueled the “Back to
Nature” impulse and granted American Progressives the means
to cast their desire to head for the hills in the hard, cold light
of science. (12)
Such an account highlights the roles of little-known scientists and

medical reformers, such as Cyrus Edson, chief inspector of the New
York Board of Health, who advocated that Americans head to the
wilderness to stave off degeneracy, or Dr. Eugene L. Swan, who in
1911 urged young men to “get out into the open,” explaining that
“the great cry of ‘Back to Nature’ that is spreading abroad over our
land is full of deep significance, and the heeding of Nature’s ever-
calling voice and an adaptation of our lives to her laws, is going
to become the salvation of the American race” (qtd in Schulze 23).
But Schulze’s account also features canonical modernists such as
Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore. Above all, it makes a strong case
for Harriet Monroe as one of the most significant and fascinating
writers of American modernism, and not simply a transitional
figure or a figure more important as editor of the crucial modernist
little magazine, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, than a writer herself.
While focusing on Pound, Monroe, and Moore, Schulze argues
that her rubric would apply to a much wider range of American
modernist poets—such as William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell,
and Wallace Stevens, though not to Robert Frost. “The desire of
American modernist poets to stave off the threat of degeneration
through their poetic approaches to nature was a ubiquitous drive
that has gone unremarked in the scholarship on modernist poetry,”
Schulze argues. Schulze’s research demonstrates the power of a
supple approach to modernism and science to challenge and revise
some of the basic assumptions we have too long made about
modernism.
Notes
1 For Freud in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921),
similarly, the unconscious mind is unlocked in the crowd, and the
charismatic crowd leader displaces the control of the superego.
2 The APA grew rapidly, from 31 members in 1892 to 308 in 1916,
and 530 members by 1940. But the APA designates 1926 as the key
year in its early growth, as it then created a new class of nonvoting
membership, the associate members, and there were 2,079 associate
members by 1940: “Many of these associates were individuals doing

practical or applied work in psychology, and who also belonged to
one of the applied associations that emerged in this time” (APA).
3 The “Chronology of Psychology in Britain” explains that, in 1902,
“W.H.R. Rivers, Charles Myers and William McDougal [were]
appointed as the psychological subcommittee of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), set up to
recommend methods of conducting anthropometric surveys of
the British population at large. Their 1908 report [was] the first
explicitly to suggest the inclusion in such surveys of measures of
higher psychological processes, by means of ratings of character
and capacity by trained observers, as well as of sensory and motor
capacity” (“Chronology of Psychology in Britain”).
4 See Eric Kandle, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand
the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to
the Present (2012). Kandle’s research on the neurophysiology
of memory earned him the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine.
5 On Severn’s and others’ meldings of hermetic alchemy and
psychoanalysis, see Morrisson (Modern Alchemy, 185–93). The
issue of Severn’s work with Ferenczi has seen recent attention and
will shortly result in new publications revising the history in which
Freud referred to her as the “Evil Genius” and expressed concern that
she was damaging Ferenczi. The Library of Congress recently held
a symposium on the subject: “The ‘Evil Genius’ of Psychoanalysis:
Elizabeth Severn, Dr. Sándor Ferenczi’s Partner in the Pioneering
Study and Treatment of Trauma” (2013), and in September 2015
the New School held a symposium on “Elizabeth Severn, Sándor
Ferenczi, and the Origins of Mutual Analysis.” Arnold Rachman’s
Elizabeth Severn, the Evil Genius of Psychoanalysis is forthcoming
from Routledge.
6 See Morrisson (Modern Alchemy, 185–93). Rather than
understanding ritual as consciously passing on information, in this
occult, epistemological and psychological interpretation, as occultist
E. J. Langford Garstin explains in a 1930 article on “The Value of
Ritual,” “although instruction may in many instances be the ultimate
object, it is not obtained from the study of the ritual itself, but is
made possible by its performance. In other words the ritual is carried
out to enable the operator to obtain knowledge, but not to instruct
him by the ceremony itself” (539).
7 For a wide-ranging account of the scientific, medical, and historical
narratives of this phenomenon in Europe, see Pick. See also
Härmänmaa. For the American concerns about degeneration, see

Schulze. The literature on degeneration in Nazi “science” and culture
and on the Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) exhibition in 1937 is
voluminous and beyond the scope of this book.
8 Wolff cites work on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ernest Hemingway,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, T. S. Eliot, and
Gertrude Stein (5).
Coda
A relatively recent development in interdisciplinary modernist

studies promises to shape research on modernism, science, and
technology in the coming years: the increasing prominence of
critical disability studies.
Critical disability studies

Just as ecocriticism and ecofeminism have recently begun to register
significantly in new scholarship on modernism, so too is a field that
has only over the past few decades emerged and consolidated itself
as a major area of study in the humanities: disability studies. A field
once dominated by applied health sciences and eventually the social
sciences of sociology, anthropology, and psychology, disability
was long defined in negative terms of abnormality, lack, problems
needing medical attention. But, since the 1980s, a different response
to disability has gradually crystalized that reframes disability as a
culturally constructed category very different from the medicalized
understanding of it. Above all, it approaches disability through a
rights-based paradigm. Sometimes called “critical disability studies,”
this vibrantly interdisciplinary field had reached enough critical
mass that then Modern Language Association (MLA) president
Michael Bérubé could announce at the 2012 MLA conference that
it was no longer emerging, but emerged (Garland-Thomson 915).
As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson puts it in a brief history of critical
disability studies,“This expansion beyond health science perspectives
on disability to consider it a civil and human rights issue, a minority
identity, a sociological formation, a historical community, a diversity
group, and a category of critical analysis in culture and the arts
constitutes the signature move of critical disability studies” (917).
Critical disability studies thus rejects the authority over disability
of the very sciences that were professionalizing and laying claim to
the field in the modernist period: medicine, psychology, sociology,

