Poetry and the Hard Sciences
December 7, 2022, 19:30
Warburg-Haus, Heilwigstraße 116, 20249 Hamburg
The opposition between poetic and scientific worldviews is one of the most enduring narratives of Western cultures: as the common wisdom goes, science operates with numbers, while poetry uses words. Science is objective and precise; poetry is vague and evocative. Science establishes universal facts and laws; poetry creates unique experiences that defy rational understanding.
In the digital age, this opposition no longer holds. Dystopian references to advanced natural sciences and technologies can be found in poems, as can the scientific language of calculations and classifications, and factual and impersonal reports. These “hard” sciences are becoming so entangled with poetry that they are changing its very substance, resulting in new forms of posthuman poetry. Neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, and mathematicians are developing tools to dissect and measure this poetic matter with scientific precision. The last event of the Poetry Debates will therefore discuss the relationship between poetry and science from a radically contemporary perspective, putting the spotlight on how theories of posthumanism, the Anthropocene and Big History are informing both poetry writing and empirical poetry research today. The event will be held in German.
With
Daniel Falb (Poet and theorist; Berlin)
Dr. Stefan Blohm (Psycho-linguist and empirical aesthetics researcher; Frankfurt/Main)
Moderator: Prof. Dr. Claudia Benthien (Literary scholar and principal investigator, PoetryDA)
Free entry.