Introduction: The Interactive Relations Between Science and Technology and Literary Studies

Abstract

As we know, humanities and science and technology are two entirely different fields of knowledge, which appeal to different research methodologies. Since the ancient time, there has been such a relative consensus: science and technology is mostly opposed to humanities although occasionally not necessarily so, especially to literature and literary studies. People usually hold that in speaking of science and technology, the more recent, the better or more advanced. It is true that in evaluating a scientific or technological result, we may say that the discovery or research result has made a disruptive breakthrough that has completely replaced all the previous achievements. But it is not always necessarily true of humanities research results. In evaluating an achievement of the humanities studies, we often emphasize its inheritance and development of the ideas of its predecessors.In the Western humanities academia, if someone has a good command of Greek and Latin, he would be highly respected and admired by his colleagues and students for his profound learning and wide knowledge. In the Eastern countries, if a scholar understands Sanskrit or ancient Chinese, other people will admire him for his attainment in classics. So that is why people have got an opposite consensus on the humanities: the older the better. For the older ones have been historically proved valuable or correct and therefore become canonized, whereas the new ones have not yet experienced historical test and selection, the value of which cannot be adequately judged. That is why we always start from Homeric epics and Greek tragedies and comedies in teaching Western literature, and from Book of Poetry in teaching Chinese literature. Of course, in the European Renaissance period, there did appear quite a few erudite people who were very good at both science and humanities. And in other periods there were some writers who write about the topics of science and technology, hence we have science fiction as a border-crossing genre. But after all, such men of profound learning and interdisciplinary knowledge plus superb imagination are indeed very rare. Most people are good only at one area of learning or field of representation. That is why people have gradually reached such a consensus: science and technology are naturally opposed to humanities. You cannot do both well unless you are a genius.It is no doubt that from a humanistic perspective, or more specifically, from a literary point of view, we usually think that science and technology has little to do with literature and literary studies, let alone other disciplines of the humanities. It is certainly true to some extent as the quality and function of the two are largely different. But if we seriously consider this from a new perspective of the interactive relations between science and humanities, we may well find that literature and literary studies do have some relations with science and technology: both opposite and dialogic. For example, the rise of the genre of science fiction, which is now increasingly relevant to our life and attractive to literary scholars, is a typical genre combining science and technology with literary imagination and creation. To those elite writers and literary scholars in the traditional humanistic sense, science fiction does not represent the mainstream of literary creation. So they tend to neglect its value and impact on our life and literary production. Partly due to their dissatisfaction with the current high-technological approach to literature and art studies, which has raised a severe challenge to traditional humanistic approach to literary studies, and partly due to the slow reaction of humanities scholars and writers to the most advanced technology that has changed their life as well as the ways of research and writing, they even undervalue the function of technology in humanities and literary studies. As for this, we edit this special issue in an attempt to confront this challenge and try to prove that these two, science and technology and humanities, are possibly complementary.Readers will easily find that several authors in this issue deal with science fiction, especially the recent rise and popularization of science fiction in China, with some eminent authors winning various literary prizes internationally. Li Zou, starting from the issue of biotechnology, explores how futuristic technology transforms socioeconomic forms by analyzing Wang Jinkang's “The Reincarnated Giant” and “The Last Love” in an attempt to argue that biotechnology in China's science fiction “reshapes the politics of life and power dynamics in the society and transforms the socioeconomic institutions from one based on shared understanding and values into an apparatus controlled by interest oriented rationality and technology.” While Bo Li just focuses on Hong Kong's Chinese newspapers in which Western detective stories, especially the English ones, were translated and published in Chinese, which are “fraught with advanced science and technology and thus considered as miniature of China's modernity.” Both of the essays touch upon the elements of science and technology in literary works by starting with specific cases. They try to illustrate how the elements of science and technology often appear in various kinds of works in modern literature.Other authors, however, try to apply a scientific and technological approach to literary studies. In this way, we could say that science and literature both appeal to imagination, either artistic or scientific, without which neither scientific discovery nor literary creation could be achieved. Thus science and technology should not necessarily be opposed to literature and literary studies. If applied adequately, it will help study literature in a scientific and empirical way. A controversial example could be found in Franco Moretti's “distant reading” of world literature at present. To Moretti, world literature is an issue-driven topic. As different people think in different