STEP - Science and Technology in the European Periphery

CFP: Scientific Canons
University of East Anglia
6th May 2011
Keynote speaker: Aileen Fyfe (University of St Andrews)

Sponsored by the British Society for Literature and Science

In literary studies, canonisation has been an important topic since the 1980s. Alongside
critiques of canons as pantheons of dead white males, and work to supplement canonical
literatures by (re)instating female authors, new topics, and world literatures, critics have
interrogated the very usefulness of ‘the canon’ as a conceptual category. To what extent
are canons necessary to disciplines as they compete to secure their own special kinds of
authority? Do specialists create special sets of texts in their own image, or do special
texts produce a need for specialist expertise? And what is the role of the critic, and of
readers, in making and unmaking literary canons? Such questions have energised our relation
to the history of literature, but in the history of science discussion of the ‘canon’ is
only just getting off the ground. The problems here are different: perhaps there is a canon
of people (Aristotle, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin) but isolating and defining a canon of
scientific texts is a much trickier affair. Papers and speakers are therefore invited to
this one-day conference debating the problems and possibilities of a scientific canon.

Papers might address the following (or related) questions:

> which scientific texts, and which forms of scientific text (the paper, the book, the
lecture series, etc.) have become, or might become, canonised?

> Why might we want a scientific canon, and who/what for? For scientists in specific
disciplines, for historians and literary critics, for general readers?

> How do we define a scientific text, and what criteria of value might we apply to it?

> Is the problem of the scientific canon related to science’s perceived separation from
literary culture?

> What roles might the aesthetic value of a scientific work or reader responses have to
play in the making of a scientific canon?

Please send abstracts to Adelene Buckland, University of East Anglia, at
a.buckland@uea.ac.uk, by 31st January 2011. Panel submissions especially
welcome.

Dr Adelene Buckland
Lecturer in Literature
Room 2.52
Arts Building
University of East Anglia
Norwich
NR4 7TJ
01603 593666