Course Syllabus: COMP LIT 210/CHID 220/GLITS 315
Literature and Science: Telling Tales of Science
Winter 2025 Professor Gary Handwerk
Tues/Thur 11:30-1:20; CMU 120 Office: A-402 Padelford
E-mail: handwerk@uw.edu GH Office Hours: by appt. (generally
Canvas Site: https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/1716528 available for a bit after classes)
TA: Erin Gilbert, eringil@uw.edu
Office: LL B-28 Padelford
EG Office Hours: Mon/Wed 3:00-4:00 (and by appt.)
About the course:
Modern science is typically understood as a research enterprise, one with practical applications to be sure, but at its basis as a process of investigation into or discovery of facts about the natural world. It is that, to be sure. But science is in equally fundamental ways a social, civic, cultural and political enterprise, deeply intertwined with the ways in which human beings define themselves and organize their activities. This holds true, indeed is especially true, for non-scientists and non-researchers, those of us who are “mere” citizens. Our topic in this course will be the latter: how the scientific enterprise reaches into social life, shaping the intellectual frameworks through which we understand our world (and ourselves), affecting public processes of social and political decision-making, and influencing our daily interactions with people and with the natural world in ways that can be obvious or unobtrusive.
Our core material will be at a set of what one might term either natural history or public science texts. Each deals with one or more scientific issues of wide social concern in its era; each was widely reviewed and broadly read; each had significant impact upon how the project of science has come to be socially construed and practiced. These texts range from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859; selections only!), the seminal text for modern evolutionary theory, through Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which helped launch modern environmental movements, to a trio of more recent texts dealing with climate change, ecology, epidemiology and public health. Although different in substance and in style, all of them share one key feature: unusual rhetorical skill. All are works carefully crafted to achieve wide readerships and to have a significant impact upon public debate and political decision-making—not only informing or educating the public about environmental issues, but also shaping the deep base of beliefs and values that frames social and political debates about public policies related to those issues. This element—rhetorical effectiveness—will be our primary analytical focus. Why, and even more centrally, how did these works succeed in having the impact that they did?
In school, we often learn science primarily as a matter of facts, information and theories, plowing through textbooks, generally one discipline at a time. But the influence of the sciences upon us permeates our lives in myriad other ways as well. To approach this topic from the angle of the humanities will for us mean foregrounding one particular mode through which science has an impact: the power of stories and story-telling. Some of you may read scientific journals, at least occasionally, dipping into Nature or the New England Journal of Medicine or Transactions of the American Geophysical Union to read an article of particular relevance or interest for you. For most of us (indeed, even for many scientists outside of their own disciplinary specialties), however, science comes to us framed by narrative, embedded in anecdotes or reporting or personal memoir, couched in terms of the ethical or political implications a particular theory or discovery is presumed to have, or set into a broader historical perspective (hi-story, itself a form of story). As these options suggest, narrative is not a single thing; it has various forms (termed genres) that function more or less appropriately in varied settings. So another part of what we will be doing in this class is to hone your awareness of genres—how different ones are constructed with an eye to specific reader expectations, what devices particular genres tend to employ, and why.
Learning to read these kinds of texts from an alert “literary” perspective is a skill that we can also bring to bear on non-literary texts. Most kinds of discourse make extensive use of “literary” sorts of strategies, deploying not just narrative structures, but features such as imagery, allegory, analogy, tone and other elements typical of literary texts to help them achieve their rhetorical purposes. Indeed, it is rare that scientific expertise proves to be the sole determining factor even for decision-making about what one might see as scientific issues—the reality of global warming, for instance, or the decision to protect or not protect an endangered species, or the choice to approve (or not) a specific chemical or medication for wide-spread use. It is even rarer for politicians or bureaucrats or activists to refrain from the slanting of perspective that rhetoric can provide (thus the not-so-distant renaming of global warming as “climate change”). So the analysis we will practice in this class is in an important way transferable to the reading and the writing you may do in very different contexts.
Comparative Literature 210/CHID 220/GLITS 315 will be a writing-intensive course, but in a class as large as this one, much of the writing will necessarily be informal, low-stakes, ungraded writing. You will be writing in your e-journal on a regular basis both before and after, as well as during almost every class. That writing will provide me with one key measure of your engagement in the course and your active reading of the texts we will be covering. For this informal writing, PLEASE CREATE A WORD DOCUMENT AS YOUR VIRTUAL JOURNAL, TITLED WITH A FILE NAME LIKE THIS: Your name.your course number (thus: handwerk.cl210, lee.glits315), which you will be asked to submit via e-mail, NOT on Canvas, on a regular basis throughout the quarter. Although you will be doing your response writing both inside and outside of class at varied times, you MUST cut-and-paste every entry into your e-journal. You will also be doing: 1) a series of three longer, graded analytical essays, and 2) a culminating response essay on Refuge, and 3) a final ungraded self-reflective essay about your experience in the course. You will have the option to revise and resubmit one of your graded essays.
Course Texts (be cautious with e-books, which may not contain all the material in the printed text):
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming
Devra Davis, When Smoke Ran Like Water Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge
Additional Course Readings available on Canvas Web site (in the Files section, organized by folders according to author name)
Graded Work:
Analytical essays (3): single-spaced, minimal margins 20% each; 60% of final grade
Attendance, participation, in-class writing, Refuge response 20% of final grade
Journal/Self-reflective essay 20% of final grade