6 T. HUGH CRAWFORD Science Studies and Literary Theory In 1978, George Rousseau published a retrospective essay in Isis entitled “Literature and Science: the State of the Field.” He charts work across the twentieth century, much of which was inspired by his mentor Marjorie Hope Nicholson, that helped define a field of study largely concerned with influ- ence – how literature was influenced by or embodied the spirit of the sciences of its particular era. 1 Rousseau noted that in the 1970s the size of the field of Literature and Science – at least as measured by MLA participation – had taken a “sharp plunge.” 2 In part, he blames the emergence of structuralism in the American academy, singling out Michel Foucault as the most significant or perhaps pernicious influence, but Foucault was also accompanied by a more broadly construed critical pluralism: “linguists, semioticians, phe- nomenologists, Marxists, Maoists, hermeneuticists, neo-hermeneuticists, psychological critics, neo-Freudians, neo-Jungians, formalists just begin to describe the rampant proliferation” (590). Far from describing the state of a dying field, Rousseau’s essay marks the moment when literary theory entered what had been a fairly traditional philological practice. Indeed, in the decades that followed, Rousseau played a key role in the assimilation of literary theory into science studies, particu- larly regarding Foucault but also through his work on the imbrications of literature and medicine. The chaos he describes was real. Most scholars are familiar with the impact “theory” had on the literary studies from the late seventies on, but the story of science studies takes a slightly different path. Put bluntly, science was seen as occupying a significantly different epistemo- logical realm, so while theorists studying literature and culture might be able to pronounce confidently that everything is a text, that everything generally did not include the objects science enables us to know. Literary theory moved into science studies in fits and starts. The year 1987 marked the first conference of the newly formed Society for Literature and Science (an organization now called the Society for Literature, 117 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139942096.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press