Configurations最新文献

{"title":"How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy (review)","authors":"X. Chacko, Sushmita Chatterjee, Laura A. Foster, Brian Sabel, Sam Smiley, Banu Subramaniam","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.0006","url":null,"abstract":"for fiction” (221). The material Keiser gathers here is interesting, but the arguments about hypochondria lose focus. One of the most ambitious moments of Nervous Fictions comes in the introduction when Keiser sees his nervous fictions as foundational in Cartesian dualism. His argument is subtle and, to my mind, deserves more attention in the book: Keiser contends that Descartes massages the difference between the pineal gland—an identifiable organ—and the mind through analogy. The pineal gland is the theater for the soul, but shares with the mind the quality of singularity. They are like each other, and through this quick-footed move, Descartes opens up the possibility of the mind itself as an internal theater—a metaphor that captures the imagination of countless writers and thinkers following him. With the publication of Nervous Fiction, Kesier joins and advances an important conversation of established scholars navigating what science could and could not do and also what it meant and how it meant. Nervous Fictions promises to chart new intellectual territory in how we understand the relationship between literature and science in the period—it is at once a relation of influence as well as mutual constitution.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"31 1","pages":"96 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47240873","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":"Reading Omens in the Escape of Genetically Engineered Dinosaurs, 1970s–1990s","authors":"Victor Monnin","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.0001","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The catastrophic scenario of Jurassic Park is known worldwide and across generations, thanks to two movie trilogies, as well as countless video games, toys, and other derived products inspired by Michael Crichton's 1990 novel. Despite Jurassic Park's originality, stories of genetically engineered dinosaurs on the loose made their debut during the 1970s, when genetic technologies, such as recombinant DNA, were being developed. This article retraces, through a series of examples, the rise of a now classic narrative featuring genetically engineered dinosaurs escaping their creators, from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s. The succeeding variations around this narrative eventually forged a powerful, long-lasting cultural device processing anxieties into entertainment by fictionally predicting the consequences of genetic technologies. The deep past and dinosaurs were fashioned into a screen on which the public learned to read omens about the technological future and the end of a traditional distinction between natural and artificial.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"31 1","pages":"35 - 59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42556597","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":"Video Games and American Culture: How Ideology Influences Virtual Worlds by Aaron A. Toscano (review)","authors":"Mark T. DiMauro","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.a899695","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.a899695","url":null,"abstract":"their case studies are West-centered (p. 240) and critically consider the fact that they had limited exchange of ideas with others. How would such a conversation change the concept of the laboratory and its meaning? Who would (and should) it include? In conclusion, the strength and innovation of The Lab Book lie in its exploration of new, “hybrid” laboratories. Its value will have to be measured by whether the methodology it offers is used in further robust analyses. The Lab Book offers a site-specific heuristic to be discussed, developed, and challenged. The six categories it systematically tests with examples make it an important basic literature for future laboratory studies. The call for an understanding of laboratories that goes beyond space, equipment, and technology is highly stimulating.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"31 1","pages":"190 - 193"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48020912","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":"Automatic: Literary Modernism and the Politics of Reflex by Timothy Wientzen (review)","authors":"M. Paterson","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.a899693","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.a899693","url":null,"abstract":"Central to Timothy Wientzen’s fascinating, lively, and flawed book is the split he identifies in modernist literature and art between, on the one hand, the discoveries of patterns, grooves, and the habits of organisms observed in John B. Watson’s laboratory in the United States and Ivan Pavlov’s laboratory in Russia, and, on the other hand, the drive to overcome any such programmatic physiological base within an organism through the artistic drive for creativity and experimentation with form. This split is characteristic in itself of modernity, of course, a dichotomy Wientzen identifies at one point as being between the “radical newness in art and culture” and “an era dominated by robots, hollow men, and automata incapable of escaping the grooves of thought and action patterned by society” (p. 170). In lesser hands, perhaps, the split identified here would be characterized in cruder and more predictable terms as the opposition between the new sciences of human behavior and a concomitant plea by artists and writers, with comparatively little scientific background or knowledge, for escape from their confines through the pure freedom of art for art’s sake, or a form of production that escapes the hyper-rationalized bureaucracy of industrial modernity. Yet, through careful reading of representative literary oeuvres, along with sections that join some of the dots in the history of the science of reflexes and the social implications of the concepts of habit and automaticity, the result is a more edifying and less predictable study of the interactions between the arts and the sciences in modernism. Among the four writers who feature in the four substantive chapters of this book, part of the Hopkins Studies in Modernism series, Wientzen finds ample evidence of reflexivity concerning their historical and scientific moment. In the examination of passages from D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Rebecca West, and Samuel Beckett, Wientzen finds to varying degrees their awareness of, and response to, the troubling of human subjectivity, agency, and social control in the wake of the widening impact of the scientific and social scientific findings of human behavior and its potential for manipulation. There are four chapters sandwiched between a succinct introductory overview and a concluding chapter that assesses the implications of early-twentieth-century studies on twenty-first-century politics and media. For each of the chapters the structure