Since its publication and first performance, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) has often been interpreted with regard to the theme of truth and illusion. A less studied but nonetheless important aspect of the play concerns its relation to C. P. Snow’s concept of the “two cultures.” This article argues for the convergence of these two discussions, resulting in an epistemological understanding of Albee. The play not only rejects the mutual alienation of the “two cultures” but also constitutes a dramatic move toward a synthesizing “third culture.” Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is read as an epistemological drama of ideas.

September 2022:  Andreas Tranvik is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University. His research is primarily focused on literature as it relates to the history of knowledge. Currently, he is working on a research project about humour and knowledge in the works of the 18th century Danish-Norwegian writer Ludvig Holberg.

In the recent past, narratives have been hailed as a promising instrument for improving the effectiveness of science communication to nonscientist audiences. Narratives play an important part in how individuals comprehend the world, and persuasive narratives may often be more successful in communicating complex scientific issues to the general public than evidence-based arguments. At the same time, however, narratives have the potential to perpetuate misinformation and inaccuracies about science due to their formal characteristics. Also, as narratives are not subject to the same truth requirements as scientific argumentation, they cannot be easily countered, which can lead to serious misconceptions about important scientific topics. In this article, the role of narratives and narrative explanations in science communication is discussed regarding the genre of popular science. The essay approaches the affordances and limits of narrative in this context with two primary examples representing recent popular-science best-sellers: Elisabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011).

In theoretical literature concerning narratives in science communication and popular science, the concept of narrative tends to be applied rather loosely, encompassing everything from journalistic accounts of scientific research to sequential explanations of change in natural systems. As many of the discourse types of popular science involve representations of temporal change in the non-human natural world, they necessarily also create “narratives” that do not easily fill all the characteristics of prototypical narrative representations. This article takes a closer look at the narrative qualities of science popularization, focusing especially on popular scientific “histories” featuring human species as their main protagonist. The aim is to explore this topic further by a more comprehensive categorization of different kinds of narratives and narrative explanations in the selected popular scientific texts. With this theoretical emphasis, the article will contribute to a fuller understanding of the affordances and limitations of narrative in addressing scientific issues.

February 2022: Juha Raipola is a postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University, Finland. Raipola has published articles on posthumanism, ecocriticism, and climate fiction, and he is currently focusing his research on the relationship between instrumental narratives and popular science. With a special interest both in the environmental humanities and narratology, Raipola has been exploring the fine line between informative narrative explications of scientific phenomena and scientific misinformation

Narrative is increasingly promoted for improving science communication and thus combatting misinformation and facilitating fact-based education and policy (Dahlstrom 2014; ElShafie 2018). This instrumental use of narrative is laudable, but current approaches tend to be reductive and therefore potentially counterproductive. Most proponents of narrative science view narrative as a mere formula, often derived from entertainment (Luna 2013; Olson 2015; Loverd et al. 2018). Sceptics rightly worry that using narrative formats in this way oversimplifies and distorts scientific information. Given the social, medical, and environmental urgency of effective and accurate scientific communication, the shortcomings and promise of narrativizing science represent a limit-case for the applicability and scope of narrative theory and practice.

In the context of narrative science, this essay begins by examining two valences of the term “limits of narrative.” First, it criticizes the current project of narrativizing science for failing to recognize narrative’s limited capacity to handle complex scientific models and phenomena, which H. Porter Abbott has upheld as exemplary cases of the “unnarratable” (2008: 227). The second valence of “limits” emerges as a response to the first. Although scientific information often eludes narrativity, what is unnarratable now may become narratable tomorrow. As Robyn Warhol suggests, attempts to render the unnarratable can create newly narratable ground, which she calls “neonarrative” (2005: 221). That is, new narrative forms arise at the limits of the narratable. This is a territory where scientists, like experimental novelists, struggle to express new, counterintuitive models, theories or results. What biologist Lewis Wolpert calls “the unnatural nature of science” (1998)—its resistance to commonsense notions of causality and ontology—could just as well be called the unnarratable nature of science.

The essay argues that an effective use of narrative in science would need to accept the limits of narrative, probing for neonarrative footholds at those limits; those neonarrative forms would likely be challenge or violate the narrative templates audiences bring to texts of various kinds. By way of illustration, the article analyzes willfully artificial elements in diagrams depicting coevolution between pollinators and plants (Nilsson 1988; Pauw et al. 2009), a narrative whose agents and events are relative statistical values rather than discrete entities. By foregrounding the “synthetic aspect” of their characters (Phelan 1989), these diagrams showcase how scientific texts use the communicative efficacy of narrative without sacrificing accuracy or complexity.

February 2022: Daniel Aureliano Newman is Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) at the University of Toronto. Holding a PhD in literature and a Master’s of Science in Evolutionary Ecology, he is the author of Modernist Life Histories: Biological Theory and the Experimental Bildungsroman (Edinburgh UP, 2019) and of several essays in journals including Style, Journal of Narrative Theory, Frontiers of Narrative Studies, American Journal of Botany, and Configurations.