Abstract
Tracing two genealogies of genetics in two contemporary science novels, Hamann identifies the historicising of scientific knowledge and practice as a new trend in the history of the novel. He argues that the foregrounding of scientific historical difference in both Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman reflects the central tenet of twentieth-century philosophy of science that scientific epistemology is historically specific. At the same time, Hamann uncovers the novels’ engagement with past genetic practice as a critique of genetics in the twenty-first century. Exploring the literary forms through which the two novels historicise genetic science, Hamann offers an original perspective on how the aesthetics of the two texts inform and are informed by their investigation of scientific epistemology.
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Notes
- 1.
See also Jay Clayton who identifies a trend in recent fiction to negotiate convergences of literary and scientific cultures, especially through two-generational plots that juxtapose past and current science. He suggests that such histories of science offer insights into risks and opportunities arising from scientific cultures today. Mendel’s Dwarf employs a variant of the two-generational plot (Clayton 2003, 202–4).
- 2.
While Rheinberger explicitly acknowledges Foucault, his emphasis on the materiality of epistemological conditions is an addition to Foucault’s more discourse-oriented genealogical method. Foucault’s conception of genealogy is also not specific to a study of science.
- 3.
In the following, all references to Mendel’s Dwarf are marked with MD plus page.
- 4.
Lambert occasionally assumes a third-person narrative instance which allows him a more detached narrative perspective on events.
- 5.
This aspect of the focalisation is discernible, for instance, through the use of “genetic,” a term that after all had not yet been coined.
- 6.
In the following, all references to A Whistling Woman or Babel Tower are marked with WW or BT plus page.
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Hamann, P. (2019). Genealogies of Genetics: Historicising Contemporary Science in Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman. In: Engelhardt, N., Hoydis, J. (eds) Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19490-1_7
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