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Peter Rabinowitz
Peter Rabinowitz
Professor of Comparative Literature Peter J. Rabinowitz gave a paper at a symposium on Narrative, Science, and Performance sponsored by Ohio State University’s Project Narrative on Oct. 2. The symposium was a follow-up to an earlier conference at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics, and it brought together scholars from such diverse fields as physics, neuroscience, physiology, theatre and narrative studies. 

Rabinowitz’s paper “‘The Impossible Has a Way of Passing Unnoticed’: Reading Science in Fiction” offered a schema for talking about the rhetorical use of science in literary texts. Starting with examples from a wide range of texts—from Ibsen’s Enemy of the People and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya through Fleming’s Doctor No and John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic—the talk concluded with a more detailed discussion of the 2000 novel Properties of Light by Rebecca Goldstein, who was herself a participant in the conference.

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