and anthropology, for instance, with their modernist-era influence
on such areas as eugenics, and legal and public policy. Exerting
an increasing influence on recent modernist studies publications
and at conferences, such as the Modernist Studies Association and
MLA, disability studies, not unlike the domains of science studies,
literature and science, and ecocriticism that we have explored in this
volume, is shaping the ways we understand important scientific and
social issues in modernism: issues such as shell shock, degeneration,
eugenics, subjectivity, and agency.
Understanding modernist visual aesthetics in terms of disability
studies is not simply a matter of calling attention to representations
of the disabled body or mind in art. Rather, as Tobin Siebers argues,
disability is central to modern art and has evolved an aesthetic
value itself:
What I am calling “disability aesthetics” names a critical concept
that seeks to emphasize the presence of disability in the tradi-
tion of aesthetic representation. My argument here conceives
of the disabled body and mind as playing significant roles in
the evolution of modern aesthetics, theorizing disability as a
unique resource discovered by modern art and then embraced
by it as one of its defining concepts. Disability aesthetics refus-
es to recognize the representation of the healthy body—and its
definition of harmony, integrity, and beauty—as the sole deter-
mination of the aesthetic. Rather, disability aesthetics embraces
beauty that seems by traditional standards to be broken, and yet
it is not less beautiful, but more so, as a result. (2–3)
Siebers looks anew at the attack on modernism in the Nazis’
Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937 that prominently featured the
art of such modernist pioneers as Paul Klee, whom they portrayed
as schizophrenic, or German expressionist Ludwig Meidner, who
was labeled a Jewish defective, or artists such as Ludwig Kirchner
and Otto Dix, who featured disability in antiwar art and were seen
as degenerates. Siebers highlights several modernist techniques
from Dada to Expressionism—the flattened canvas, the aesthetic
deformation of bodies, even the choices of color; “the palette of
modernism paints human faces in greens, yellow, and purples,
embracing discoloration without rejecting attending associations of
Coda 151
disease” (35). Ultimately, Siebers concludes, “if modern art has had
such enormous success, it is because of its embrace of disability as
a distinct version of the beautiful. The Nazis grasped the nature
of this aesthetic, but they rejected it, misreading the future of art
as they misread many other things about human culture. Instead,
they attacked modern art for the very features that give it such
remarkable imaginative and transformative power to represent the
human condition” (35).
If the disability aesthetics central to the “degenerate art” of
modernism shocked the Nazi government, it also emerged in
modernist literature in ways that disability studies helps us to
interpret. For Garland-Thomson, “critical disability studies attends
to how the discrepancies between actual bodies and expected
bodies are characterized within particular cultural contexts” (917).
This critical attention in recent modernist studies has produced
compelling new understandings of authors—ranging from the
canonical to those garnering less critical attention—that move
in different directions from the explorations of shell shock and
disfiguration in the Great War that have monopolized the attention
of modernist studies for many years. In a recent tour de force article
in Modernism/Modernity that asks “What can disability theory
bring to modernist studies?” Janet Lyon attends not so much to
the “discrepancies” between bodies but rather the discrepancies
between minds in mental disability. Beginning with a moment that
was both shocking to Virginia Woolf and, because of the violence
of her phrasing, shocking to readers a century later, Lyon discusses
Woolf’s diary account of an encounter on a towpath near Kingston
of “a long line of imbeciles.” What is shocking is not the dated and
now discredited term, “imbeciles,” for the group, but rather what
Woolf concludes: “It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly
be killed” (qtd in Lyon 551).
Beginning with what Lyon takes to be the “uncontroversial
proposition that modernist aesthetics, with its emphasis on
disproportion, fracture, and incompleteness, shares with disability
theory a foundational contestation of the category of ‘the normal’”
(552), she then explores the history of asylum building, laws
stripping the mentally “deficient” of all rights, civil and human, and
the expansion of biopower and the discourse of mental deficiency.
This institutional and legal history is crucial and covers a great deal
of ground, from the Lunacy Act of 1845 to the Mental Deficiency

Act of 1913. The latter, championed by the eugenics movement,
created several new categories of deficiency and aimed to “effectively
eliminate defectives from the public world” (553), stripping them
of rights: “Once singled out and signified as feeble-minded for
feeble-minded asylums, they became a part of an institutional sign
system associating mental deficiency with the condition of civil
death—civiliter mortuus, the stripping of civil rights and political
identity from persons deemed to be law-breakers or non compos
mentis” (553; emphasis in original).
In this context, rather than the much more pervasive one of shell
shock during and after the Great War, Lyon reads across multiple
writings the encounters with the mentally disabled in public by
Woolf and Charlotte Mew (both of whom had experienced the
expanding realm of psychiatry and asylums, and both of whom
committed suicide at fifty-nine) (552). The Mental Deficiency Act
(MDA) created the expectation that humane public policy would
remove the mental “defective” from public, so their appearance in
public, recounted or imagined in the modernist texts at hand, in
Lyon’s argument, “could and did constitute the conditions for a
certain kind of shock, in the manner of Freud’s Unheimlich—that is,
as something that shocks because it ‘ought to have remained hidden
and secret.’ From this hypothesis I mean to ask: what were ‘they’ to
‘us’—we modernists—in the epistemic moment crystallized by the
MDA?” (554).
Modernist attention to interiority goes hand in hand with this
moment in the history of disability. Lyon argues, then, that “one
significant aspect of the modernist aesthetic project . . . involves
the deliberate experimental creation (rather than short-circuiting
or collapse) of new aesthetic domains out of the encounter with
non-normate bodies and affects. In line with recent work by Tobin
Siebers and Michael Davidson, I will extend my proposal that
modernism’s interest in aporia and fracture, disproportion and
asymmetry, are rooted in aesthetic and epistemological challenges
to ‘normal’” (560–61).
In this reading of Mew and Woolf, the dialectical sophistication
of Mew’s poetry becomes evident. Her 1916 poem “On the Asylum
Road” produces a proto-Levinasian critique in its play with historical
genres and engagements with another group encountered in public.
But Woolf’s diary entry, and the later essay and novelistic writing
Coda 153
discussed (including, of course, Mrs. Dalloway), not only show the

long-term provocation of mental disability to Woolf’s imagination
and aesthetic practice, but also leaves Lyon with an ethical concern:
“If mental disability—and specifically the idiocy haunting Woolf’s
memoirs—delivers a ‘sledge-hammer blow,’ it is precisely because
Woolf cannot enter into or dwell in its consciousness” (569). But,
as Lyon argues,
one may plan (heroically) to kill Septimus in order to save him