ways, “world literature cannot be literature, bigger … It has to be different. The categories have to be different. […] World literature is not an object, it's a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method: and no one has ever found a method by just reading more texts. That's not how theories come into being; they need a leap, a wager—a hypothesis, to get started”.1 What kind of leap should literary scholars have? Certainly getting out of the text and keeping a distance to observe a large number of literary texts is an efficient way of world literature studies. Since one cannot read all the literary works of the world in his lifetime, or even the major world masterpieces, Moretti proposes a sort of “distant reading,” where distance “is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems.”2 Through this method of “distant reading” one can at least have a general picture of world literature. Although those good at close reading easily feel the challenge, I think it might well compensate for the neglect of numerous literary works from different parts of the world, especially from those marginal countries or regions. In this aspect, two essays deal with the possible solution to this challenge. In Qinglong Peng, as a “new approach to comparative literature studies, digital humanities promises to expand the subject matter and methodology of such studies.” Peng enthusiastically calls for a digital humanities approach to all the studies of literature, history and philosophy, and culture. He obviously believes in the prospect of this methodology. In response to Peng's optimistic attitude toward the impact of digital humanities, Yifeng Sun and Dechao Li, mainly as translation scholars, try to narrow it down and apply this methodology to literary translation: “With DH gaining increasingly more momentum in comparative literary studies, its technology and research methodology have progressively reshaped literary translation.” To them, “a comprehensive review of how DH has transformed the practice and scholarship of literary translation and also a synoptic outline of how it might continue to shed new light on this sub-field of translation studies seem quite necessary, especially if we want to gain a more in-depth understanding of the relationship between literature and other social and cultural activities across linguistic and national boundaries.” The authors of both essays welcome with great enthusiasm the coming of new technology intervening in traditional humanities research, especially in comparative literature studies and the studies of literary translation.It is true that when we read modernist literary works, we have no difficulty finding the sharp critique those modernist writers have of modern industrialization and the impact of modern technology on humanities, especially on literary creation and studies. In those works, science and technology appear to be opposed to humanities and literature. But that is not the whole story about the relations between science and technology and literature.In various postmodern theories and trends, however, science and technology are not always opposed to humanities and literature, which finds particular embodiment in the recent rise of posthumanism, which actually resets the relation between human and his or her invented thing: technology and machine. In the posthuman era, humans are no longer thought of masters of all the living things on earth. They are nothing but one species of every living thing. They cannot change or conquer nature, but on many occasions are changed or conquered by nature and science and technology. Their life has also been changed by the appearance of various advanced technologies in the current global era. The widely talked about topic of cloning technology in the present era raises such a severe challenge to human beings and their reproduction. Since animals could be cloned, is not it a matter of time before the appearance of cloning men? Stimulated by the hope for a bright future and an easier life, people continuously work hard to invent new and advanced technologies for the purpose of reducing our labor and benefit ourselves as well as our offspring. If we cannot invent all of them in real life, we can at least conceive of them in our imaginary literary works. Thus science fiction may well satisfy people's desire for a better life in the future. Chen Qiufan's Waste Tide is such a novel of superb artistic imagination, on which both Yuqin Jiang and Yuanyuan Hua offer their critical analysis from different theoretical perspectives: Jiang's tries to point out from a posthuman perspective that the novel exposes the cyborg's alienation from the development of high technology and a sick society; while Hua's starts from the Frankfurt School's critical theory to examine the dual alienation—“the interrelated processes of the alienation of human nature and the alienation of nature” in the novel. These two kinds of alienation in the contemporary era cannot be avoided along with the advancement of science and technology. Wang Liao focuses on Hao Jingfang's interesting and popular novel Folding Beijing. This metropolis has experienced rapid development in the past decades, in the process of which various problems have occurred. The reason why the novel attracts contemporary readers simply because it exposes some “urban diseases” behind the seemingly prosperous appearance. To Liao, Hao's novel “demonstrates that there is still reason and hope to fight for a multicolored, natural and heterogeneous future. Furthermore, the increasing rate of unemployment, the shortfall of infrastructure capacity and the scarcity of natural resources are all symptoms of the ‘urban diseases’ which are challenging Beijing and many big cities around the world.” Wei Lu, through reading Japanese-British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go from a perspective of “sci-fi realism,” which has been developed as a theoretical concept “by some Chinese sci-fi writers/critics to reveal the relationship between the development of sci-fi writing in the increasingly rapid advancement of science and