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Heinrich Meyer
To cite this article: Heinrich Meyer (1957) Literature and Science. Proceedings of the
Sixth Triennial Congress (International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures),
Oxford, 1954, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 32:2, 145-147, DOI:
10.1080/19306962.1957.11786876
Download by: [The UC San Diego Library] Date: 30 June 2017, At: 09:00
Literature and Science. Proceedings of the Sixth Triennial Congress (Inter
national Federation for Modem Languages and Literatures), Oxford,
1954. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1955. Pp. xvi, 330.
An editorial committee of six scholars has admirably succeeded in sum
marizing the substance of some fifty-odd papers in English, French, Ger
man," Italian, and Spanish and even in letting us feel at times the real
presence of the speakers. But it would be foolish if the reviewer now tried
to summarize a summary. Only an impression of the great wealth of ma
terial can here be given. Papers not referred to are not necessarily less inter
esting; they are perhaps only less interesting to the reviewer or his pre
sumable readers.
Three outstanding general addresses open and close the volume, Herbert
Dingle's "Relations between Science and Literature," without a doubt the
one paper that everyone can appreciate, G. Temple's "Style and Subject in
the Literature of Mathematics," comments on the art of mathematical
presentation, and Ronald Peacock's "Abstraction and Reality in Modem
Science, Art and Poetry." Peacock does not confuse analogy with reality
when he shows the structural similarity of art and science in our day. As
this also occurred to Delacroix and Chopin over a century ago, perhaps the
form of science and art has always been subject to a common factor? The
trouble is in fi.nding it. Various approaches have here been taken, some
pedestrian, some bright. Some have studied scientific methods, others
scientific subject matter used by the poets, again others looked for the
impact of science on literary form. The mellow and rich discussion of
"Bibliography," by McManaway, would fit in anywhere, but here it took
on new weight in its context, while Hatzfeld's arbitrary summary of
146 THE GERMANIC REVIEW
others by such scholars as Folkiersky, who refers a great deal to Ira Wade
(next to Dingle the most often quoted scholar), Mercier, Roddier, Mortier,
Rees, Roos, Vattaui, Bisson, Bemol, and von Richthofen. To evaluate these
suggestions will require years of further investigation. The book as a whole
then is rich and varied, and that which may displease one may stimulate
another who looks at it with different ideas or a different sense of form and
substance. At any rate, it is quite worth owning and studying and
pondering.
Muhlenberg College HEINRICH MEYER