Sabine Sielke

The Brain - is wider than the Sky - or: Re-Cognizing Emily Dickinson

Many of Emily Dickinson’s poems present operations of the human mind as physiological processes. These poems invite us to re-cognize Dickinson, that is, first, to reflect on what it can mean to approach her poetry by way of the cognitive sciences and secondly, to situate her poetics at the threshold of fundamental transformations of our media ecology and thus of common ways of perceiving, remembering, and creating the world. Interrogating how interactions between brain, mind, world, and media figure in Dickinson’s poems, this essay explores cognition as both individually embodied and embedded in a history of metaphor and mediation.

Science Studies and Literature

As an interand transdisciplinary inquiry into how science and technology work and have worked, science studies is inextricably entwined, I argue, with the cultural work of literary texts that probe the history of knowledge production. When engaging the question what fiction and poetry know, science studies may even present itself as an effect of an intense discussion on the relation between the sciences and literature that has been going on for centuries. This essay, in its first part, lays out the scope of and situates science studies within a larger debate of the history of science and technology. In part two, my contribution historicizes the interrelation between science studies and literature by revisiting the ongoing “one”, “two”, and “more cultures” debate. Focusing on the fiction of Richard Powers, its third and final part interrogates how some literary texts more than others operate as a variety of science studies. Like science studies, Powers’s novels reflect intensively on the history of science and technology; unlike science studies, they aim at putting literary and scientific practice on par. Sabine Sielke, University of Bonn E-Mail: ssielke@nap-uni-bonn.de

Multiculturalism in the United States and Canada

For anyone concerned with US and Canadian cultures, multiculturalism inevitably turns into a crucial matter, sooner or later. The self-conceptions of both nations soundly rest upon processes of immigration and integration characteristic of former settler colonies—similar to Australia and New Zealand. At the same time, US and Canadian nation building came at the price of acts of exclusion that have had lasting effects—be it the European colonial powers’ confrontations with various Indigenous peoples or, in the case of the United States, the enslavement, oppression, and ongoing discrimination of African Americans. All these processes—essentially processes of globalization—have significantly shaped US and Canadian political structures and cultures. The two nations’ history and rhetoric of ethnic contact and conflict, however, also differ in important ways. 1 Embracing its more positively valued metaphor of the mosaic, Canadian multiculturalist discourse has aimed at distancing itself from the trope of the melting pot, which was introduced by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782). What tends to be forgotten, though, is that when Kate Foster’s Our Canadian Mosaic was first published in 1926, Horace Kallen, Randolph Bourne, and others had already coined the term “cultural pluralism” and helped to establish the “salad bowl” metaphor, which has displaced the trope of the melting pot in the self-conception of the United States since the 1970s. 2