{"title":"Unruly Children: Blake’s Book of Urizen and Embryology’s Break from Newtonian Law","authors":"J. Fletcher","doi":"10.3828/EIR.2016.23.1.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/EIR.2016.23.1.14","url":null,"abstract":"William Blake’s conflation of cosmology and embryology in the The Book of Urizen testifies to his view that Newtonian mechanism and empirical philosophy had infiltrated the new discoveries being made in the eighteenth-century life sciences. Ironically, however, emerging vital materialist physiologies and theories of embryological development, though voicing allegiance to the laws of Newton, ultimately revealed a living world that could not be contained in or explained by his metaphysical system – a state of affairs that I argue Blake dramatizes in Urizen, wherein the Newtonian Urizen despairs over his reptilian offspring, who cannot keep “his iron laws one moment.” Despite their anti-Newtonian implications, the various vitalist natural philosophies were for Blake another form of natural religion, for they too denied divinity to the self-active living matter of the universe. Urizen’s dark satire thus attacks both Newtonian law and the materialist embryological theories that transgressed it.","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128402796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Challenging the Digital Humanities: A Response to Jon Saklofske","authors":"Ashley Reed","doi":"10.3828/eir.2016.23.1.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2016.23.1.8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122650232","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Digital Doors of Perception: Illuminating Blake through New Knowledge Environments","authors":"Jon Saklofske","doi":"10.3828/eir.2016.23.1.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2016.23.1.7","url":null,"abstract":"The unique work and non-traditional production methods of William Blake have inspired me to design digital platforms that ask new critical questions regarding Blake’s output. Custom-fade allows for overlapping comparisons between the variants of William Blake’s printed images, and is exposing correlations in ways that traditional materials and methods cannot. Similarly, NewRadial, designed to sort, browse through, manipulate and comment on Blake’s iconic pages in a visual environment, was initially intended to open new possibilities for traditional critical approaches relating to Blake’s work. Its usefulness beyond specific Romantic period material has since prompted its evolution into a much more robust new knowledge environment. The growth of NewRadial (from a Blake-inspired tool to an environment that is helping to redefine the ways we might engage in scholarly collaboration) is an example of the way that larger methodological initiatives and metacritical ideas can emerge from addressing particular Rom...","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125665859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Blake and Digital Making: A Critical Cluster","authors":"Ashley Reed, Jon Saklofske, R. Whitson","doi":"10.3828/EIR.2016.23.1.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/EIR.2016.23.1.3","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"71 4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132316630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Channeling William Blake: A Response to Roger Whitson","authors":"Ashley Reed","doi":"10.3828/EIR.2016.23.1.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/EIR.2016.23.1.11","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121269640","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Coming to Terms with Algorithmic Demystification: A Response to Roger Whitson","authors":"Jon Saklofske","doi":"10.3828/eir.2016.23.1.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2016.23.1.12","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123484948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"There Is No William Blake: @autoblake’s Algorithmic Condition","authors":"R. Whitson","doi":"10.3828/EIR.2016.23.1.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/EIR.2016.23.1.10","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines a Twitterbot I created in the summer of 2013 to automatically tweet lines of poetry that mimic the style of William Blake. What does it mean for a tweet to be Blakean? The question recalls Alan Turing’s famous test of artificial intelligence: how do we know when a machine exhibits intelligence? I explore Turing’s question with specific reference to the temporal structure of algorithmic loops and branches found in Blake’s poetry, the Markov-chain structure used to statistically generate natural language, and the auto-generated lines of poetry produced by my Twitter program. My article takes inspiration from Friedrich Kittler’s article “There is No Software,” in which he questions what writing means when automatic processes are increasingly mediating communication online. For me, Blake’s poetic syntax enables an analogous exploration in the field of Romantic literary studies: namely how we can understand the meaning of poetry and literature when it is computationally mediated and gener...","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121041259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Craft and Care: The Maker Movement, Catherine Blake, and the Digital Humanities","authors":"Ashley Reed","doi":"10.3828/EIR.2016.23.1.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/EIR.2016.23.1.4","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the popular Maker movement, the scholarly discourse of “critical making,” and the work of digital humanists through an analysis of the working relationship between William and Catherine Blake. It begins by examining the contemporary Maker movement, which claims to embrace William Blake as its “patron saint” even as it increasingly insists on the monetization of Makers’ creative labor. This pressure toward monetization—in which garage tinkerers become uncompensated R&D departments for large corporations—is accompanied by an emphatic gendering of Makers as male and productive rather than female and reproductive, erasing and effacing the care work that makes Making possible. Given the Maker movement’s appropriation of Blake as symbol, it is instructive to examine the collaborative creative processes of William and his wife Catherine, who facilitated Blake’s “making” at every stage, both as care worker and as laborer at the press. Recent scholarship on Catherine, however, falls into the ...","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114073556","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Catherine Blake was an Insect? A Response to Ashley Reed","authors":"Jon Saklofske","doi":"10.3828/eir.2016.23.1.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2016.23.1.5","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131633215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conjuring Catherine Blake’s Material Ghost: A Response to Ashley Reed","authors":"R. Whitson","doi":"10.3828/eir.2016.23.1.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2016.23.1.6","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":281500,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Romanticism","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115048753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}