Dear blog,

I’m deep in the midst of marking at the moment and it’s a welcome break to write this and think about something else! I went to the Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities conference last week at the University of Bergen in Norway (http://www.uib.no/fg/litt_vit/nyheter/2011/04/literature-and-chemistry). It was an interesting idea, to bring together literary scholars and chemists to talk about the relationships between literature and chemistry. Our hosts were absolutely wonderful and Bergen itself is lovely. The conference tended to focus on a few key authors, particularly Primo Levi, Goethe, and Davy had a fair few mentions too.

Though it was interdisciplinary in one sense, particularly in the mix of people who were present, it wasn’t really in other senses. While I might not have understood at all, I would have liked to have heard the chemists speaking more on their own subject rather than on literature since their lack of expertise in our subject led to papers that dealt with biographies or synopses of texts. One chemist did offer something that I certainly could not have presented myself; he went through the episodes in Levi’s The Periodic Table, where Levi systematically stole what he could from the chemistry lab in Auschwitz and tried to create sustenance from these things. Professor Luigi Dei, from the University of Florence, explained the chemical formula of these items and went through the chemical processes Levi attempted until he was successful in making cigarette lighters with the elements he had stolen and sold these for food. Other great papers came from the literature scholars – Robert Gordon from Cambridge (again on Levi), Folkert Degenring from the University of Kassel on science fiction, George Rousseau from Oxford on Ludwig Boltzman, and Dominic Rainsford from the University of Arhus on Wordsworth. The latter paper was incredibly suggestive I thought. Dominic used the chemical process used to produce a precipitate to argue that in many of the situations Wordsworth explores in the Lyrical Ballads, the poet places himself as a ‘sensitive and unstable mixture’ in a unstable context and a reaction occurs, which leaves the reader with some kind of product (the precipitate), in the form of, perhaps, a changed view of the world.

I can report too that the event for the Manchester Science Festival on 24^th October went well. We had 41 attendees in the end. I gave the lecture part of it and then Wahida Amin, a Phd student working on Davy’s poetry, gave out a selection of poems to participants in groups and they discussed them. It was a fun evening and it was good to be able to show people poems that are not particularly easy to access or in the public domain.

Now back to this marking…

Sharon