Contact Address:
Prof. Dr. Klaus Mecke
Institut für Theoretische Physik
Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Staudtstraße 7
91058 Erlangen
Germany
Phone: +49-9131-85 28441
Fax: +49-9131-85 28444

Contact Address:
Dr. Aura Heydenreich
Germanistik und Komparatistik
Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Bismarckstraße 1b
91054 Erlangen
Germany
Phone: +49-9131-85 22978

ELINAS Book Series founded with De Gruyter

The Erlangen Center for Literature and Natural Science (ELINAS) has founded a book series with the renowned publisher De Gruyter. The first two volumes, Physik und Poetik (Physics and Poetics) and Quarks and Letters, have now been published. The series enables experts from different disciplinary cultures to combine their methods to investigate the functions of language in scientific research as well as the processes of modeling scientific knowledge in literature. It is conceived as an interdisciplinary forum for reflection on the cultural significance of scientific and literary research as well as on the ethics and rhetoric of scientific argumentation.
 

The first volume, Physik und Poetik (Physics and Poetics), documents extensive interviews with authors who have been deeply engaged with how physics knowledge shapes world-pictures, a concern often overlooked by literary criticism and scholarship. Their reasons for this engagement are as diverse as the books they write, and these interviews give them the opportunity to express their thinking, enriching the discourse of the two cultures with a voice that that understands both literature and physics. We encounter physics in all spheres of life, ranging from the many devices of our technologized civilization, to descriptions of natural phenomena, to our fundamental understanding of the world, which has been radically altered by quantum theory and relativity theory. It is therefore not surprising that authors make use of physical insights to tell stories about humans and the world they live in. Experimental literature and metaphors in physical theories are just two topics discussed in these interviews with Ulrike Draesner, Durs Grünbein, Michael Hampe, Jens Harder, Reinhard Jirgl, Thomas Lehr, Ulrich Woelk and Julie Zeh. All are agreed that physics and literature are two modes of knowing the world that complement and condition one another.