How Nice to Be an Outsider

Every one of my scholarly/literary activities is outside literary studies as such. Yet to a varying degree all that I do is the subject of the amoeboid activities of the field. I also have, in principle, no vested interest in the flow of students into your departments [this was a lecture to an audience in comparative literature], nor do I have to worry about jobs for them, nor the level of remuneration of your sluggers and sometime pinch hitters. It seems to me that given this practical disinterest (reading Burke and Kant) I am ideally situated to make aesthetic judgments if not prognoses of the future of literary studies. Which is the reason, I suppose, that I was asked to do so. But first let me count the ways in which I am marginal. First of all, I am a chemist, of the theoretical subspecies. I have done some good science, even shaped the way that chemists think of the motion of electrons in molecules, and how the electrons determine the shape and reactions of those persistent groupings of atoms we’ve learned to see without seeing. My and my collaborators’ work is divulged, some of my colleagues would say preached, in over 450 scientific articles (our stock in trade, rather than books). Such “texts” have become the subject of a burgeoning field of literary studies of science. But no one would bother with my texts; they are individually unimportant (though what they collectively teach is of value; I think of my articles as chapters in a serialized text, but please don’t tell the editors of the journals in which I publish). And perhaps when I write science I am too self-conscious of the central problem of representation for me to play the role of an innocent native (or his artifacts) awaiting the sage pseudo-anthropo/ sociological investigation of the way I construct knowledge. Also the cognitive, intrascientific background needed to assess my papers is moderately formidable; there is a reason why chemists spend five years in graduate school .