Since 1959, when C.P. Snow delivered his seminal lecture The Two Cultures on the lack of understanding between scholars working in the humanities and their colleagues from science departments, the gap between the two groups has been one of the most notorious clichés of contemporary Western culture. The aim of this article is to show that this seemingly insurmountable abyss between sciences and the humanities that was brought to the forefront during the mid-20th century is slowly receding into history. Literature (...) studies today is heavily indebted to modern science. Biology, physics, and ecology are among the most important subjects scholars of literature have to take into account. In order to prove this point I shortly describe literary genres which introduce modern science to the readers: science fiction, cyberpunk, solarpunk, lablit, quantum fiction, and cli-fi. I also refer to the newly-emerged schools of criticism-science fiction studies, ecocriticism and evocriticism-to show how scholars discuss these texts within the framework of the humanities. Additionally, I give a sample discussion of one of the cli-fi’s classics, J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World and also shortly discuss two science fiction novels concerned with the civilisational conflict between science and humanities: Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. (shrink)

The author refers to three authors, Anthony Burgess, Aldous Huxley and Stanisław Lem, who, when building their visions of a biologically ‘amended’ society, imbue them with their apprehensions of the psychological consequences of civilisation’s further development; the more or less voluntary limitation of the freedom of the individual, globalisation, the domination of ‘dumbed-down’ popular culture and advanced science and technology at the service of the ruling elite. The writers and the philosopher continually warned the reader that a combination of these (...) factors will result in the emergence of a new totalitarianism, a dictatorship disguised as an apparently permissive utopia. The author demonstrates how the writers in question are part of the pessimistic stream of reflection on humankind which dominated the Western thought of the mid-20th century and which found its fullest reflection in Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom. (shrink)