Science and Storytelling: The Narrative of Nature, the Nature of Narrative

3 Credits.

This course is half reading seminar, half writing workshop. The two halves build on one underlying principle: Both the scientific method and the traditional literary narrative follow the same storytelling structure: What do you know? What do you want to know? What do you learn? Now what do you know? Etc. In the seminar half of the class, we read and discuss samples of the writings of scientists throughout history—focusing especially on what those works would have meant to the authors and to their readers. Primary sources include Plato, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg, plus many more. In the workshop half of the class, students will write—in a step-by-step, week-by-week process, in close collaboration with their peers—a midterm paper and a final paper on any science topic and in any form of their choosing, while applying storytelling lessons from the seminar half of the course.