New Literary History最新文献

{"title":"How to Survive Totalitarianism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt","authors":"Zoë Roth","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a907159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a907159","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In the wake of the Trump election, Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism garnered renewed attention. In it, she argues that totalitarian ideology \"is severed from the world individuals perceive through the five senses \"and insists on a 'truer' reality concealed behind all perceptible things.\" By changing what appears true, totalitarian regimes can produce new, upside-down realities built on \"alternative facts.\" The question of perception, appearance, and the senses points to the important role that aesthetics—or what pertains to sense perception—play in Arendt's theorization of totalitarianism. However, scholarly attention to aesthetic concepts in her thinking, including work/fabrication, common sense, and performance, mostly concentrates on later works that largely eschew the concrete political context of totalitarianism, fascism, and the concentration camp. This article argues that Arendt's analysis of totalitarianism provides a crucible for her development of aesthetic concepts and methods. Through drawing out the structure of totalitarianism's perceptual regime, it demonstrates that totalitarianism produces a form of anaesthesia. It destroys the concrete texture of reality and replaces it with hollowed out, atomized, and spectral traces of phenomenal experience. In turn, the article shows that situating Arendt's aesthetic thinking on fabrication and common sense in relation to totalitarianism reveals how aesthetic objects and criticism can challenge political forces' assault on reality.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Marriage Plot, Again: A Feedback Loop","authors":"Megan Ward","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a907167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a907167","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The bigamy plot—the courtship's evil twin—involves characters marrying, then marrying again, a phenomenon rife across Victorian novels. This repetition creates redundancy, both in terms of spouses and, from an informatic perspective, reinforcing the marriage plot's importance. In contrast to a regulated feedback loop that generates stasis, the bigamy plot accumulates more of the same, emphasizing the ongoing centrality of marriage plots in the Victorian novel. This essay argues that this redundancy within the bigamy plot mirrors the emerging imperial information systems and realist aesthetics of the time. With the rise of data management systems like censuses and registries, both literature and empire wrestled with representing individuals both as unique entities and as interchangeable units. Through a reading of the proliferation of records in Jane Eyre (1848), this essay demonstrates how bigamy and its imperial records emerge as a way to understand the struggle for representation, a brief moment in which personhood is extended across the system while also being retracted.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Staying Alive: Cybernetic Persistence","authors":"Bruce Clarke","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a907174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a907174","url":null,"abstract":"Staying Alive:Cybernetic Persistence Bruce Clarke (bio) In some recent writings I ventured to describe what I've called neocybernetic systems theory.1 One way I've approached this description is by drawing a contrast with Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, or ANT.2 A sympathetic colleague remarked that if Latour could own ANT, I should lay claim to my own acronym—NST. Thus, a key difference between these theories is that ANT is built around the concept of network, whereas NST is built around the concept of system. The crucial difference between these two forms is that a network is an unbounded structure—in this respect, it offers an environment open for nodal ramification by its actors, but no internally generated dynamics of its own. In contrast, the specific systems at the fore of NST are, in my formulation, autopoietic systems. That is, they are self-producing, hence internally generated, and in key regards, autonomous, systems: that's what makes them neocybernetic. Even while such systems are open with regard to energy flow, their organizations close upon themselves in processual distinction from the environments that afford them—as in the paradigmatic case of the living cell.3 While both of these theories range well beyond literary application, the idea of literary cybernetics admirably pursued in this NLH forum necessarily turns on the fundamental category of system. And the concept of system—as abstracted from the specific range of technological, biological, psychic, and social instantiations developed in NST—is coupled to a coconstitutive metaconcept of the environment. The environments of NST are themselves potentially suffused with systems, but they are not—they are to be distinguished from—systems per se. As defined in this discourse, an environment is unbounded and, as such, too complex to be systematized. Environments are the mediums out of which systems achieve their forms, the resources from which the productive closures of systems emerge. In any event, this is the theory-form I've taken in my own work in literary cybernetics—literary NST if you will. It pivots from Heinz von Foerster's