SOURCE: “Disciplinary Hybridity in Shelley's Adonais,” in Mosaic, Vol. 32, No. 3, September, 1999, pp. 21-39.

In the following essay, Brigham studies Shelley's Adonais as an interdisciplinary poem that incorporates scientific literature with traditional poetry.

Research programs in science studies—as well as more general programs in women's studies and cultural studies—have for the past two decades testified to a dissatisfaction with traditional disciplinary boundaries in the academy. At the same time, negative reactions to these interdisciplinary forays, most notoriously in Paul Gross's and Norman Levitt's Higher Superstition (1994), indicate the intense significance of such boundaries from the standpoint of many scientists. Included on Gross's and Levitt's enemies list is anthropologist of science Bruno Latour who has analyzed the nearly imperturbable cultural architecture supporting the ideal of scientific purity, that is, the conception of science as purged of cultural bias, a condition built into our very notion of science. Latour sees...