SOURCE: "Literature and Science," in On Modern German Literature, Vol. I, translated by Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, The University of Alabama Press, 1967, pp. 56-79.

In the following essay, Kurz discusses the place of literature in a world increasingly dominated by science and technology.

The Discussion in England

The last essay of the late Aldous Huxley¹ deals with the tension between literature and science. It was written against the background of the controversy in England between Charles P. Snow and Frank R. Leavis. In the Rede Lecture of 1959, Snow, who was first a physicist, then a novelist, and in the last war Director of Technical Personnel in the Ministry of Labor, advanced the thesis of the two separate cultures: the intellectual and literary as opposed to the strictly scholarly, or more exactly scientific, culture. This thesis was certainly not new, but it became a theme of primary importance in...