discourse of recursion and self-reference in second-order cybernetics, to Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's coupling of autopoiesis and cognition, to the uptake of George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form in both Varela and Niklas Luhmann's social systems [End Page 1281] theory.4 This cluster of work was the Stanford school in systems theory as I came upon this material at the end of the 1990s: Luhmann and Friedrich Kittler, and thus von Foerster and Claude Shannon, mediated through David Wellbery, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Tim Lenoir, and Stanford University Press's Writing Science series. But cybernetics itself, as Heather Love and Lea Pao develop the topic, is larger than this particular line of elaboration. In their introduction, \"Literary Cybernetics: History, Theory, Post-Disciplinarity,\" Love and Pao note the robust interdisciplinary mix at ","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"100 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction, Literary Cybernetics: History, Theory, Post-Disciplinarity","authors":"Heather A. Love, Lea Pao","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a907164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a907164","url":null,"abstract":"Introduction, Literary Cybernetics:History, Theory, Post-Disciplinarity Heather A. Love (bio) and Lea Pao (bio) In 1948, mit mathematician Norbert Wiener coined the term \"cybernetics\"—adapted from the Greek word for \"steersman\" or \"governor\"—to describe an emerging technology-based discipline focused on the science of \"control and communication in the animal and the machine.\"1 Cyberneticians posited that machines can be programmed to learn from the past, that human brains can be understood as complex computers, and that information can circulate freely along conscious and mechanical channels. Since Wiener's codification of cybernetics as a field of study, the even further-reaching discipline of systems theory has emerged.2 Statistical and probabilistic approaches to communication now permeate our understanding of and engagements with information culture, and terms like \"cyberspace\" and \"cyborg\" are part of our everyday parlance. From the start, cybernetics and systems theory saw themselves as intensely interdisciplinary undertakings—the famous Macy conferences on cybernetics that ran from 1946 to 1953, for example, brought together academics and applied scientists working in mathematics, engineering, psychology, anthropology, and more. Even though humanistic ideas (about language, meaning, literature) and scholars (such as I. A. Richards and Yuen Ren Chao) have featured in and shaped these meetings, the humanities and the arts have not often been regarded as an integral part of the cybernetics narrative. However, in recent decades, the work of artists, writers, and literary critics engaging with cybernetics and systems thinking in robust and diverse ways has become more visible. Across several subfields and periods in literary studies, concepts such as recursion, self-reference, self-organization, the feedback loop, entropy, entanglement, and emergence have enabled scholars to frame their objects of study as part of a broader media-technological ecology and to forge interdisciplinary connections between literature and more technical fields. In the Anglo-American sphere, Kathleen Woodward's work has invited us to \"think cybernetically\" about literature and culture; historians of theory such as Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan and Lydia H. Liu have traced the [End Page 1193] exchange between and among cybernetic discourses, French theory, and literary criticism; literary scholars such as Patricia S. Warrick, David Porush, William R. Paulson and N. Katherine Hayles have analyzed literary and cultural theory at the intersection of society, technology, and science, drawing attention to the (implicit and explicit) collaborations between the humanities and sciences, as have Marjorie Levinson, who suggests that systems-theory concepts, such as self-organization and recursion, can provide a new account of lyric form, and Bruce Clarke, who reengages second-order systems theory with narrative theory to capture complex and \"extrascientific\" processes like cogniti","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Memory Work and Dirty Work: Writing the Labor of Eldercare","authors":"Susan Fraiman","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a907156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a907156","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: \"Memory Work and Dirty Work: Writing the Labor of Eldercare\" identifies the US eldercare memoir as a burgeoning subgenre of life writing. Typically written by daughters about nursing their parents at the end of life, these memoirs—searing accounts of care for declining bodies—make eldercare visible as a major category of unpaid feminized work. Most home care aides in the US are also women, many of them Black and/or immigrants, performing this important job for meager wages. Eldercare memoirs are thus substantially concerned with the nature and devaluation of a particular form of labor. Dramatizing its feminization, they lead me to pursue a further question: to what extent are female aides and their unequal, quasi-familial relationships with daughters given space in these narratives? Texts treated in detail include Sue Miller's The Story of My Father (2003) and Ruth Tosic's I Am Not the Girl: Memoirs of a Certified Nursing Assistant (2021).","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"197 