from the Foucauldian nightmare of the institution, while at the
same time wishing death upon “defectives” for their insufficient
institutionalization. Surely Woolf recognizes the violence of this
ethical contradiction on some level, for the idiot boy remains
with her to the end of her life, in both his real tactile form, with
hand outstretched, and as an enigma haunting the bestial face
that she dreams about in the mise en abyme of a hall mirror. He
is her frère, her semblable. (569)
In this growing subfield of critical disability studies in modernist

studies, the scientific, social, cultural, legal, and institutional
histories of modernist social sciences come together and offer
sophisticated but tough analyses of disability’s role in the aesthetics
of modernism.
One culture?
At the beginning of this book, we examined C. P. Snow’s 1959 “two
cultures” argument and the critiques of it launched by literature
and science scholars from the 1980s through the present day. Helen
Small has recently reminded us that these “two cultures” debates
have a long history—before Snow (and a strident rebuttal by F. R.
Leavis) came the science and literature debate between T. H. Huxley
and Matthew Arnold in the 1880s, and several earlier examples
can be traced back to antiquity. After Snow’s argument came the
“Sokal affair” of 1996, when the physicist Alan Sokal attempted
to discredit humanities theory, science studies, and cultural studies
more generally by placing a hoax article on the social construction
of gravity in the prominent journal Social Text.1 As Small notes,
these debates tell us little about actual academic research in the
disciplines simplified by the participants, and, instead, tell us more

about the “wider social, cultural, institutional, and political factors
that had a bearing on the argument” (35).
The kind of scholarly inquiry we have been exploring across
this volume participates in varying ways in what Small calls a “one
culture” model that “consciously rejects the imprisoning power of
specialization and seeks to establish the depth of cultural overlap
and productive interaction between different spheres of knowledge”
(Small 33). This “one culture” model is familiar to scholars working
in modernism, science, and technology. As George Levine put it
in his influential collection One Culture: Essays in Science and
Literature (1987), “It is possible and fruitful to understand how
literature and science are mutually shaped by their participation
in the culture at large—in the intellectual, moral, aesthetic, social,
economic, and political communities which both generate and take
their shape from them” (5–6). In the United Kingdom, Ludmilla
Jordanova’s Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and
Literature (1986) turned to textual analysis methodologies from
literary criticism to read science books (20).
Inevitably, a word that we have seen rather frequently in
this volume, “interdisciplinary,” becomes a critical term in the
functional logic of fields, associations, and universities. Small
notes that most cross-disciplinary collaborations (she includes
history of science and science studies) and most interdisciplinary
scholarship and teaching are “sustained by forms of training that
are recognized as discipline-particular” (34). Small does not raise
this point to reject interdisciplinary work, but rather to point out
how entrenched disciplinarity is. But, contrary to much of the
rhetoric of the past few decades, Andrew Abbott argues that “the
emphasis on interdisciplinarity emerged contemporaneously with,
not after, the disciplines. There was no long process of ossification;
the one bred the other almost immediately” (134). He highlights
the calls for interdisciplinary research and teaching going back
to the 1920s: “the Social Science Research Council and the Laura
Spelman Rockefeller Foundation were already focused on the
problem of eliminating barriers between the social sciences by the
mid-1920s” (133). Looking back to the early-twentieth-century
American university (where some social science disciplines such
as sociology and economics were routinely combined as late as
the end of the 1920s), Abbott traces the long institutional history
Coda 155
of interdisciplinary studies, concluding that they “are ultimately

dependent on specialized disciplines to generate new theories and
methods. Interdisciplinarity presupposes disciplines” (137). The
very structures of academic hiring, degree programs, and promotion
require scholars to be structured around disciplines rather than
a seemingly endless array of problems that might organize their
work—and that has been so since the beginning of academic
disciplines in the modern American university.
Yet the kind of scholarship on modernism, science, and
technology we have been exploring does not presuppose a
lack of specific disciplinary training in some field, nor does it
require specialized doctoral training in multiple fields. Individual
disciplines are often in the process of being reshaped by new cross-
disciplinary collaborations (such as those of critical disability
studies, science studies, and ecocriticism). This is how disciplines
avoid ossification. What such work does require, however, is the
will to cross disciplinary boundaries in the company (whether
in person or simply through reading) of those who do have the
intensive disciplinary and professional training in fields other than
one’s own. Undergraduate students should be encouraged to study
deeply in the necessary fields that inform their interdisciplinary
interests (whether through course work or directed reading).
Graduate students and faculty should not only read with a mind
open to disciplinary perspectives other than those of their fields, but
they should also try to build networks of scholars from those fields
with whom to discuss their shared research interests. The Society
for Literature, Science, and the Arts and the British Society for
Literature and Science can expose one to scholars from a broader
range of disciplinary backgrounds than can the associations largely
devoted to single specific disciplines. Disciplines will not disappear,
nor should they. But, as Abbott has shown, and as we have seen
in much of the modernist-era science discussed in this volume,
disciplines, since at least the 1920s, have generated interdisciplinary
collaborations, research, and teaching.
In the aggregate, the past few decades of scholarship on
modernism, science, and technology show the highly fertile ground
of interdisciplinary fields, such as science and literature, science
studies, history of science, and now critical disability studies and
ecocriticism, and concepts such as paradigms, technoscientism,
domaining, and other critical terms in this volume. This scholarship
has helped capture the creative and sometimes contentious or even

destructive joint emergence of modernism, science, and technology
in an age of the falling and rising of paradigms, of making it new.
Note
1 See Small (30–39) on the history and function of these “two
cultures” models. Ortolano locates the significance of Snow’s
1959 Rede Lecture, and F. R. Leavis’s rebuttal of it (and seemingly
personal attack on Snow as a novelist) in a February 1962 lecture at
Cambridge, in what it reveals about the culture of postwar Britain
and the clash between what he styles the “technocratic liberalism” of
Snow and the “radical liberalism” of Leavis (Ortolano 4–5). Noting
that Britain “had invested heavily in scientific and technological
developments through the interwar years (the total number of
scientists increased from approximately 5,000 in 1911 to 49,000 in
1951), and this investment continued through the period of austerity
and into the more expansive years of the 1950s” (Bowler 264), Peter
Bowler sees Snow’s alarm about the “two cultures” in 1959 as “the
war cry of a technocrat anxious to gain even more power for the
experts” (264).
GLOSSARY OF KEY TERMS
FROM SCIENCE STUDIES
Actor-network theory. A theory developed by Bruno Latour, Michel

Callon, John Law, and others, in which human and nonhuman
actors (or “actants”), material and conceptual, join together in
social networks whose performances create meaning.
Black box. A term adopted from cybernetics by Bruno Latour.

