Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0016178, Sat, 12 Apr 2008 19:56:15 +0100

Subject
Re: Boyd on Lolita, science, pattern
Date
Body
On 28/03/2008 23:00, "b.boyd@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ" <b.boyd@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ> wrote:

> Dear All, or Some anyway:
>
> You may be interested in this article in the latest American Scholar which
> links my interests in Nabokov and in evolutionary approaches to literature
> less unsuccessfully than I have managed previously:
>
> http://www.theamericanscholar.org/sp08/literature-boyd.html
>
> Brian Boyd
> ---
> I relish this thought-provoking essay as one more attempt to bring together
> the two 'rival' (but each 'unrivalled!') components in Nabokov's life and
> achievements. What we loosely call Science and the Humanities. Beyond C P
> Snow's Two Cultures, we have E O Wilson's plea for CONSILIENCE -- the Unity of
> Knowledge (Knopf, New York, 1998). Wilson urges us to
>
> " ... view the boundary between scientific and literary cultures not as a
> territorial line but as a broad and mostly unexplored terrain awaiting
> cooperative entry from both sides."
>
> But (the ever-present disconjunctive), as Jay Labinger* notes
>
> "It would be hard to disagree with that sentiment, but Wilson's claim that
> 'the only way either to establish or to refute consilience is by methods
> developed in the natural sciences' seems to have more to do with COLONIZATION
> than ALLIANCE!" [my CAPS]
>
> * Science (AAAS), 28 March, 2008, reviewing "Proust Was a Neuroscientist,"
> Jonah Lehrer; and "Artscience -- Creativity in the Post-Google Generation."
>
> As I've oft complained on NABOKOV-L, the Science/LitCrit 'dichotomy' is huge
> and skewed. We mathematicians, semanticists and scorpionologists really 'dig'
> VN's corpus as much as the non-scientific 'literary' reader. Yet there's
> little reciprocal understanding or sheer enjoyment by the latter for the vast
> achievements of science and mathematics. The 'patterns' and 'symmetries'
> gleefully discovered in VN's narratives are quite trivial compared with the
> recently published Lie Group E8!
>
> Stan Kelly-Bootle
>
>


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