| dcterms.abstract | My dissertation examines diverse perspectives that literary authors, popular science writers, and academics bring to bear on the question of who can contribute to public science discourse. That discourse has a vexed history; it inherits assumptions of incompatibility from debates about a “Two Cultures” divide, and has been the battleground of the “Science Wars” between scientists and cultural theorists. I move beyond discord and valuation, in favor of a “participatory model,” where both scientists and nonscientists promote the scientific literacy of the lay public. My project juxtaposes popular science alongside literature, which illuminates narrative's alternately constructive and destructive role in the unstable environments of popular science, literary engagement with science, and scientific inquiry itself. I argue such instability is a product of “narrative desire”—Peter Brooks's term for what propels a narrative to reach its end. From the inconclusive results of experimental research, to the evolving landscape of 21st century science communication, to the contested ownership of biosamples and science stories, the study of and response to scientific ideas presents a range of opportunities for both misunderstanding and misconduct. My project examines explorations and examples of misunderstanding and misconduct, such as Allegra Goodman's retelling of real-life alleged science fraud, and the work of science writer Jonah Lehrer, whose fabrications misrepresented science in support of the story he wanted to tell. But the “narrative impulse,” Brooks writes, “is as old as our oldest literature,” and my aim is to locate the productive function of our universal instinct for storytelling. In this light, I cast Goodman's novel Intuition as exposing the pressures that promote misconduct and allegations of misconduct in ways that are absent from scholarly and journalistic considerations. And I argue that Joyce Carol Oates's novel The Man Without a Shadow and Deborah Zoe Laufer's play Informed Consent function reparatively in medical ethics debates, in that they leave uncomfortable questions unanswered and thereby do justice to what is unresolved. My dissertation thus asserts that scientific knowledge is not “top down” or the business of specialists, but something that moves through culture and benefits from a narrative approach to public science discourse. | |