Facts or machines have been blackboxed when, “no matter how
controversial their history, how complex their inner workings, how
large the commercial or academic networks that hold them in place,
only their input and output count” (2–3).
Domaining. A term from British anthropologist Marilyn Strathern

brought into literature and science by Susan Merrill Squier. Strathern
explains of the dynamics she calls “domaining,” “In cultural life,
in those habits of thought about which for most of the time we
are very much unaware, the ideas that reproduce themselves in
our communications never reproduce themselves exactly. They
are always found in environments or contexts that have their
own properties or characteristics. . . . Moreover, insofar as each
is a domain, each imposes its own logic of ‘natural’ association.
Natural association means that ideas are always enunciated in an
environment of other ideas, in contexts already occupied by other
thoughts and images. Finding a place for new thoughts becomes an
act of displacement” (qtd in Squier, Babies in Bottles, 26–27).
Laboratory studies. In laboratory studies, researchers follow

scientists in their labs and through the networks of people,
institutions, laboratory equipment, and nonhuman participants
in their research to conceptualize how scientific knowledge is
produced. In their 1979 book Laboratory Life: The Construction
158 GLOSSARY
of Scientific Facts, Steve Woolgar and Bruno Latour’s approach to

the workings of Roger Guillemin’s laboratory at the Salk Institute
came to the attention of literary scholars in part because it often
conceptualized the productions of the lab in textual and rhetorical
terms.
Paradigm. A central concept in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of

Scientific Revolutions (1962), the paradigm is the “implicit body
of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief that permits
selection, evaluation, and criticism” (16–17) upon which the research
programs of what Kuhn calls “normal science” can be mounted.
Kuhn’s work examines how science as it is institutionalized sustains
its principles, questions, and methods of inquiry. A paradigm
eventually loses its explanatory power in the face of anomalies
generated through the workings of normal science. In what Kuhn
calls a “paradigm shift,” the community of scientists in the field
eventually assents to a new paradigm that is able to explain the
anomalies that caused the previous paradigm to be revealed as
inadequate.
Technoscience. A key term in science studies, used by Gaston

Bachelard in the 1950s and Gilbert Hottois, beginning in the
late 1970s, and popularized by Bruno Latour through his 1987
volume, Science in Action. Latour uses “technoscience” to target
the artificiality of distinctions between “science” and “society”
as well as “science” and “technology.” In Latour’s usage, the
term encompasses not only the people and methods we might
traditionally see as “scientific” but also the material technologies
and concerns involved across the scientific enterprise, and the
“supporters, allies, employers, helping hands, believers, patrons and
consumers” (Science in Action, 175).
Technoscientism. A term coined by Bruce Clarke to describe the

intermingling of concepts among the sciences and other social or
cultural fields, or the outright appropriation of scientific terms
and ideas outside of their original scientific context. It draws
together the sociohistorical term “scientism”—indicating, often
negatively, the appropriation of science for nonscientific activities—
with the theoretical work by a host of scholars, including Bruno
Latour, Gillian Beer, and Donna Haraway, “in which the splicing
GLOSSARY 159
together of science and technology also implies their inextricable

relations to society as a whole” (Energy Forms, 7).
Thought style. A central concept in Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and

Development of a Scientific Fact (1935). Fleck argued against the
efforts of logical positivism to derive a fixed and absolute basis
for meaning and knowledge, instead arguing that cognition itself is
historically and collectively produced. Drawing from historicism,
sociology, and epistemology, Fleck defined “thought style” as the
readiness for “directed perception, with corresponding mental and
objective assimilation of what has been so perceived” (99), and he
suggested that different periods (or even people within the same
period) had different thought styles. When comparing the thought
style of modern science to that of an earlier period—for example,
the alchemical writing of Paracelsus or other medieval chemists—
he writes, “Our physical reality did not exist for them” (127).
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Index
Note: Page locators followed by “n” indicate notes section. Page numbers
in italics refer to figures.
Abbott, Andrew 154–5 Bell, Ian 6, 51, 56

Abbott, Edwin 50 Bellmer, Hans 93
actor-network theory 22–4, Bergson, Henri 18, 101
61, 157 Berman, Marshall 37
Adams, Henry 45 Bernard, Claude 97
affect theory 85, 116 n.6 Berthelot, Marcellin 64
Agassiz, Louis 29 Besant, Annie 52
airplanes 3, 8 “big science” 9–10
alchemy 63–5, 128, 146 n.5 Bijker, Wiebe 19–21
Alt, Christina 111, 113–14 biocentrism 32, 83, 101, 109–10
anatomy 83, 140 biology 32, 80 n.2, 101, 115,
anthropology 8, 91–2, 117–18, 118. See also life sciences
121–3 and biocentrism 109–10
and critical disability and cell theory 86
studies 149–50 and eugenics 140
and eugenics 140 guiding metaphors of 83
and Ezra Pound 34 n.3 and Henri Bergson 102
and Gustave Le Bon 120 and neuron doctrine 8, 95
and Mass-Observation 124 and organicism 87–94
professionalization of 119 and psychology 84
Arnold, Matthew 153 and sexology 133–5
Arrhenius, Svante 58 and social sciences 33, 132–3
Asimov, Isaac 86–7 and thermodynamics 49
astronomy 8, 38–9, 49, 80 n.2 and Virginia Woolf 112–14
automobiles 3–4, 8, 10, 91 and vitalism 44
biopolitics 125, 133, 140, 151
Bachelard, Gaston 22, 77, 158 black box 22–4, 36 n.12,
Baekeland, Leo 21 135, 157
Balla, Giacomo 4 Bloomsbury Group 135
Balthus 93 Boas, Franz 121
Barnes, Djuna 112, 137 Boccioni, Umberto 4–5, 54
Becquerel, Henri 59, 63 Bohm, David 89
Beer, Gillian 39, 42, 158 Bohr, Niels 68, 72
172 Index
Bonkowski, Wyatt 129–30 Cold War 20, 78

