Configurations最新文献

{"title":"Roald Hoffmann: An Appreciation","authors":"Jay A. Labinger","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.a912116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.a912116","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Roald Hoffmann’s unsurpassed accomplishments on both sides of the humanities/sciences border (which much of his career has been aimed at demolishing) have been recognized by, inter alia, the 2022 SLSA Lifetime Achievement Award and the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His work spans a wide range of SLSA-related topics: the creative nature of science in general and chemistry in particular, the central role of narrative in scientific investigation and reporting, the nature of the scientific article, the importance of artistic representation for chemistry, and others. He has also written several science-themed plays and an extensive body of poetry, and worked to make chemistry accessible to the nonspecialist. This essay highlights some of his most significant contributions to SLSA’s mission and goals.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"78 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138495528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Creative Writing: Embracing Unfamiliar Knowledge","authors":"Laura Otis","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.a912114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.a912114","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>What can someone learn, if anything, by reading or writing fiction? If people can gain new knowledge by imagining, of what does that knowledge consist, and how can we characterize it? This reflection on SLSA creative writing sessions approaches these questions by considering the kinds of discussions that can emerge when writers read their work to literary scholars, scientists, and artists. To show how writers differ in their appeals to diverse readers’ sensory imaginations, the essay refers to stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Junot Díaz, and Lauren Groff. The author argues that if artists and scholars can approach each other’s work as alternate but legitimate knowledge-building processes, we may be better equipped to meet the many twenty-first-century challenges we face.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"78 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138495531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity by Tom Tyler (review)","authors":"Kaori Nagai","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.a912117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.a912117","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity&lt;/em&gt; by Tom Tyler &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Kaori Nagai (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; Tom Tyler, &lt;em&gt;Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity&lt;/em&gt;. University of Minnesota Press, 2022. &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Game&lt;/em&gt; by Tom Tyler playfully explores the intersections between animals and games, especially video games. It consists of 13 concise essays and discusses a wide selection of video games spanning various decades, including the earliest periods of the gaming industry, the 1970s and 80s. The book provides a fascinating glimpse into how ubiquitous animals have always been in video games, as companions, adversaries, targets for hunting, items for trading and food, and even as paw prints, scent trails, and stools. Fittingly for a book on games, moreover, it makes us aware of the rules and conventions of the game and takes pleasure in unsettling them at every opportunity. This makes the book deeply thought-provoking, challenging many of our preconceptions of what games are and why we “humans” play them. Grounded in animal studies, the book critiques a key rule of the game, human exceptionalism—the view that we humans are different from and superior to all other organisms—according to which we think about, deal with, and exploit other animals. The book title, &lt;em&gt;Game&lt;/em&gt;, is well chosen to challenge the border between real life and the realm of video games, allowing us to see the extent to which human exceptionalism is built into our digital realm of play. As Tyler explains, “game,” which etymologically means amusement and entertainment, came to be associated with specific types of amusement—namely, hunting. The word, therefore, refers to an activity of killing animals for sport, and also the animals thus hunted and killed. Many video games are revealed to be “a game about game,”&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; which enacts hunting or other forms of bodily “animal” entertainment. As such, video games are a vital medium through which to rethink fundamentally our relationship with nonhumans.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Video games, with their advanced technological features, excel at providing an opportunity to “become animal” and explore a nonhuman perspective. For instance, &lt;em&gt;Game&lt;/em&gt; has a chapter on the game &lt;em&gt;Dog’s Life&lt;/em&gt; (2003), wherein players take on the role of a dog who explores the canine environment using its keen sense of smell, which Tyler interestingly explores in conversation with Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of &lt;em&gt;Umwelt&lt;/em&gt;. However, &lt;em&gt;Game&lt;/em&gt;’s predominant focus is on more sobering instances of becoming animal: our own vulnerability and creatureliness as animals. For instance, playing a video game is to experience “death” every time we see a “Game Over” screen; we even find ourselves hunted by all kinds of nonhuman predators, a situation Tyler wittily summarizes as “the inevitability of ","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"78 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138495529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hearing the Living Metaphors: A Response to Serpil Oppermann's \"Storied Seas\"","authors":"Başak Ağın, Z. Gizem Yılmaz","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.a912113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.a912113","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this paper, we evaluate Serpil Oppermann’s “Storied Seas and Living Metaphors in the Blue Humanities” as a turning point in the theoretical development of ecocriticism. Oppermann’s application of her own theory, material ecocriticism, in the reading of the water bodies that entwine the biological and the textual, situates material-ecocritical undertakings as a landmark of the ecocritical map. The well-known metaphor of the wave, used in explicating the growth of ecocriticism, was replaced by the metaphor of the rhizome in an earlier essay by Oppermann herself. By affirming both metaphors as valid, we argue that Oppermann’s 2019 <i>Configurations</i> essay initiated the fourth wave of ecocriticism and showcased what it means to follow a rhizomatic pattern. In our response, we take Oppermann’s open call to hear the voices of marine creatures as an invitation to explore the limits of the environmental humanities and seek to push our ocularcentric academic borders. Developing a new framework to study the soundscape of the ocean, we intend to literally hear the voices of marine entities (provided to the reader/audience through QR codes) and investigate what kind of new narratives might emerge out of this experience.