Literature and Pseudoscience
47.2, Fall/Winter 2009
Katherine Eggert, editor
This special issue investigates the relationship between literature and science practices whose claims to truth are not bolstered by the experimental method. Contributors explore particular writers and texts along with particular pseudoscientific practices and practitioners. They also address broader questions, such as the relationship between the truth value of literature and the truth value of the sciences; how pseudoscience intersects with broader issues of knowledge creation and knowledge management; scientific and literary epistemologies; the entanglement of literary theory with debates over scientific truth; and the intersections of pseudoscience with particular literary or bibliographical scholarly methods. Together, the essays in this issue new light on literary value by placing literature in the context of historical and contemporary forms of knowledge production.
- Plague cures and utopia
- Female mountebanks
- Anthropology as science fiction
- Class anxiety and Victorian pseudosciences
- Complex adaptive systems
- Cryptography and literary theory
- Pseudoscientific narrators
- Journalism and exorcism
- Theosophy’s urban design
- and more