technology in the world and the allegorical nature of dystopian sci-fi realism as an effective social critique in its recent development.” Starting from this perspective, Lu thinks that Ishiguro's novel is “a text of realist dystopian science fiction, with the elements of realism and science fiction oppositional, or even antithetical to each other in several aspects.” But the two elements, scientific and fictional, are well “mixed and blended in one single text.”It is not surprising that humans always desire for a better world. Sometimes they even do something ridiculously stupid to satisfy their insatiable desires. If they cannot find a wonderland in the real world, they could at least create it in a fictional world or even an imaginary cyber world. Yuming Piao describes a very interesting but fantastic Korean story “Dr. K's Research” by Dong-in Kim who tries to prove that sometimes a scientific success could turn out an “ethical failure” if one believes science and technology could make everything possible. Dr. K works very hard in his research because he wants to “invent artificial food from feces with a scientific method” for the purpose of solving the food problem people are confronted with. But it is ridiculous to have people eat the so-called artificial food made from feces as it is a violation of fundamental moral values. In this sense, a scientifically successful result does not necessarily mean ethically correct.As I have pointed out previously that since the ancient time, there has always been a debate about the relations between science and humanities. Thus Mingming Su and Bin Jin's essay offers a rereading of Samuel Butler's works on evolution from a Chinese and posthuman perspective and shows how Butler anticipates the posthumanist discourse, which is characterized by the decline and deconstruction of the anthropocentric way of thinking and which is different from Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. To the two authors, “Although Butler accepts natural selection as one of the factors of evolution, he argues that it is totally inadequate as a principal means of variation.” Thus he shows his different attitude from Charles Darwin from a writer's perspective although they both advocate evolution. The fundamental reason “for the contradictions in his attitude towards machine and technology seems to be that he is both the rightful heir to traditional humanism and the pioneer who predicts posthumanism.” Perhaps that is the very reason why we still read Butler's works today and could find something illuminative in them. Yang Mu's essay focuses on Ken Liu's Nebula winning novel The Grace of Kings, from a Chinese perspective. Through her close reading of the contemporary novel, Mu tries to show how “Chinese” writing “may blaze an alternative trail for the genre and suggest a possible way out for the alienated humanity in the era of advanced technology by presenting the philosophical, the political and the scientific technologies in classical Chinese thoughts.” She wants to show that ancient China had a tradition of humanistic ideas as well as scientific thoughts whose value has not yet been adequately discovered and used.In most essays of this special issue, the topic of the posthuman is more or less touched upon. I will elaborate it a bit more theoretically here although I did it elsewhere.3 As I pointed out several years ago, “science should not necessarily be opposed to the humanities. We might mediate between science and the humanities, and even bridge the gap between the two.”4 In this aspect, posthumanism will play such a role. Obviously, posthumanism came after the decline of humanism, but it does not necessarily mean the end of humanism. It has actually transcended over the human-oriented doctrine, for in the past hundred years, the function and position of humans were highlighted so much so that they almost shadow all the other living things on the earth.As some of the essays illustrate, posthumanism signals the increasing alienation of humans brought about by a change in mankind's function on earth. Cary Wolfe, one of its leading theorists in the contemporary era, has no doubt helped push forward this trend of thought. His book What Is Posthumanism? (2009) has more or less answered the earlier questions. For Wolfe, “posthumanism is the set of questions confronting us, and way of dealing with those questions, when we can no longer rely on ‘the human’ as an autonomous, rational being who provides an Archimedean point for knowing about the world (in contrast to ‘humanism,’ which uses such a figure to ground further claims).”5 But confronted with the severe challenge raised by the rise of posthumanism to humans, we cannot but claim: Gone are the days when human beings are viewed “masters” of living things on earth. “Humans” in their traditional sense have become “posthumans.” They are nothing but one of the numerous living things on earth, which also finds embodiment in the relations between humans and various technologies. That is why some of the staunch humanists strongly resist the advanced technologies. Some of them still prefer to write letters in pen and send them by post rather than communicate with people through e-mail or with WeChat. To these people, humanities in its traditional sense are naturally opposed to science and technology.It is true that humans have invented various kinds of machines and developed various advanced technologies. Machines with advanced intelligence and various functions are now widely used in almost all fields, in both sciences and humanities, which finds embodiment in the recent rise of digital humanities. This new technology has certainly bridged up the seemingly opposite relations between technology and literary as well as humanities studies offering the latter scientific and technological methods. While new technologies are efficient and convenient for people to emancipate themselves from hard labor, they also bring about negative consequences with large numbers of skilled workers being pushed into the ranks of the unemployed. For instance, in the current period of COVID-19 