[Download] "States of Mind: Science, Culture and the Irish Intellectual Revival, 1900-30." by Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: States of Mind: Science, Culture and the Irish Intellectual Revival, 1900-30.
- Author : Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies
- Release Date : January 22, 2003
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 366 KB
Description
Recent studies of Irish science have begun to examine the discipline's cultural, historical, and social significance. Cogent examples include Peter Bowler and Nicholas Whyte's Science and Society in Ireland: The Social Context of Science and Technology in Ireland, 1800-1950, John Wilson Foster's Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History, and Nicholas Whyte's Science, Colonialism and Ireland. (1) None of these works however treats science as a discourse whose theories enabled the development of Irish controversy in the decolonizing moment. I will argue here that science was central to the Irish intellectual Revival from 1900 to 1930, a directing discipline whose terms, of evolution, electricity, and the atom, informed the logic of cultural debate. We can see general evidence of the necessity of science to controversy in the public sphere in Irish periodicals, literary and otherwise, of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Every movement had a journal, every party a newspaper; Leopold Bloom, our Irish Everyman, sells advertising, his consciousness alive to the media that constitute his modern self. Science marked the terms of this polemical culture's discourse, the weekly Leader of 1901 exhibiting a range of wild Irish animals including the west-briton, or long-eared ape (anglohibernicus microcephalus), the sourface (anglohibernicus dyspepticus), the bigot (anglohibernicus intolerantissimus), the court jester (judex jucundus), the emmpee (stumporator omnipotens) and the dark brother (magnopofex timidus). (2) Science offered objective sanction to subjective argument. It supplied the terms of enquiry and report for cultural projects. In evolution--the development of which theory in Ireland is a central concern of this essay--it promised a pre dictable future for present ambitions. It even suggested the radical potential of unseen force, a world of dark made visible, of x-rays and atoms.