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"78 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138495532","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Confluence and Change: The Emergence of Configurations","authors":"Kenneth J. Knoespel","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.a912110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.a912110","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This reflection recognizes the diligence of many colleagues and institutions that participated in founding <i>Configurations</i>. Founding the journal came through building on important changes in university education. Its presence enabled research between multiple disciplines and contributed to the emergence of new curricula, degrees, and critical theory. Kate Hayles and Bruno Latour were central in building the vision for the new journal, and they remain a lasting legacy for its future.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"77 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138495535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Playing at SLSA: A Game Studies Stream Retrospective","authors":"Edmond Y. Chang, Patrick Jagoda, Julianne Grasso, Peter D. McDonald, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Stephanie Boluk, Patrick LeMieux, Alenda Y. Chang, Doug Stark, Timothy J. Welsh, Jamal Russell, Ashlee Bird","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.a912115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.a912115","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This retrospective essay weaves together the reflections of 12 diverse voices on the inclusion of game studies at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) annual meetings. The first game studies stream was organized in 2011 and brought together a series of interdisciplinary scholars, presentations, and panels on video games, virtual worlds, art, storytelling, war, time, platform, and identity. The stream was then and continues now to be a community of graduate students, scholars, developers, teachers, and artists, some of whom have published in <i>Configurations</i>. These are a few of their stories. </p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"78 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138495530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From SLS to SLSA: A Brief History","authors":"Lance Schachterle, Stephen J. Weininger","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.a912109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.a912109","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We sketch here the background of the founding of what was originally known as the Society for Literature and Science and its first years of operation, with a few comments on some of our early landmarks and some later developments. We thank our colleagues Carol Colatrella, Mark Greenberg, Judith Yaross Lee, Manuela Rossini, and David Porush for their suggestions about our draft. We ask the forbearance of many other colleagues and friends who soon joined these original co-founders but are not named here because of time limitations.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"77 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138495536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life by Peter Boxall (review)","authors":"Zsófia Novák","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.a912118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.a912118","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;span&gt;Reviewed by:&lt;/span&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life&lt;/em&gt; by Peter Boxall &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Zsófia Novák (bio) &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; Peter Boxall. &lt;em&gt;The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life&lt;/em&gt;. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. vii + 411 pages. ISBN 978-1-108-83648-7. &lt;p&gt;What does the “enworlding” power of the “novel imagination” consist in? How does the world-making capacity of fiction relate to the junction between the mind and the body, where consciousness makes itself manifest? How and why does the novel become the form that is particularly suited to the exploration of that shifting bridge between the self and the prostheses by which it extends itself into the world? These are some of the main questions addressed in &lt;em&gt;The Prosthetic Imagination&lt;/em&gt;, Peter Boxall’s latest book, in which the University of Sussex academic and literary critic offers a highly original account of the novel genre, conceptualized as the site where the evolution of the prosthetic condition—developing in tandem with and captured by what Boxall calls the novel imagination—can be most clearly traced. Rereading the “history of the novel as a history of artificial life,” Boxall contends, can help us come to terms &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 381]&lt;/strong&gt; with our current, “deeply estranged relation to life, in which the distinction between the real and the artificial becomes difficult or even impossible to maintain” (13). Thus, the author sets out to map the dynamics of the prosthetic imagination as it emerges throughout the novel’s progress, exploring the “unfolding processes by which mind has employed prosthetic and mimetic forms to extend itself into the world” (20) in a range of literary—predominantly Anglophone—fiction from the early modern period to the Anthropocene.