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Coupling Men in Couplet Space: Pope to Gunn","authors":"Dustin D. Stewart","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a907161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a907161","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Donald davie, a serious man, had serious doubts, but his friend Thom Gunn kept assuring him that contemporary poetry could be at once really gay and really traditional. Gunn thought so partly because several major poets who helped forge the tradition as he and Davie knew it, poets such as Christopher Marlowe and Walt Whitman, were themselves gay.1 He also thought so, as his recently published letters confirm, because of his counterintuitive conviction that historical poetic techniques can enhance \"improvisatory and up-to-date subject matter.\"2 Free verse caught the sensation of modern freedom but sometimes fell short in reflecting on it or thinking through it. Gunn, who moved from Cambridge to California in 1954, maintained that poets seeking to represent a queer experience or unconventional setting might be better off relying on the time-tested shaping power of established meters and rhymes. Formal control could then serve as both a defining part of the exploration—an order within freedom—and a device for assessing it, as though from the outside. This inside-and-out defense of traditional form is one he adopted from his Stanford teacher Yvor Winters, for whom poetry's formal discipline (as Gunn puts it) \"does not reject experience\" but offers \"a means of simultaneously conveying it, in all its variety, and evaluating it.\"3 Experience was the rub for Donald Davie, who in 1982 claimed that his friend's poetry had cut itself off from the literary past by embracing queer content.4 Gunn had good reason to disagree. The very sequence in which he came out in his verse, far from marking a clean break with Winters and traditional form, attests to his ongoing involvement with them. That coming-out sequence takes place in couplets that deserve to be called Popean. But they're Popean in a specific sense, defined not just by regular meter and rhyme but especially by line-ending punctuation that allows enjambment to make room for intimacy.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On Poems (System and Environment)","authors":"Jack W. Chen","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a907165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a907165","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In this essay, I propose a different approach to how we might conceptualize poetry, one that understands the poem not simply in terms of human-centered agency (that is, the complex of author-persona-reader) but as an emergent informatic-system. I focus on how the material and immaterial media of language, prosodic rules, and generic constraints all possess their own kinds of agency, comprising a set of limitations for what words the poet may select in composing the poem. Taking a poem by the Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei, I build upon a number of theoretical framings to argue that these strictures function as the constitute the field of what is possible in terms of poetic composition, that the compositional loop between an individual poet and poem is a cybernetic system and the set of constraints that delimit what is compositionally possible is the cybernetic environment.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533265","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Genre at Earth Magnitude: A Theory of Climate Fiction","authors":"Derek Woods","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a907162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a907162","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: What critics and publishers now call climate fiction is a growing genre that captures significant critical attention. This essay theorizes the relation between two of the genre's features, one formal and one political, in the scale frame they address: the planetary scale of climate, or what many scientists call the Earth system. The archive that articulates these features consists of a popular, digital discourse about climate fiction, much of which appeared since Hurricane Sandy. Instead of looking at individual works or narrating their history, I read this popular \"metagenre\" to draw out its implicit theory of the genre. According to the metagenre, climate fiction's abstract features consist of a didactic purpose and a normative form. Climate fiction's purpose, whatever its social effects, is ultimately to contribute to planetary climate stability. Second, the genre's definitive form is (or should be) extrapolative realism. Extrapolative realist narrative builds on scientific consensus to imagine plausible futures. The striking thing about climate fiction is that its purpose and form exist in a contradictory or inversely proportional relationship. If the genre fulfills its goal by contributing to the equilibrium of the climate, then its verisimilitude will diminish. If the climate continues to destabilize, then the genre's realism will have been vindicated at the expense of its purpose. Climate fiction is unique because it promises extrapolative realism in the content of individual novels and films but does so in the constitutive and paradoxical presence of a goal that would prevent such future climates from materializing. The point of analyzing climate fiction's constitutive paradox between purpose and realism is not to revel in irony, leave the final word to ideology critique, or dismiss the popular aesthetics of climate fiction. Rather, this paradox can be generalized to the worldview or grand narrative of the Anthropocene: the contradiction between climate fiction's purpose and form sheds light on a more general temporal structure bound up with technocracy and scientific legitimation.