Bono, James 13–14, 25, 35 n.5 Compton, Arthur 68
Booker, M. Keith 74 Conrad, Joseph 46, 50
Born, Max 68, 73 Heart of Darkness 108, 121–2
Botar, Oliver A. I. 109–10 The Secret Agent 48–9, 75
Bowker, Geoffrey C. 65 Cooter, Roger 70
Bowler, Peter 29, 70 Crawford, Hugh 97–8
Bragdon, Claude 51, 56 Crick, Francis 89
Braun, Karl Ferdinand 3 critical disability studies 33, 155
Brentano, Franz 126 formation of 149
Burstein, Jessica 93 and modernist
Buzard, James 122–3 aesthetics 150–3
crowd psychology 33, 49,
Callon, Michel 61, 157 118–20, 145 n.1. See
Carnap, Rudolf 19 also Mass-Observation
Carrà, Carlo 4 movement; psychology;
Carrel, Alexis 108 social sciences; sociology
Casella, Daniela 137 cubism 50–1
cell theory 8, 32, 86–7, 95, cultural studies 112, 153
101, 115 Curie, Marie 59, 81 n.8
Chadwick, James 68 Curie, Pierre 59
chemistry 8, 11–13, 38–9, 49, Cybernetics 23, 157
66, 80 n.2 Czarnecki, Kristin 111
and alchemy 64–5
and James Joyce 75 Dada 150
and Marcel Duchamp 62 Dalton, John 58–60
and mechanism 87 Darwin, Charles 38–9, 102, 112
and organicism 90 and Gustave Le Bon 120
professionalization modernist readership of 29
of 9, 80 n.3 and vitalism 101
and radioactivity 57–60, Daston, Lorraine 126
63, 72 Davidson, Adam 10, 34 n.4
Chevreul, Eugene 103 Davidson, Michael 152
Choi, Tina Young 42–3 de Broglie, Louis 68, 77
Clark, Jill 49, 75 degeneration 6, 33, 49, 84, 117,
Clark, Suzanne 137 119, 132, 146 n.7, 150. See
Clarke, Bruce 46, 49, 69, 81 n.4 also eugenics; Max Nordau
on D. H. Lawrence 47–8, 75 and “Back to Nature”
on energy and movement 144–5
modernism 38, 43 and eugenics 139, 143
on technoscientism 23, and sexology 132–8
39, 158 and thermodynamics 44–6
Clausius, Rudolf 43 Desmond, Adrian 113
Index 173
Dirac, Paul 72 Engels, Friedrich 37

Dix, Otto 150 engineering 31, 39–41, 43,
domaining 85, 106–7, 118, 133, 80 n.3
155, 157. See also Marilyn Enlightenment 78, 109, 111,
Strathern; Susan Merrill 126, 136
Squier entropy 40, 43–9, 81 n.4.
Doolittle, Hilda. See H. D. See also degeneration;
Duchamp, Marcel 51, 54, 55, 62–3 energy; physical sciences;
Duszenko, Andrzej 75–6 thermodynamics
and information theory 75
ecocriticism 33, 155 epidemiology 32, 83
and modernist studies Epstein, Jacob 5
109–11, 113, 144, 149–50 ether physics 8, 16, 31, 40–1,
ecofeminism 109–14, 149 50, 67, 81 n.7. See also
Eddington, Arthur 50, 53, quantum physics; relativity
69–70, 77 and radioactivity 62
Einstein, Albert 37–8, 53, 66–8, and “vibratory
88. See also Newtonian modernism” 52–7
physics; quantum physics; ethnography 122–3, 135
relativity; physical sciences eugenics 8, 132–3, 140. See also
and cubism 50 critical disability studies;
and differential geometry 7, 40 degeneration; social sciences
and ether physics 41, 81 n.7 and disability 150, 152
and “the fourth and Ezra Pound 6
dimension” 51 and modernist studies 134–5,
and James Joyce 74–5 137–43
popular reception of 29, and Ross Harrison 106
69–71, 82 n.12 and the social sciences 118
electricity 10, 39, 51 evolutionary theory 32, 38, 44,
Eliot, T. S. 44, 46, 63, 81 n.5, 113, 118, 132, 139. See also
105, 122–3 Charles Darwin; eugenics
Ellis, Havelock 135–6 Expressionism 150
embryology 32, 83, 87, 94, 109
Emerson, Lori 51–2 Ferenczi, Sándor 128, 146 n.5
energy 87. See also entropy; film 8, 32, 103, 139, 141–3
matter; physical sciences; First World War 1, 8, 34 n.1, 78,
thermodynamics 104, 117
as modernist trope 31, 38 and shell shock 129, 151–2
nineteenth-century paradigms Flagg, Francis 108
of 39–40 Flammarion, Camille 44–5
and quantum mechanics Fleck, Ludwig 19, 64, 98, 159
67–9, 72 Ford, Ford Madox 50, 104, 130
and thermodynamics 42–9 Forster, E. M. 135, 137
174 Index
Foucault, Michel 125–6, 134, 136 Gross, Alan 15

