Literature and Science has become a recognizable and respected field in the academy, and this paper asks whether technology studies holds a place in that (inter)discipline. Before we can locate technology within literature and science scholarship, we might be tempted to ask a further question: if science and technology are intimately related concepts, why pull technology out as a subject that might be studied with literature but separately from science? This question forms the focus of my article. I aim to demonstrate why we should formalize technology’s place in the union between literature and science. My attention to this issue does not imply that I believe technology to be absent from literature and science scholarship. Discussions of real and imagined technologies frequently arise in Configurations and JLS, whether we are investigating techniques of bodily alteration, histories of media, fossil-fuel burning motors that harm the environment, or the fantastical systems we find in speculative fiction. What appears notably less often in our publications and conference panels are the methodologies of technology studies—and most especially their historical approaches. The question here is not, therefore, whether we are discussing specific technologies or not; it is whether we are analysing technology and culture in the same way that we analyse the arts and artifacts of literature and science. I argue that Literature and Science fosters research in the latter areas of inquiry significantly more than it does in the first. In fact, the Call for Papers for this special double issue of JLS and Configurations posed a question about the relationships among literature, science, and the arts. The omission of technology from that list is illustrative. To address this issue, I propose that we establish literature and technology as a sister field to Literature and Science—not to extricate these interdisciplinary fields from one another but rather to allow for the creation of thematic working groups within Literature and Science. To make this case, I will argue, first, that the study of literature and technology has been relatively neglected within Literature and Science. Second, I will demonstrate what we can stand to gain by redressing this issue.
...MoreArticle Melissa M. Littlefield; Martin Willis (2017) Introduction: The State of the Unions. Journal of Literature and Science (pp. 1-4).
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