emaciated, sallow, and sickly looking. His work also
transforms his daughter, who develops immunity
to the poisonous flowers he cultivates but renders
her toxic to anything or anyone in proximity of her
breath. Collectively, these texts argue for a mode of
science that critiques and limits its own ambitions
and takes into account the social costs of scientific
work once it leaves the laboratory.
These literary arguments, however, did little to
curtail the degree to which science and technol-
ogy propelled larger processes of urbanization and
industrialization. Many late 19th-century literary
texts responded to this nagging realization by jux-
taposing pastoral and industrial imagery. Huck’s
desire to embark on a journey into unspoiled ter-
ritory, near the end of Mark Twain’s adventures
oF huckLeberry Finn, for instance, might reflect a
growing ambivalence about the purported civilizing
effects of an increasingly urbanized world. And in
Twain’s a connecticut yankee in kinG arthur’s
court, the protagonist’s failed attempts to indus-
trialize Arthurian England offers a stark rejection
of Enlightenment notions that time and scientific
initiative result in progress.
By the 20th century, science no longer needed
the qualifying term natural to denote methodologi-
cal research capable of generating certainty about
aspects of the physical world. Nevertheless, the defi-
nitional instability of the term remains to this day as
the intellectual writings of social scientists, histori-
ans, and philosophers have increasingly questioned
the supposed boundaries dividing science from other
forms of intellectual and cultural work. Such writings
argue that scientists belong to a distinct culture with
its own ethics, politics, languages, and rituals, and
that their work is shaped, in direct and indirect ways,
by larger national and international pressures. Much
20th-century literature reflects and informs these
observations by questioning science’s autonomy and
objectivity. In many texts, scientific research and
its technologies become driving forces behind the
growth of consumer culture, corporations, economic
systems, and political entities. In his u.s.a. triLoGy,
John Dos Passos employs a narrative technique
that interweaves documentary sources, newspaper
collages, fiction, montage techniques from film, and
biographical sketches to depict the lives of working
Americans in an industrial culture. His rapid narra-
tive transitions emphasize the role of communica-
tion, entertainment, and information technologies
in shaping lived experience.
A few decades after Dos Passos’s trilogy, Ray
Bradbury’s fiction would consistently imagine
future worlds in which consumer culture and enter-
tainment technologies render the critical imagina-
tion obsolete and undesirable. His Fahrenheit 451,
along with Aldous Huxley’s brave new worLd
and George Orwell’s nineteen eiGhty-Four, dra-
matize how computer and surveillance technologies
disseminate and enforce values compatible with the
dominant power structures. These nightmare worlds
depict entire populations that come to see individual
conformity as an acceptable price to pay for national
security. Other texts reveal a growing ambivalence
toward the seeming omnipresence of military and
information technologies in our lives. An atomic
war might be the cause of the airplane crash that
strands a group of schoolboys on a deserted island
at the beginning of William Golding’s Lord
oF the FLies, but details of the cataclysm are
mentioned only in passing. Later in the novel, the
bestial violence that erupts on the island suggests
that military technologies might be little more than
extensions of an inherently violent and combative
human nature. Published a few decades later, Don
DeLillo’s white noise employs an ironic and
ambivalent narrative voice for a plot that juxtaposes
consumer excess, unstable identities, omnipresent
information technologies, and looming threats of
ecological disaster.
In complex ways, these texts contribute to the
always unfinished work of historicizing and theoriz-
ing the relations between society, science, and tech-
nology. They reflect and contribute to larger cultural
debates about how best to understand the impact
of science on our present circumstances and how to
approach an uncertain future in which technology
and science will unquestionably play a role.
See also Adams, Henry: education oF henry
adaMs, the; Lowry, Lois: Giver, the; Poe,
Edgar Allan: “Murders in the Rue Morgue,
The”; Silko Leslie Marmon: cereMony; Stein-
beck, John: cannery row; Stevenson, Robert
Louis: stranGe case oF dr. JekyLL and Mr.science and technology 97