Frazer, James 108 Gudernatsch, J. F. 107
Freud, Sigmund 38, 125–6, 130.
See also psychoanalysis; Haddon, Alfred Cort 121–2
psychology; sexology; social Haeckel, Ernst 91, 93, 120
sciences Haldane, Charlotte 137–8
and crowd Haldane, J. S. 87–8
psychology 145 n.1 Haraway, Donna 39, 89–91, 94,
popular reception of 29 101, 111, 116 n.7, 158
and psychiatric Harrison, Ross 94, 106, 116 n.8
historiography 127–8 Harrison, Tom 122, 124
and sexology 134, 136–7 Hart, Bernard 131
and telepathy 131 Hassan, Ihab 79
Friedman, Alan J. 74 Hasselberg, K. B. 12–13
Fuller, Buckminster 52 H. D. 51, 105
Fuller, Steve 19–20, 36 n.11 Heisenberg, Werner 40, 68,
Futurism 2–5, 34 n.2, 36 n.12, 71–3, 77
54, 56, 110, 143 Helmholtz, Hermann von 29,
43, 56
Galison, Peter 9–10, 35 n.10, Henderson, Linda Dalrymple 38,
61–2, 66 50–2, 62–3
Galton, Francis 138, 143 and “vibratory
Gardner, Eldon J. 86 modernism” 53–4
Garland-Thomson, Hertig, Arthur 133
Rosemarie 149, 151 Hertz, Heinrich 66
Garstin, E. J. Langford 146 n.6 Hess, David J. 21–2, 65
Gauss, Carl Friedrich 40 Hinton, Charles Howard 50–1, 56
Gawne, Richard 89 history and philosophy of
Geissler, Heinrich 61 science 12, 15, 18–19,
Gell-Mann, Murray 79 21–2, 25, 84. See also
genetics 32, 83. See also literature and science;
life sciences science and technology
and eugenics 139–40 studies; science studies
geology 140 Hobsbawm, Eric 1
geometry 7, 31–2, 38, 40, Hooke, Robert 86
69. See also the physical Hottois, Gilbert 22, 158
sciences Hubble, Edwin 38
and spatial fourth Hubble, Nick 123
dimension 50–2 Hulme, T. E. 91, 93
germ theory 8, 32, 83, 97–8 Husserl, Edmund 18
Goody, Alex 2 Huxley, Julian 106–8
Great War. See First World War Huxley, T. H. 104, 107, 153
Green, David 142–3 hypnosis 120
Griesemer, James R. 65 hysteria 120, 127–8
Index 175
Imagism 51, 98, 123–4, 135 laboratory studies 22, 157

Impressionism 102 LaFollette, Marcel 10, 28
Industrial Revolution 3, 40 LaMarck, Jean-Baptiste 120
Iser, Wolfgang 25 Latour, Bruno 21–6, 39, 61,
98, 126, 135, 157–8.
James, William 84, 96, 100–2, See also actor–network
115 n.2, 126 theory, black box,
Jardine, Nicholas 24–5 laboratory studies,
Jauss, Hans Robert 25 science studies
Jean, James 77 Lavoisier, Antoine 86
Jenkins, Philip 34 n.1 Law, John 61, 157
Jennings, Humphrey 122–4 Lawrence, D. H. 75, 101
Jolas, Eugene 1 Women in Love 47–8, 63
Jones, Ernest 125 Leadbeater, C. W. 52
Jordanova, Ludmilla 154 Leane, Elizabeth 29, 80 n.2
Joyce, James 29, 83 n.13, 112 Leavis, F. R. 153, 156 n.1
and new physics 73–6, 78–9 Le Bon, Gustave 45–6, 49
82 n.12 The Crowd: A Study of the
Jung, Carl 127–8 Popular Mind 119–20
Leeuwenhoek, Antoine
Kandel, Eric 127 van 86
Keller, Evelyn Fox 14, 26, 88 Léger, Fernand 92
Kelvin, Lord 43–4, 46, 56–7, Lehmann, Otto 91
81 n.7 Levine, George 27, 42, 154
Kepes, György 92 Lewis, C. I. 18
Kirchner, Ludwig 150 Lewis, Wyndham 5, 93,
Klee, Paul 110, 150 112, 122
Kojève, Alexandre 18–19 life sciences 26, 32, 39, 83–5,
Kopp, Hermann 64 89, 115, 118. See also
Koyré, Alexander 18–19, 35 n.8 anatomy; biology; genetics;
Krafft-Ebing, Richard physiology
von 134, 136 and microscope 88
Kuhn Thomas 7, 22, 33, 35 n.10, and technology 141
36 n.11, 39, 42, 81 n.4, 99, and Virginia Woolf 114
127. See also paradigms; literature and science 13–15, 25–7,
history and philosophy of 35 n.5, 80, 157. See also
science; science studies domaining; science studies;
and Bruno Latour 24 science and technology
and Ludwig Fleck 35 n.9 studies
and science studies 21 logical positivism 18–19, 159
Structure of Scientific Lorentz, Hendrik 67
Revolutions 15–20, 158 Lowell, Amy 145
and Susan Merrill Squier 26 Loy, Mina 93, 105, 135, 137
Kupka, František 54 Lyon, Janet 151–3
176 Index
Mach, Ernst 67, 126 modernist studies 8, 57, 59, 73,

Macintyre, John 59 90, 143
Mackey, Peter Francis 75 and biology 95
Madge, Charles 122–4 and critical disability
Malinowski, Bronislaw 121–2 studies 149–51, 153
Mansfield, Katherine 46, ecocritical turn in 109,
81 n.5 111–12
Marconi, Guglielmo 3 and eugenics 138
Marinetti, F. T. 5–6, 10, 12, and impersonality 103
34 n.2, 36 n.12 interdisciplinarity of 13–15, 84
“Founding and Manifesto of and Mass-Observation
Futurism” 3–4 movement 122
Zang Tumb Tumb 3, 56 and material histories of
Marsden, Dora 82, 121 science 61
Marx, Karl 37 and new physics 69, 76
Mass-Observation and non-Euclidean
movement 33, 122–4 geometries 52
mathematics 39, 80 n.2. See also and psychology 125, 127, 133
geometry and pulp science fiction
matter. See also energy; physical magazines 108
sciences and science studies 21–6, 97
paradigms of 38–9, 53, 56–7, and sexology 134
63, 66–7, 89, 91 and social sciences 118, 121
Maxwell, Clerk 49, 66 and spatial fourth
mechanism 132. See also dimension 53
organicism; vitalism and thermodynamics 43, 46
and D. H. Lawrence 47 and vitalism 102
and organicism 32, 87–90 Monroe, Harriet 6, 145
medicine 32, 83, 128, 130 Moore, Marianne 6, 145
and critical disability Moses, Omri 101
studies 150 Müller, Otto Friedrich 87
and eugenics 140 Münsterberg, Hugo 96, 102
and modernist writing Myers, Greg 42
96–102
Meidner, Ludwig 150 Nagaoka, Hantaro 60, 88
Mendel, Gregor 83, 115 n.1, 140 natural history 112, 115
Mew, Charlotte 152 naturalism 43, 115, 142
Meyer, Ernst von 64 Needham, Joseph 90
Meyer, Steven 95–6, 100–2 neuroscience 8, 125
Micale, Mark 27, 97, 120, neuron doctrine 32–3, 94–6,
126–9 99–101, 116 n.7
microscopes 86–8, 95, 99 and optics 103
Minkowski, Hermann 67 and psychology 125
Index 177
new criticism 121 Pfannkuchen, Antje 56–7

