ConfigurationsPub Date : 2022-10-15DOI: 10.1353/con.2022.0027
{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0027","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Contributors <!-- /html_title --></li> </ul> <p><strong>Anton Borst</strong> is an instructional consultant at New York University’s Center for Faculty Advancement, where he develops programs and services to support effective teaching practices across disciplines. Specializing in antebellum American literature and Romanticism and science, he received his PhD in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and has taught literature and writing at NYU, Hunter College, Baruch College, and Pace University. He is a co-author of <em>The Craft of College Teaching: A Practical Guide</em> (Princeton U. Press, 2020) and co-editor of <em>Critical Reading across the Curriculum</em>, Volumes I and II (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017, 2020).</p> <p><strong>Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal</strong> is Ruth and Paul Idzik College Chair in Digital Scholarship and assistant professor of English and Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. His research is situated at the crossroads of media theory, science and technology studies, and literary criticism. His current book project, <em>Rendering: A Political Diagrammatology of Computation</em>, shows how our cultural narratives, politico-economic formulations, and epistemic beliefs get crystallized into computational hardware and software architectures.</p> <p><strong>Michael Filas</strong> is a professor of English at Westfield State University in Massachusetts, where he teaches American literature and creative writing. His research and creative work consider themes of posthumanism, collage, and medical humanities. His recent work has appeared in <em>The Writing Disorder</em>, the <em>Journal of Experimental Fiction</em>, <em>Eleven Eleven</em>, <em>Specs</em>, <em>Fiction International</em>, <em>The Information Society</em>, and <em>Passages North</em>. Michael’s current project is an analysis of Todd Haynes’s 1995 film <em>Safe</em> in the contexts of Aristotelian tragedy and American societal trends during the late pandemic.</p> <p><strong>JiHae Koo</strong> is an assistant professor of English at Kookmin University, South Korea.</p> <p><strong>Robert Nguyen</strong> is a doctoral candidate in English and Visual Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. His dissertation project examines recursion and failure in literary, film, and television representations of Silicon Valley. His work is forthcoming in the <em>Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts</em>.</p> <p><strong>Mary Sanders Pollock</strong>, professor of English at Stetson University, teaches British literature, environmental studies, and gender studies. She is the editor of two scholarly anthologies and three monographs, including <em>Storytelling Apes: Primatology Narratives Past and Present</em> (Penn State U. Press, 2015) and <em>The Evolution of Gerald Durrell</em> (forthcoming).</p> <p><strong>Daniel J.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"81 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138495513","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}
ConfigurationsPub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/con.2022.0032
Michael Filas
{"title":"How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre (review)","authors":"Michael Filas","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0032","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"497 - 500"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49524467","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}
ConfigurationsPub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/con.2022.0031
M. Pollock
{"title":"Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France by Kari Weil (review)","authors":"M. Pollock","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0031","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"500 - 501"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43293701","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}
ConfigurationsPub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/con.2022.0029
Daniel J. Worden
{"title":"Scrambled Astronomy in Fatouville’s French Scenes for Arlequin, Empereur dans la lune","authors":"Daniel J. Worden","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0029","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In Paris in 1684, Louis XIV’s troupe of commedia dell’arte performers staged scenes in French alongside their improvised Italian-language comedy routines in Arlequin, Empereur dans la lune [Harlequin, Emperor in the Moon]. The playwright Anne Mauduit de Fatouville composed and contributed these scenes, appropriating the era’s vocabulary of astronomy. These scenes take up, scramble up, and redeploy contentious ideas about the moon and stars in a satirical attack on astrology and pedantic stargazers. Fatouville’s writing, coupled with standout performances by actors like Domenico Biancolelli, helped make the production an immense success. This article suggests that the show’s achievement also grew out of three main comedic strategies that it used to create a singular psychological impact on its first audiences. These theatrical devices led certain viewers to confront, laugh at, and temporarily repress anxiety about possible omens in the starry sky, and imagined extraterrestrials lurking on the moon.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"411 - 433"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48628320","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}
ConfigurationsPub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/con.2022.0030
Robert Nguyen
