Technoscience, William Carlos Williams, and Modernism

(Hardback)

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Utilizing the work and thought of William Carlos Williams, this book delves into the battle between science and the humanities over cultural authority. It argues that argue many modernists in the arts and humanities sought to find areas of commonality between apparent opposites (narrative and quantitative discourse, intuition and external observation, the creative process and scientific method, the avant-garde and scientific innovation). William Carlos Williams was deeply concerned with finding such commonalities, in part because of the binary split of his own professions. He was a major modernist writer with a passionate humanist faith in the power and importance of the arts, but also a doctor whose positivist medical training schooled him to see science as the only truth. How he negotiated these warring discourses is, in microcosm, the story of technoscience and its arguments with and compromises with the humanities and arts.

Author Bio

Tony Barnstone is professor of English language and literature at Whittier College