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A co(s)mic guide to getting bent : shifting perspectives between science and literature in twentieth-century England

University of British Columbia

This dissertation uses the comics form as a theoretical and formal intervention to explore a shift in perspective unfolding between science and literature in early twentieth-century Britain. Each comic chapter visually and narratively explores a shared investment in moving beyond singular, geocentric, and anthropocentric frames of reference in the works of Arthur Eddington, James Jeans, Olaf Stapledon, and Virginia Woolf. Eddington maintained that standpoint matters in the contemplation of the world, signalling a shift away from a Newtonian cosmology, which held that space and time exist independently of any perceiver, toward an Einsteinian one, where length, time, and mass differ depending on the frame of reference. A more robust vision⁠—Eddington contended⁠—is obtainable by combining multiple viewpoints, an idea which Jeans, Stapledon, and Woolf also explore in their writings. Chapter 1 presents two exercises of perspective to reveal how Eddington and Jeans require readers to move beyond geocentric, anthropocentric, and singular viewpoints in their science popularizations. I investigate the tension between their approaches, where Jeans struggles to embrace a multiplicity that Eddington foregrounds in his explications. Chapter 2 explores how Stapledon’s "Star Maker" illustrates a radical performance of multiplicity and a re-inscription of the singular perspective that relativity supplanted. Chapter 3 asks readers to construct a three-dimensional model of Woolf’s "The Waves" in order to participate in four interactive exercises of perspective, each differently demonstrating how Woolf articulates a shift beyond singular and anthropocentric viewpoints by modelling the entanglement among humans and nonhumans. Chapter 4 moves the discursive frame beyond the human by unleashing two dogs whose lives separately intersected Woolf’s and Stapledon’s lived experience. In doing so, I juxtapose Woolf’s "Flush" and Stapledon’s "Sirius" to reveal how both authors’ depictions of a dog’s-nose view of the world and interspecies love blur familiar human/nonhuman boundaries and contest human presuppositions of ‘a priori’ separations between dog and nondog. Crucially, this comics dissertation creates a site of co-operative meaning making, not only through the interacting of historical fact and fictional speculation, but also with the reader’s own perspective being a part of—not apart from—the multiplying perspectives at play.

Text

2025-03-31

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/77566

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/