epidemic, all schools have closed, and many stores have closed too. Teachers have to teach online, and stores sell goods also online. By and by, there has appeared the phenomenon of oversupply of teaching and working staff. Some part-time teachers who are not popular among students have to be fired, and some senior teachers who are not good at video teaching and publish little have been persuaded to retire earlier. In companies, bosses use pay cuts or bonuses to force employees to resign. Fortunately, in those high-leveled research universities, teaching staff could either do research or writing academic papers at home so that they could publish more.It is even worse that humans may no longer be able to control or dominate some of their inventions and creations. This phenomenon has been frequently described in literary works that deserve our critical and scholarly observation and study. Since this is not a phenomenon that occurs in an individual country or nation, but rather, a global phenomenon, we, as comparatists, should certainly pay considerable attention to it and seriously study it. The present special issue is thus aimed to explore this unique phenomenon in the current postmodern era from a comparative and international perspective by laying more emphasis on what has happened in the Asian countries where economy and science and technology have been developing so rapidly in the past decades that it is even beyond people's recognition and expectation.As a result of the impact of various technologies on human life and work, many manual jobs have been taken over by machines. With the rise of Internet bookstores, scholars no longer need “real” bookstores, which unfortunately are increasingly disappearing. Today's young people have become slaves to these machines, especially to their smartphones, without which they could hardly live and work easily and effectively. Many of them would rather do shopping with Alipay or other mobile means of payment, which has already made a certain impact on the function of banks. Some clever bank officials have to compromise or cooperate with Tencent, which invented WeChat or Alibaba, which invented Alipay, to ensure that they do not lose money. Thus, the traditional relation between man and machine has been reversed: it is not the human who rules the machine, but rather, the machine that is more or less in control of man's destiny nowadays. Since all these phenomena are vividly represented in literary works, as literary scholars, we should observe them carefully in our comparative studies.But whatever ways posthumanism may develop, it will not necessarily mean the complete replacement of the function and role of humanity. It is true that human existence is challenged by various factors, but in its constant fight against and negotiation with nature it finally survives evermore comfortably. Apart from a powerful life force, the existence of humankind is also supported by certain emotions. Literature is a means of expressing people's emotions and subtle feelings. It is true that the artificial intelligence, or AI, could also produce excellent literary works, and even translate ordinary documents efficiently. The same is true of translation, which is often supposed to disappear as machine translation and the more advanced AI translation have been developing by leaps and bounds. But when it comes to sophisticated mental labor, machines still hardly compare to a human. It is therefore not surprising that some people predict that in cross-cultural communication, machine and AI translation will gradually prevail. Sooner or later, it will replace human translation. Yet, when it comes to sophisticated literary and theoretical texts, with subtle symbolic meaning and colorful images, machine and AI translation often make mistakes. Excellent literary works can only be created by writers with profound knowledge, elegant sentiments, and skillful writing techniques, which can hardly be replaced by any other means of representation and translation, because only intelligent people can appreciate and enjoy elegant cultural products, including literature. Only those who are literary genius can produce excellent literary works of lasting value, which cannot even be produced by other humans who are less talented. Chinese ancients once said that one's literary talent is like his person, which can never be imitated. Nor can his descendants inherit his genius. Similarly, only those excellent translators who have a wide knowledge and great literary and aesthetic accomplishment can translate sophisticated literary works into their mother tongues. In this special issue, two of the authors deal with the earlier phenomena and offer their questions and strategies.Last but not least. Since we are comparatists, we are most concerned about the future of comparative literature. To my mind, comparative literature in the age of globalization is increasingly characterized by interdisciplinary studies crossing the borders of disciplines and branches of learning and fields of representation. Along with the increasingly attractive topic of world literature, the so-called “distant reading” may well be a very effective research method. But the rise of distant reading cannot necessarily replace the function of traditional close reading. It is through close reading that one can grasp the subtle nuances of literary meanings. In this way, digital humanities may also contribute a lot to comparative studies of literature in the future. Although they “have been around since at least 1940,”6 it was “not until the Internet and World Wide Web that they came into their own as emerging fields with their own degree programs, research centers, scholarly journals and books, and a growing body of expert practitioners.”7 After the impact of various theories, especially from other disciplines, there is a tendency to return to literary studies proper, and digital resources are increasingly being applied to empirical studies of comparative and world literature. Perhaps it is why we decided to edit this special issue on technology in comparative literature studies.