A Brief History of L&S -- The Science Wars -- Models of Engagement -- Encoding an Infinite Message: Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations -- Is That a Coded Message? It May Not Be So Simple! -- Found in Translation -- Entropy as Time's (Double-Headed) Arrow in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia -- Chirality and Life -- Making New Life -- The End of Irony and/or the End of Science?

One of the most contentious questions in contemporary literary studies is whether there can ever be a science of literature that can lay claim to objectivity and universality, for example by concentrating on philological criticism, by appealing to cognitive science, or by exposing the underlying media of literary communication. The present collection of essays seeks to open up this discussion by posing the question’s historical and systematic double: has there been a science of literature, i.e. a mode of presentation and practice of reference in science that owes its coherence to the discourse of literature? Detailed analyses of scientific, literary and philosophical texts show that from the late 18th to the late 19th century science and literature were bound to one another through an intricate web of mutual dependence and distinct yet incalculable difference. The Science of Literature suggests that this legacy continues to shape the relation between literary and scientific discourses inside and outside of academia.

Winner of the (Inaugural) 2022 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award From a celebrated Chickasaw writer, a spiritual meditation, in prose and poetry, on our relationship to the animal world, in an illustrated gift package. Concerned that human lives and the natural world are too often defined by people who are separated from the land and its inhabitants, Indigenous writer and environmentalist Linda Hogan depicts her own intense relationships with animals as an example we all can follow to heal our souls and reconnect with the spirit of the world. From her modest forest home in Colorado, and venturing throughout the region, especially to her beloved Oklahoma, she introduces us to horses, packrats, snakes, mountain lions, elks, wolves, bees, and so many others whose presence has changed her life. In this illuminating collection of essays and poems, lightly sprinkled with elegant drawings, Hogan draws on many Native nations’ ancient stories and spiritual traditions to show us that the soul exists in those delicate places where the natural world extends into human consciousness—in the mist of morning, the grass that grew a little through the night, the first warmth of this morning’s sunlight. Altogether, this beautifully packaged gift is a reverential reminder for all of us to witness and appreciate the radiant lives of animals.

Science is everywhere, in everything we do, see, and read. Books-all books-offer possibilities for talk about science in the illustrations and text once you know how to look for them. Children's literature is a natural avenue to explore the seven crosscutting concepts described in the Next Generation Science Standards*, and with guidance from Valerie Bang-Jensen and Mark Lubkowitz, you will learn to develop the mindset necessary to think like a scientist, and then help your students think, talk, and read like scientists. Sharing Books Talking Science is an engaging and user-friendly guide that provides practical, real world understandings of complex scientific concepts using children's literature. By demonstrating how to work in a very familiar and comfortable teaching context-read aloud-to address what may be less familiar and comfortable content-scientific concepts-Valerie and Mark empower teachers to use just about any book in their classroom to help deepen students' understanding of the world. Valerie and Mark supply you with everything you need to know to get to the heart of each concept, including a primer, questions and strategies to spot a concept, and ways to prompt students to see and talk about it. Each chapter offers a list of suggested titles (many of which you probably already have) to help you get started right away, as well as "topic spotlight" sections that help you connect the concepts to familiar topics such as eating, seasons, bridges, size, and water. With Sharing Books Talking Science, you will have the tools and confidence to explore scientific concepts with your students. Learn how to "talk science" with any book so that you can infuse your curriculum with scientific thinking...even when you aren't teaching science. *Next Generation Science Standards is a registered trademark of Achieve. Neither Achieve nor the lead states and partners that developed the Next Generation Science Standards were involved in the production of this product, and do not endorse it.

Between Literature and Science follows through to its emerging 21st-century future the central insight of 20th-century literary and cultural theory: that language and culture, along with their subsystems and artifacts, are self-referential systems. The book explores the workings of self-reference (and the related performativity) in linguistic utterances and assorted texts, through examples of the more open social-discursive systems of post-structuralism and cultural studies, and into the sciences, where complex systems organized by recursive self-reference are now being embraced as an emergent paradigm. This paradigmatic convergence between the humanities and sciences is autopoetics (adapting biologist Hubert Maturana’s term for “self-making” systems), and it signals a long-term epistemological shift across the nature/culture divide so definitive for modernity. If cultural theory has taught us that language, because of its self-referential nature, cannot bear simple witness to the world, the new paradigmatic status of self-referential systems in the natural sciences points toward a revived kinship of language and culture with the world: language bears “witness” to the world. The main movement of the book is through a series of model explications and analyses, operational definitions of concepts and terms, more extended case studies, vignettes and thought experiments designed to give the reader a feel for the concepts and how to use them, while working to expand the autopoetic internee by putting cultural self-reference in dialogue with the self-organizing systems of the sciences. Along the way the reader is introduced to self-reference in epistemology (Foucault), sociology (Luhmann), biology (Maturana/Varela/Kauffman), and physics and cosmology (Smolin). Livingston works through the fundamentals of cultural, literary, and science studies and makes them comprehensible to a non-specialist audience.

Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases. Even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of Chagas, a rare and devastating illness that affects the heart and digestive system. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas—or the kissing bug disease—is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus. After her aunt’s death, Hernández began searching for answers. Crisscrossing the country, she interviewed patients, doctors, epidemiologists, and even veterinarians with the Department of Defense. She learned that in the United States more than three hundred thousand people in the Latinx community have Chagas, and that outside of Latin America, this is the only country with the native insects—the “kissing bugs”—that carry the Chagas parasite. Through unsparing, gripping, and humane portraits, Hernández chronicles a story vast in scope and urgent in its implications, exposing how poverty, racism, and public policies have conspired to keep this disease hidden. A riveting and nuanced investigation into racial politics and for-profit healthcare in the United States, The Kissing Bug reveals the intimate history of a marginalized disease and connects us to the lives at the center of it all.