Literature and Science has become a recognizable and respected field in the academy,and this paper asks whether technology studies holds a place in that (inter)discipline.Before we can locate technology within literature and science scholarship, we might betempted to ask a further question: if science and technology are intimately relatedconcepts, why pull technology out as a subject that might be studied with literature butseparately from science? This question forms the focus of my article.I aim to demonstrate why we should formalize technology’s place in the unionbetween literature and science. My attention to this issue does not imply that I believetechnology to be absent from literature and science scholarship. Discussions of real andimagined technologies frequently arise in Configurations and JLS, whether we areinvestigating techniques of bodily alteration, histories of media, fossil-fuel burningmotors that harm the environment, or the fantastical systems we find in speculativefiction. What appears notably less often in our publications and conference panels arethe methodologies of technology studies—and most especially their historicalapproaches. The question here is not, therefore, whether we are discussing specifictechnologies or not; it is whether we are analysing technology and culture in the sameway that we analyse the arts and artifacts of literature and science. I argue that Literatureand Science fosters research in the latter areas of inquiry significantly more than it doesin the first. In fact, the Call for Papers for this special double issue of JLS andConfigurations posed a question about the relationships among literature, science, andthe arts. The omission of technology from that list is illustrative.
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