[DOWNLOAD] "The Two Cultures: The Literary Moderns Revisited (Report)" by Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: The Two Cultures: The Literary Moderns Revisited (Report)
- Author : Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 272 KB
Description
Abstract Leading from C.P.Snow's comments in his Rede Lecture of 1959, regarding "self-impoverishment" on the part of both scientists and literary intellectuals,this essay begins by examining texts by two of the writers in question: "The Waste Land", by T.S.Eliot and Women in Love, by D.H.Lawrence. Noting, as Snow does, the pessimistic tone regarding the individual human condition informing these literary works, as well as what Snow terms their Luddite attitude regarding industry, technology, and scientific advance in general, the essay will highlight the authors' dismissal of the possiblities for concrete, collective economic betterment presented by the natural and physical sciences in the very period, the mid-Twentieth Century, when Eliot, Lawrence, Franz Kafka, and other literary pessimists held center stage in British, European, and American classrooms. The essay will then shift its attention to the Twentieth Century literary titan, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, one of whose massive novels, Cancer Ward, emerges from the writer's comprehensive familiarity with the medical sciences. The author of The First Circle,The Gulag Archipelago, and Cancer Ward presupposes an educated readership conversant with primary facts and issues in both the humanities and the sciences. Therefore, while neither experimental in style nor blindly optimistic regarding a utopian future through science, the novel suggests another possibility: an ethically aware, active populace, educated in both the arts and the sciences, capable of using its knowledge for both individual well-being in the spiritual sense and collective well-being in the socioeconomic sense. The essay will focus on the dual function of medical science in Cancer Ward, as literary metaphor and as bureaucratic fact in the now defunct soviet Union. The paper will conclude with a retrospective look at the teaching of the modern literary canon in American classrooms of the 1960's and beyond, and a suggestion for revision of that pedagogic approach, which marginalizes scientific elements in those texts.