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Casting the novel as the art form that is “driven and shaped by its capacity” (17) to access and articulate the elusive nexus between mind and matter, Boxall’s study aims to “articulate [the] relation between prose fiction and the technologies of embodiment as it develops through the course of modernity” (20) as well as to flesh out the intriguing contradictions that lie at the heart of the prosthetic logic, “the logic which suggests that the forms in which we know ourselves are always at a remove from us, that we are not identical with our manifestations” (14). The tensions that mobilize the prosthetic seam—as that “dissolving space” (17), that volatile ground “where consciousness comes into being through its encounter with its own apparatuses” (68)—run through the book’s chapters, which themselves become arenas for the movement from the mimetic to the prosthetic model “in which narrative, information, does not refer to the world but produces it” (11), and then on to the simulacral. The fiv","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"78 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138495527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cli-fi and the Future of the Novel: Building on Helena Feder's \"Ecocriticism and Biology\" Special Issue","authors":"Simon C. Estok","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.a912112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.a912112","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The topic of climate change is epic in every sense of the word. Established conventions of the novel simply may not be equal to the task of representing the enormity of the issues we currently face, and climate change fiction authors are radically refashioning the novel. Kim Stanley Robinson’s <i>The Ministry for the Future</i> shakes the genre with its innumerable narrators and points of view, nonlinear narratives, radically weakened characterizations, dizzying narrative jolts and spasms, and its wealth of mechanically scripted hard science. In <i>The Hungry Tide</i>, Amitav Ghosh offers a more engaging narrative with a more passive science that listens not only to the data but also to local knowledges. Drawing on the work of Vandana Shiva and Macarena Gómez-Barris and building in the spaces opened up by the 2010 <i>Configurations</i> issue “Ecocriticism and Biology” (one of which has come to be known as “the blue humanities”), this article shows that how we conceptualize science will in large part determine the impact of the narrativization of scientific data on literary genres. Focusing on a facet of “the blue humanities,” this article argues that increasingly, there is serious attention—in both theoretical and fictional work dealing with climate change—to questions about what happens to biological systems and microfauna when aquatic systems are disrupted, to ways in which our oceans are becoming slimy, and to what our responses to this sliming may mean, questions that are vital to how we will proceed and how literary genres will fare. </p></p>","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"78 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138495534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Configurations: A Thirty-Year Retrospective","authors":"Melissa M. Littlefield, Rajani Sudan","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.a912108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.a912108","url":null,"abstract":"&lt;span&gt;&lt;span&gt;In lieu of&lt;/span&gt; an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:&lt;/span&gt;\u0000&lt;p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;!-- html_title --&gt; Configurations: &lt;span&gt;A Thirty-Year Retrospective&lt;/span&gt; &lt;!-- /html_title --&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; Melissa M. Littlefield and Rajani Sudan &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;Although many of you know that &lt;em&gt;Configurations&lt;/em&gt; is the journal of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, you may not have been around for its founding or its shift from SLS to SLSA. You may be familiar with the journal’s current themes, but you may not be aware of the significant roles that &lt;em&gt;Configurations&lt;/em&gt; and SLSA played in fostering so many of the interdisciplinary (sub)fields that have risen to prominence in the past decades: game studies, animal studies, the environmental humanities, graphic medicine, and electronic literature(s), not to mention numerous literature/science crossovers into neuroscience, mathematics, and biotechnology, as well as historical scholarship. What you hold in your hands or see on your screen is an academic hive of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary activity—one that has been shaped and supported by several generations of scholars.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;At this 30-year mark, the people behind SLSA and &lt;em&gt;Configurations&lt;/em&gt; deserve to be celebrated, so this issue is a metaphorical pat on the back for keeping this strange and wonderful mélange of ideas, projects, people, and academic investments alive and well. There are so many who deserve thanks, including the original group of scientists and humanists who established in 1993 what was then known as the Society for Literature and Science, and its journal. As you’ll see in the initial retrospective essays in this collection, many individuals across several institutions worked diligently to counter assumptions that literature and science have nothing to do with one another. Renowned figures in science studies and science such as Bruno Latour, Roald Hoffmann, and Stephan Weininger collaborated with equally eminent humanities &lt;strong&gt;[End Page 287]&lt;/strong&gt; scholars—N. Katherine Hayles, George Rousseau, and Sander Gilman—to establish a forum where interdisciplinary thought could truly flourish.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;As co-editors of the journal for the past 10 years, we have had the privilege of working with junior and senior scholars invested in carrying the ideas of SLSA forward—and challenging the boundaries of what “counts” as literature and science scholarship. We’ve devoted some issues to themes, making space for editors who had ideas about where &lt;em&gt;Configurations&lt;/em&gt; could fruitfully go: putrefaction (25.1), keeping time (23.2), immunity (25.3), taxidermy (27.2), and oceans (27.4), to name a few. We saw so much enthusiasm for literature and science that we expanded the journal from three to four issues a year; but we’ve also confronted the challenges of the pandemic, including labor shortages and work/life balance issues that have made it difficult for scholars to continue their research agendas uni","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"77 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138495537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}