English Hour Bridges C. P. Snow's Two Cultures

Jim Bradley: "AU's Human Odyssey Program: Helping Faculty and Students to Bridge the Two Cultures"

Inspired by visits to campus by Lord C.P. Snow and Jacob Bronowski in the early 1970s, several Auburn faculty members from diverse disciplines organized and established "The Ascent of Man Program" for upper-level undergraduate elective credits. In 1994 the program was renamed "The Human Odyssey" and made a part of the core curriculum, primarily for freshmen. The courses teach about connections between science and the humanities throughout human history. They have as additional objectives enhancement of communication and critical thinking skills, showing the value of dialogue, and teaching the necessity of tolerance and the importance of living so that the "integrity, stability and beauty" of Nature is preserved. Faculty members from all disciplines across campus participate in the program.

Robin Sabino: "Something to Chew On: Literary Texts as Linguistic Data Sources"

As a sociolinguist working on language contact primarily in the African diaspora, I use literary texts professionally as data sources and as evidence for sociocultural context. I will illustrate the role of literature in my research by briefly describing two projects. The first is an analysis of Virgin Islands English Creole plural marking in three corpora of folktales. This project was executed with Mary Stephens Diamond Higginbotham and Leah Cockcroft. The second project is a consideration of cultural identity in the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, co-authored with Jennifer Hall.

Don Cunningham: "The Substance of Trivia"

I guess if there's a connection [to Snow's two cultures] it is that the "Eureka" moment of discovering something significant, whether it be the thrill of the scientist who first discovered what keeps birds from falling out of trees when asleep perched on limbs or the thrill of the literary scholar who discovered something significant in a work are essentially the same. A major subtheme is that commentators on literature must know a lot more than literature--it helps immensely if they know something of the world of science and technolgy because many authors, especially 20th century American authors to whom I will refer, use science and technology in their works.

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