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"610 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Slaughterhouse Intimacies","authors":"Samantha Pergadia","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a907157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a907157","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay traces slaughterhouse intimacies, sites of material entanglement between and among species, gender, race, sexuality, and reproduction. The phrase may seem paradoxical: the slaughterhouse is a line of death and dismemberment; intimacy connotes vital connection, private interiority. Yet the history of industrial animal farming, I argue, traffics between the intimateexchanges of gender, race, and species at the slaughterhouse, an institution that binds species to reproductive control, alters how animals are known, and changes the tempo and scale of violence itself—making the unthinkable possible. Two strands of scholarship recruit animals or species to comprehendviolations of human-based difference. Second-wave feminists often recruitedan analogic comparison between animals and women to outlinethe contours of a sexism that treats women like animals. The burgeoning field of Black animality studies has focused attention on the race-as-species metaphor in the history of scientific racism. Yet little attention has been paid to the material pathways through which industrial farming changed the entanglements of race, species, and gender. By close reading Ruth Ozeki's novel, My Year of Meats (1998), I unpack the material connectionslying beneath metaphorical comparisons and trace the circulation of U.S. meat through global circulation networks that produce and reproduce our notions of gender, race, time, species, sexuality, and reproduction.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"476 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Literary Cybernetics: The Point (of the Spear)","authors":"N. Katherine Hayles","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2023.a907175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2023.a907175","url":null,"abstract":"Literary Cybernetics:The Point (of the Spear) N. Katherine Hayles (bio) Cybernetics and literary studies are on a collision course that will transform what it means to read, to write, and to be human. The essays on \"literary cybernetics\" in this issue touch on many different ways in which this phrase can be interpreted, but for all their rich variety, they do not entirely capture either the urgency of our present situation or the inevitability of the coming transformations, even if we do not know and cannot reliably predict exactly what new forms will emerge, postcollision. At the pointy end of the spear driving into the heart of literary studies are the large language models (LLMs) created by rich tech companies and increasingly available to the general public such as OpenAI's GPT-3, -4, and ChatGPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer, versions -3 and -4), Google's LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), and Google's BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). GPT-3, for example, was trained on forty-five terabytes of human-authored texts, mostly scraped from the web (a terabyte of data would fill about 570 million pages).1 Reading for GPT-4 is very different than for a human child learning to decode letters. Words are broken into tokens (generally word fragments of about four letters) and transformed into vectors processed through its ninety-six layers of neurons. This generates probability matrixes which are then processed further through a software function such as Softmax and output as words. The outputs are probabilistic projections of what the next word (or series of words) in a sequence would be.2 These models instantiate many of the cybernetic concepts discussed in this volume's essays, including the qualities emphasized in Paul Jaussen's \"The Art of Distinction.\" They include recursivity (outputs are fed back into the model as inputs) and environment/system distinctions. Originally the training set of texts constitutes an LLM's environment, but as the model learns, assumptions in the data set are absorbed into the continuously adjusted weights of the different neuron layers; after training, the model's interactions with human interlocutors constitute another kind of environment/system distinction. So intricate are the model's instantiations of these and other [End Page 1289] cybernetic ideas that the models can legitimately be called the ultimate cybernetic machines. The textual outputs of GPT-4 are several orders of magnitude more sophisticated than those produced by chatbots such as Siri and earlier algorithmic text-programs. GPT-4's texts are not only syntactically correct and semantically coherent; they often also demonstrate dazzlingly complex turns of rhetoric and logic. Indeed, they are often so good that they cannot be reliably distinguished from human-authored texts. From the technical description above, it would be quite surprising to discover that GPT-4 can discern and reproduce literary styles as","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"197 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135533281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}