{"title":"Middle-out from Bottom-up: Engineering and Close Reading Code in HBO’s Silicon Valley","authors":"Robert Nguyen","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0030","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay examines the production and reception of a selection of computer source code briefly visible onscreen in “Founder Friendly,” an episode of the HBO satire series Silicon Valley. This text, made legible by the affordances of streaming high definition television, invited fans to engage in interrupted viewing, close reading, and tele-participation practices, in which they froze playback, examined, compiled, and ran the source code, and shared their interpretations and results. Yet the creation of such authentic and generative objects was enabled by a close collaboration and alignment of interests between the production team and technology industry insiders. In this case, the satire’s pursuit of high-definition verisimilitude led to the replication of some of the very practices and logics it critiqued.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"435 - 464"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48161329","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}
ConfigurationsPub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/con.2022.0025
JiHae Koo
{"title":"H. P. Lovecraft, Photography, and the Transhumanist Imagination","authors":"JiHae Koo","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0025","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay explores photography’s relationship to the transhumanist imaginary of American weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft; transhumanism refers to the belief that humans can evolve through technological advancements. I argue that Lovecraft’s seemingly naïve conception of photography as unerringly “objective” actually reflects his understanding of photography as a transhuman technology that can transform human consciousness. However, Lovecraft’s transhumanist vision is plagued by the recognition that the endpoint of transhumanist evolution is the annihilation of the individual body and the specific desires on which one’s sense of self is grounded—a vision Lovecraft is attracted to but finally cannot embrace.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"465 - 494"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47589335","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}
ConfigurationsPub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/con.2022.0028
Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal
{"title":"The Cyber-Homunculus: On Race and Labor in Plans for Computation","authors":"Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0028","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:By culling through a history of computing technologies and racial capitalism from the last 150 years, this paper identifies a trans-historical figuration at work. Following, as case studies, the metaphorical lives and afterlives of the Mechanical Turk—a chess-playing automaton from the nineteenth century—and Maxwell’s Demon—a scientific thought experiment first conceived in 1867— in technical and cultural discourses, it traces the figure of a cyberhomunculus, a tiny science-fictional subject laboring underneath the machinic hood, that animates para-cybernetic discourse and makes computational work palpable. In doing so, it outlines the entangled origins of atomization, automation, and outsourcing, and demonstrates how racialized and classed social relations get miniaturized into the computer, resulting in the simultaneous valuation and erasure of posthuman labor.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"377 - 409"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47227660","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}
ConfigurationsPub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/con.2022.0026
A. Borst
{"title":"The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch (review)","authors":"A. Borst","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0026","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"495 - 497"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42863367","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}
ConfigurationsPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1353/con.2022.0021
Rhianedd Smith
{"title":"I Just Don’t Think about It: Engaging Students with Critical Heritage Discourse through Science Fiction","authors":"Rhianedd Smith","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0021","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:What does sci fi have to say about and to the people who collect and preserve? Using a scene from Cuarón’s Children of Men as a starting point, the author explores some popular representations of heritage professionals and their spaces in science fiction. These chime with critically engaged museological theory and practice in recognizing the role of museums in past and present injustices. The author asks whether popular sci fi representations can be used as a starting point for discussion and debate in professional training. Can sci fi change the way we work and create different futures for museums?","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"349 - 355"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42299051","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}
ConfigurationsPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1353/con.2022.0018
Lauren A. Mitchell
{"title":"Erotic Surgery: J. G. Ballard’s Crash, Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” and the Visual Legacy of the Medical Museum","authors":"Lauren A. Mitchell","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0018","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay delves into medicine’s historically strange relation to erotic intimacy by juxtaposing an analysis of the exhibitionary objects of medical museums, with particular attention to the eighteenth-century Anatomical Venus wax models, against speculative fictions by Octavia Butler (“Bloodchild,” 1995) and J. G. Ballard (Crash, 1973). The historically legitimizing structure of dissection and the edutainment of the public medical museum have the potential to catalyze aesthetic fantasies of nude, splayed, vulnerable bodies to those outside the immediate realm of the medical field. Although we might imagine the concept of “erotic surgery” to be one that is relegated to the nightmarish fantasies of dystopic futures, it is an aesthetic phenomenon that looks back into surgical history as much as it looks forward.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"285 - 312"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47015509","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}