Science and Literature: Reflections on Interdisciplinarity and Modes of Knowledge

The joint field of 'science and literature' has been gaining increasing prominence in the last two decades, charting new grounds beyond the divided landscape of the 'two cultures'. Of our increasingly border-crossing research culture, no field provides a better example than cognitive literary criticism. Though still relatively young, this area has already produced a body of work that is extremely wide-ranging in both scale and explanatory scope, illustrating through its very organization the possibilities of multidisciplinary enquiry. This paper will examine interdisciplinarity with reference to evolutionary literary criticism, a sub-field within cognitive literary criticism; a scrutiny of the political and ideological implications that follow from basing an account of literature on adaptive value will be given followed by a discussion of the historical lineaments of the science/literature debate.