remains largely consistent, starting with a contemporary set of related intellectual or scientific discoveries in the first half, followed by a sustained examination of","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"31 1","pages":"185 - 188"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48418558","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 Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies by Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka (review)","authors":"B. Hof","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.a899694","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.a899694","url":null,"abstract":"of payoff in the afterword that comprises an urgent essay on the perils of habits and reflexes in the twenty-first century. In some ways it recombines the split strands of argumentation and application in order to bring the concerns of prior generations back to the present, although stylistically it is very different from the rest of the book. Readers familiar with Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), or who are attentive to controversies in recent decades about the data troves of tech companies, will recognize the deep significance of those earlier scientific and social experiments in the manipulation of behavior. Unlike the more measured scholarship of the book until that point, the afterword comes across as a heartfelt diatribe based on the chilling realities explored in embryonic form within previous chapters, and serves as an effective wake-up call. Yes, this historical conjunction of science and literature may be fascinating, but forget to learn from it at your peril, Wientzen rightly implores the reader.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"31 1","pages":"188 - 190"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48427371","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":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.a899697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.a899697","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","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":"135469564","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":"How Like a Leaf: Vital Energy in Greenhouse Infrastructures","authors":"K. Lynes","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.a899692","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.a899692","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:While commercial greenhouses are built as architectures to temper (climactic) precarity, this article argues that precarity abounds in the ripening conditions they enfold. Contemporary greenhouses harness the energy of the internet of things, precision agriculture, and artificial intelligence to manage inputs and outputs for optimal growth. Such growth, however, is often premised on the exploitation of racialized and gendered labor, an overlooked \"greenhouse effect\" of its model of agricultural production. The article examines how, as media, greenhouses compress space and time in the interests of yield, drawing from the vital energy of laborers, largely insourced from the Global South, and plants themselves. It concludes that the diffuse modalities of (human and nonhuman) sensing in the greenhouse nevertheless hold the potential to propose different networks of ripening. Arguing for a method of \"non-citizen sensing,\" the article asks how we might make readable the data derived from the laboring bodies in these spaces and their capacity for sensing precarity.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"31 1","pages":"159 - 184"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41702630","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":"Science, Scientists, and Prehistories of SSK in Mid-Twentieth-Century British Literature","authors":"G. Matthews","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.a899696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.a899696","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article investigates the diverse ways in which midtwentieth-century British writers responded to the proliferation of science and scientists in the traditionally non-scholarly spheres of industry, politics, and society and, in doing so, establishes a series of prehistories to the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). Authors such as Fred Hoyle, C. P. Snow, D. F. Jones, Michael Moorcock, Daphne du Maurier, and John Wyndham interrogated the notion that science is an impersonal, detached body of knowledge and provided counternarratives to teleological narratives of scientific progress. These novelists sought to: (i) present scientists as diligent and productive in opposition to the platitudes of politicians and dour bureaucrats; (ii) debunk the stereotype that scientists are unemotional and irresponsible in contrast to the instrumental reason of fictional AI; and (iii) acknowledge that science is inseparable from the social context by foregrounding the complexities involved in the dissemination of new discoveries. The article analyses the ways these writers anticipate key concepts in SSK, including the construction of scientific fact, the scientific attitude and limits of the human, and the dissemination, reception, and epistemic authority of science. In doing so, they provide important prehistories to SSK and contribute much-needed sociocultural context to ongoing debates concerning the value of science in society.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"31 1","pages":"101 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47472874","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":"Industries of Purity: Horses, Idols, and Affective Economy in Uma Musume Pretty Derby","authors":"L. Chu","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.a899691","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.a899691","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This paper scrutinizes the confluence of idol and racing industries in Uma Musume Pretty Derby, a Japanese multimedia franchise centering on \"horse girls,\" anthropomorphized characters based on racehorses. I study how the franchise elicits audience's emotional and financial investment by combining features of idol performance and racehorse breeding in an \"affective economy,\" while highlighting its strategy to reconcile the contradictory concepts of purity through a process I call \"purification.\" This paper uses the franchise to critically engage the imperial and eugenic legacies in the racing and idol industries of Japan, and demonstrates the complicated entanglement between science, empire, and entertainment.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"31 1","pages":"133 - 158"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46253535","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":"Nervous Fictions: Literary Form and the Enlightenment Origins of Neuroscience by Jess Keiser","authors":"Tita Chico","doi":"10.1353/con.2023.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2023.0004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66888243","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}