Adventures in Error: Social Science in the Sherlock Holmes Stories and Ulysses
Issued Date
2023-09-01
Resource Type
ISSN
17296897
eISSN
17298792
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85189683077
Journal Title
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies
Volume
49
Issue
2
Start Page
155
End Page
174
Rights Holder(s)
SCOPUS
Bibliographic Citation
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies Vol.49 No.2 (2023) , 155-174
Suggested Citation
Hart K. Adventures in Error: Social Science in the Sherlock Holmes Stories and Ulysses. Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies Vol.49 No.2 (2023) , 155-174. 174. doi:10.6240/concentric.lit.202309_49(2).0008 Retrieved from: https://repository.li.mahidol.ac.th/handle/20.500.14594/97962
Title
Adventures in Error: Social Science in the Sherlock Holmes Stories and Ulysses
Author(s)
Author's Affiliation
Corresponding Author(s)
Other Contributor(s)
Abstract
This paper reads Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories beside James Joyce's "Ithaca" chapter of Ulysses. I argue that both authors critique the social sciences as practiced by demographers like Charles Booth. For Doyle and Joyce, knowledge about people is unreliable, the knower is always implicated in the production of the known, and the "facts" are prone to cultural distortions. They engage the "culture versus science" debates of Matthew Arnold and T. H. Huxley and suggest that these two modes of knowledge production, the scientific and the cultural, are interrelated or even inseparable. The high modernist literary experimentalism of the 1920s has, in this respect, an antecedent in popular detective fiction. Both genres parody social science's claims to encyclopedic knowledge of people and imply that human beings defy stable categorization.