All Scientific Stuff: Science, Expertise, and Everyday Reality in 1926.

Abstract

This dissertation explores a key period in the development of science as an everyday thing as reflected in the important cultures of letters containing the pulp magazines Amazing Stories and Black Mask and the novel Arrowsmith, respectively science fiction, hardboiled detective fiction, and the realist novel. These genres’ cultural (re)formation during this period reflects contesting claims as to what constitutes realism and the role of science in realistic fiction and in everyday life. These cultures can be understood as a dialectic, with Amazing Stories implying that science can improve everyday reality; Black Mask implying that science is insufficient to reliably understand everyday reality; and Arrowsmith problematizing the competing visions of science in everyday reality. Analyzing each of these works in the context of the others shows that realism, the everyday, and scientific expertise are all variable concepts that take on different meanings in different cultural contexts. Amazing Stories names and crystalizes science fiction, the low culture genre that, according to the magazine’s vision, underscores the relevance of scientific discoveries to readers’ everyday lives. The magazine encourages readers to familiarize themselves with science as an avenue for individual and social betterment. Black Mask provides a contrasting, hardboiled vision of science’s role in everyday life, portraying scientific detection, both in fiction and in reality, as an uncertain representation of an everyday reality that science is insufficient to handle. The hardboiled detective is a nonexpert who resists scientific authority as opposed to embracing it as do the nonexperts in science fiction. Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, the first significant high culture work to represent science as a component of everyday life, depicts the life and career of a medical-doctor-turned-research-scientist in such a way as to question the norms and institutions by which expert authority is constructed. Lewis clarifies the cultural importance of this skepticism in his letter rejecting the Pulitzer Prize. In this respect, the novel encompasses both sides of the dialectic represented by the magazines, venerating the possibility of advancement through scientific discovery while also emphasizing the importance of placing critical pressure on expert authority.