newspapers 4, 29, 70 photography 38, 91, 103, 139,
Newtonian physics 8, 40–1, 141–3
43–4, 52, 66–9, 71, 74, 88. physical sciences 31–3, 62, 83–4,
See also Albert Einstein; 88, 90–2, 118. See also
ether Physics; quantum astronomy; chemistry;
physics; relativity energy; ether physics;
Nicholson, Daniel J. 89 geology; matter; Newtonian
Nietzsche, Friedrich 101, 127 physics; quantum physics;
Nobel Prize 12–13, 59 thermodynamics
Nordau, Max 117–18, 134, 139 and new geometries 40
North, Michael 5–7, 17, 34 n.3 paradigm shifts in 38–40, 57
Nye, Mary Jo 58–9 and technology 141
and Virginia Woolf 112
optics 38, 86, 102–5 physiology 32
organicism. See also mechanism; and eugenics 140, 143
vitalism and optics 102–5
and embryology 94 and psychology 84
and Gertrude Stein 99–102 Picasso, Pablo 51
and the mechanism/vitalism Planck, Max 67–8, 77
binary 32, 88–90 Poincaré, Henri 67
and neurological research positivism 35 n.10, 51, 97, 128–9
95–6 postmodernity 38, 48, 75
Ostwald, Wilhelm 58 Pound, Ezra 1, 5–6, 10, 12, 29,
Otis, Laura 94 34 n.3, 64, 122
Ouspensky, P. D. 51 and alchemy 66
and “Back to Nature”
Papapetros, Spyros 91–3 movement 145
paradigms 15–17, 21, 24, 26, 30, and Ludwig Fleck 19
33, 35 n.10, 99, 158 and nature study 112
Parkinson, Gavin 18, 67, 71–2, and spatial fourth
76–9 dimension 51–2, 56
Park Place Gallery Group 53 and thermodynamics 43, 46
Pasteur, Louis 97 and vortex theory 57
Pauli, Wolfgang 68 pragmatism 18
Pear, Tom Hatherley 131 Price, Katy 69–71
Peppis, Paul 121–2, 131, print culture 28–30
135–6, 138 Progressive Era 6, 143–4
periodicals 28–30, 45, 50, 55, Proust, Marcel 50, 74
57, 74 psychoanalysis 8, 33, 38, 132,
and new physics 77–9 136–7. See also psychology;
periodical studies 74, 82 n.13 sexology; Sigmund Freud
Perlis, Alan David 74 historicization of 126–8
178 Index
and modernist studies 130–1 Ramsay, William 58, 60

professionalization of 125 Read, Herbert 91, 93
psychology 33, 62, 88, 91, 101, Regardie, Israel 128
103, 117–18, 146 n.5. relativity 8, 31, 40, 51, 53, 66–9,
See also crowd psychology; 88. See also Albert Einstein;
Gustave Le Bon; hysteria; quantum physics
Mass-Observation and cubism 50
movement; psychoanalysis; and ether physics 57, 81 n.7
sexology; Sigmund Freud and modernism 73–8
and biology 84, 132 popular reception of 69–72
and disability studies 149–50 Rice, Thomas Jackson 75
and Gertrude Stein 95–6, 100 Richardson, Angelique 28
and mechanism 89 Riemann, Bernhard 40
and modernism 126–7, 135 Ritter, William Emerson 88,
professionalization of 125, 115 n.2
145 n.2 Rock, John 133
and the somaticist/mentalist Roman, Carrie 111
binary 130 Röntgen, Wilhelm 59
of trauma 131 Rossini, Manuela 23
Pumfrey, Stephen 70 Russolo, Luigi 4
Rutherford, Ernest 11–13, 60,
quantum physics 8, 31–2, 40, 62–5, 68, 72, 75, 80 n.2, 88
88. See also Albert Einstein, Ryan, Judith 126
ether physics, Newtonian
Physics, relativity, the Sabin, Florence 106
physical sciences Savage, Mike 123
emergence of 66–8 Schaffner, Anna Katharina
and epistemology 71–2 133–4
and ether physics 41, 57, Schleiden, M. J. 86
81 n.7 Schmidgen, Henning 8
and James Joyce 74–7 Schrödinger, Erwin 68, 77
and modernist studies 69, 73, Schulze, Robin G. 6, 143–5
78, 95 Schwann, Theodor 86
queer studies 137 science and technology studies
(STS) 20, 22
radio 8, 10, 36 n.12 science studies 13–15, 21–6,
radioactivity 11–13, 31. See also 84–5, 97, 126, 150, 154–5,
physical sciences; X–rays 157–9. See also history
and alchemy 63–6 and philosophy of science;
and modernism 62–3 literature and science;
and new paradigms in the science and technology
sciences 57–60 studies
Ramòn y Cajal, Santiago 95 scientism 39, 43, 49
Index 179
Sconce, Jeffrey 130 Stein, Gertrude 112, 116 n.8

