Potential Literature

This chapter turns to the scientific imaginary as it appears in the realm of art. It asserts that art has very often sought either to parody science or to diminish its claims to truth. Within this important post-Romantic strain of critique, this chapter isolates another voice that has sought to find a common imaginative ground between art and science. The chapter begins with Alfred Jarry's inauguration of the “science of 'Pataphysics” and ends with the literary refraction of Jarry's Gedankenexperimenten in the work of the Oulipo. The latter, in which the terms of art and criticism are uniquely joined, informs algorithmic criticism's emphasis on the liberating forces of (computationally enforced) constraint. Moreover, the chapter argues that this important modernist genealogy points to the primacy of pattern as the basic hermeneutical function that unites art, science, and criticism.