Scott, Bonnie Kime 111–13 and neuroscience 32, 84,
Second World War 9–10, 139 95–6, 99–102
Seitler, Dana 126, 139 Steiner, Rudolf 52
Severini, Gino 4 Stengers, Isabelle 126
Severn, Elizabeth 128, 146 n.5 Stevens, Wallace 145
sexology 8, 33, 84, 106, 118, Stewart, Balfour 52, 57
132–8, 143. See also Stopes, Marie 135, 137
psychoanalysis; psychology Strathern, Marilyn 85, 157
shell shock 129–31 Sullivan, J. W. N. 77, 105
Sherrington, Charles 96 surrealism 18, 31, 77–8, 110,
Siebers, Tobin 150–2 123–4
Silberer, Herbert 128 Swan, Eugene L. 145
Small, Helen 153–4 Symbolism 6
Smith, Grafton Elliot 131 Symonds, John Addington 135–6
Smithson, Robert 53
Snow, C. P. Tait, Peter Guthrie 52, 57, 81 n.7
The Two Cultures 27–8, 78, technoscience 8, 22–3, 103, 158
153, 156 n.1 and Ezra Pound 5
social sciences 32–3, 80 n.2, and F. T. Marinetti 56
84, 117, 121, 142–3, 149, technoscientism 39, 84, 102,
154. See also anthropology; 155, 158
crowd psychology; telegraphy 3, 32, 34, 53–4, 95
eugenics; Mass-Observation telepathy 41, 131
movement; sexology; telephones 10
sociology; psychoanalysis; thermodynamics 31, 39–40,
psychology 57, 81 n.4. See also energy;
and biology 132–3 entropy; physical sciences
professionalization of 118 emergence of 41–2
sociology 19, 32, 101, 117–19, and modernism 43–9
140, 149–50, 154, 159. Thomson, J. J. 60–1, 72
See also crowd psychology; Thomson, William. See Lord Kelvin
Mass-Observation thought style 19, 64–5, 98, 159.
movement; social sciences See also Ludwig Fleck
Soddy, Frederick 29, 36 n.11, 37, Tobey, Ronald C. 28
57–8, 60, 63–6, 72 Toscano, Aaron A. 36 n.11
The Interpretation of Traweek, Sharon 65
Radium 11–12, 15–16 Turda, Marius 139
Sokal, Alan 153
Squier, Susan Merrill 14–15, Valentine, Kylie 130
26, 85, 106–8, 133, 135, Van’t Hoff, Jacobus Henricus 58
137–8, 157 Veditz, C. W. A. 118–19
Star, Susan Leigh 65 Verrill, A. Hyatt 108
180 Index
Victorian era 2 Wise, M. Norton 42

Vienna Circle 19 Woese, Carl R. 89
vitalism 48, 116 n.4. See also Wolff, Tamsen 139–42
mechanism; organicism Woolf, Leonard
and organicism 32, 87–90, as science publisher 29, 125
99, 101–2 Woolf, Virginia 1, 79, 105, 122
and thermodynamics 44, and disability 151–3
46–7 and nature study 111–14
Vorticism 5, 51, 56–7, 135 and radioactivity 63
as science publisher 29, 125
Walter, Christina 103–5, 116 n.6 and thermodynamics 46, 49
Watson, James 89 and trauma 130
Weart, Spencer R. 63–4 Woolgar, Steve 22, 158
Weller, Shane 133–4 Worringer, Wilhelm 91, 93
Wells, H. G. 46, 50, 108, 133 Wundt, Wilhelm 84
West, Rebecca 121, 130–1 Wünsche, Isabel 109–10
White, Paul 113
Whitehead, Alfred North 18, 100 X-rays 8, 16, 31, 53, 59–63,
Whitworth, Michael 29–30, 68, 82 n.9, 103. See also
38, 46, 49–50, 63, 76–9, radioactivity
82 n.13
Wilde, Oscar 50, 136 Yeats, William Butler 1, 66
Williams, William Carlos
98–9, 145 Zöllner, J. C. F. 50
181
182
183
184

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Modernism,

Bloomsbury’s New Modernisms series introduces, explores,

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

First published 2017

© Mark S. Morrisson, 2017

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-3341-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Series: New Modernisms

Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Grey

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

1 Modernist culture, modernist science 1

Glossary of key terms from science studies 157

Bringing together the diverse and seemingly disparate threads

“Make it new,” prescribed Ezra Pound—the modernist poet,

rising as a world power, more confidently signaling its own imperial

F. T. Marinetti’s visually bold artist’s book Zang Tumb Tumb (1914)

newspaper—Marinetti published his manifesto on the front page

“bowed down under the opprobrious burden of the Greeks and

more viable foundation for modernism than religious or political

The implications of the evolutionary model of artistic change

Modernists pottering among the test tubes is an apt image. Yet

theory of general relativity. Relativity undermined Newtonian and

revealing modernist-era institutions of science and technology to be

Institutions of science and technology

on, for example, hydroelectric power to meet the increasing needs

events in chemistry and physics in the first half of the twentieth

The “revolution” that Soddy and Rutherford had sparked with

So drastic an innovation was, it is true, unanticipated. Radium,

But the rhetoric of Soddy’s Interpretation of Radium was not all

on former occasions,” mentioning the work of J. J. Thomson, Henri

Tools for modernist studies

Literature and science

Bono sees a renewal of the field beginning in the 1980s, as literary

From the early 1980s on, a new generation of scholars

Most of the interdisciplinary explorations that helped revive

(1995), taught in a program in the history and philosophy of science.

Kuhn’s “paradigms” and “scientific

the vast majority of scientific research comprises puzzle-solving

Kuhn proposed that true scientific revolutions, or paradigm shifts,

Kuhn and modernism

The assault of the strange and unassimilable on the conditions

philosophy of science, and ultimately with discussion of quantum

Bijker’s technological frames

had a negative impact in many ways. To Fuller, Kuhn’s work is “an

First, technological frames are more heterogeneous than

The technological frame offers both problems and strategies

are disciplinary outsiders can add the alternative perspectives

Science studies and the influence of Bruno Latour

basis for scientific knowledge” (1). That basic formulation covers

Action. It is meant to “describe all the elements tied to the scientific

for modernist studies in its shared concerns with literary theory.

Latour constantly emphasizes flexibility of interpretation and

New modernist studies, science,

One can see a proliferation of strong exemplars of this shift by

Print culture of modernism and science

Descriptions of science were especially vivid in the popular

In the United States, this attitude that science should be made

community itself, after the First World War, in an effort to establish

important to modernism (The Athenaeum and The Criterion, for

1 Primary focus on science and technology as constituents

period, but generally gaining recognition in the academic contexts

sciences, technologies, arts, and literatures of this period of rapid

Depictions of this inevitable “heat death” did not simply concern