The article reviews the book "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History" by Elizabeth Kolbert.

The sixth extinction: an unnatural history.

What is climate change? Why does this phrase evoke such strong reactions? The specter of disastrous events attributed to climate change is considered by many environmental activists, governments, a...

Don't Even Think About It: Why our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change: Marshall, George. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 238 pages. $17.00. ISBN: 978-1-632861-02-3.

Depuis les romans oulipiens d’Italo Calvino – Si par une nuit d’hiver un voyageur et Le Château des destins croises – jusqu’aux hypertextes de fiction se joue une redefinition de la forme et des enjeux de l’enchâssement narratif. Ce travail vise, a partir d’un corpus contemporain, a explorer les mutations que connait cet agencement de recits percu comme traditionnel et theorise en France dans les annees 1960 par Gerard Genette et Tzvetan Todorov. Nous proposons, avec la notion de multiplication des recits, un assouplissement de ses contours afin d’aborder un corpus d’oeuvres romanesques cherchant a tisser ensemble plusieurs recits tout en brouillant les reperes hierarchiques impliques par les notions d’enchâssement ou d’insertion. Croisant approche narratologique et prise en compte de la reception, ce travail se donne pour objectif d’interroger ce qu’est la multiplication des recits en ne perdant jamais de vue ses effets, en particulier sur la mise en intrigue (P. Ricoeur) : comment comprendre et analyser la reception passionnee (R. Baroni) du lecteur face a des oeuvres parfois monstrueuses, entremelant les strates narratives et courant le risque du desordre, de la perte et de l’illisible ? Nous proposons de suivre a la trace le lecteur intrigue, protagoniste de cette etude et arpenteur ou geometre des espaces fictionnels et textuels ouverts par la multiplication des recits, a travers sa progression dans des romans – imprimes ou numeriques – qui placent au coeur de leurs enjeux la question du dispositif narratif

Multiplication des récits et stéréométrie littéraire : d’Italo Calvino aux épifictions contemporaines

We selectively review the progress of research on the psychology of time during the past 125 years, starting with the publication of the first English-language psychological journal, The American Journal of Psychology. A number of important articles on the psychology of time appeared in this journal, including the widely cited early article by Nichols (1891). The psychology of time is a seminal topic of psychological science, and although it entered a phase of decline and even moribund neglect, the past several decades have seen a prominent renaissance of interest. This renewed vigor represents the rebirth of the recognition of the centrality of the psychology of time in human cognition and behavior. Our selective overview highlights a number of strands of progress and how they have helped lead to the present, in which the cognitive neuroscience of time and timing in the brain is one of the most fervent and fertile modern areas of brain research. We also discuss some remaining challenges and potential lines of progress.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/amerjpsyc.125.3.0267

The psychology of time: a view backward and forward.

Inheriting Generations: From the Accident of Birth to the Uninsurable Life navigates a course through inheritance: a subject found in all literary and non-literary genres, time periods and cultures. In the face of that certainty, I map three distinct and dramatic shifts in the transfer of American wealth between generations: (1) the need to make property increasingly alienable in the face of what Charles Sellers called the “market revolution” of the mid-19th century, (2) the emergence of corporate forms, especially life insurance contracts, as vehicles of inheritance in the latter half of the nineteenth century, (3) the increased role of the state in inheritance during the early part of the twentieth century. Because of the upheaval surrounding these three transitions, the tensions created when a text imagines different answers for the questions of “Who can inherit?” and “Who should inherit?” were not just useful plot devices, or sentimental evasions of real economic transfers, but of such economic and political significance that inheritance remained a topic of deep cultural and political anxiety throughout the nineteenth—and into the twentieth—century. Authors such as William Wells Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Amelia Shackelford use inheritance to navigate the mingling of economic calculation and sentimental value for the purposes of imagining forms of morality and solidarity compatible with the market. In making this claim, I depart from a scholarly tradition of treating inheritance as a conservative plot device of sentimental fiction that for some, like Ann Douglas and Gillian Brown, looks like a retreat from the marketplace—an introduction to consumerism—and for others, like Jane Tompkins and Nina Baym, looks like a viable protestation against the market’s advance from the public into the private sphere. Instead, I examine inheritance more broadly in an attempt to replace the conflict between economic calculation and sentimental value enacted in these critical readings with the ways 19th century writers were alive to the possibility that the market was a source of solidarity, even morality.

Inheriting Generations: From the Accident of Birth to the Uninsurable Life

Chaos Theory and the Dynamics of Narrative Narrating against the Clockwork Hegemony: Tristram Shandy's Games with Temporality Narrating the Workings of Memory: Iteration and Attraction in In Search of Lost Time Narrating the Unbounded: Mrs. Dalloway's Life, Septimus's Death, and Sally's Kiss Narrating the Indeterminate: Shreve McCannon in Absalom, Absalom!

Narrative Form and Chaos Theory in Sterne, Proust, Woolf, and Faulkner

Females have been insulated, as it were; and while they have been stripped of the virtues that should clothe humanity, they have been decked with artificial graces that enable them to exercise a shortlived tyranny. Love, in their bosoms, taking place of every nobler passion, their sole ambition is to be fair, to raise emotion instead of inspiring respect; and this ignoble desire, like the servility in absolute monarchies, destroys all strength of character. Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/30054246.pdf

Complicating a Simple Story: Inchbald's Two Versions of Female Power

The Author's Inheritance is the first extended study to focus on Henry Fielding's influence on the works of Jane Austen. Parker explores how Fielding and Austen rely upon a common comedic vision, employ similar themes and plot structures, and follow a similar trajectory in their careers. Each author reinforces the social and cultural status quo while simultaneously revealing its deficiencies, creating a comforting social vision that ensures their place in the literary canon.

The Author's Inheritance: Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, and the Establishment of the Novel

This thirteenth volume in the interdisciplinary Study of Time series explores the way in which limits and constraints impact upon our understanding of time.

Time: Limits and Constraints

David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) features a complex temporal scheme. Critics have discussed the novel as an allegory of mortality and in terms of labyrinthine time and reincarnation time. I herein discuss it in terms of elided time, examining the ellipses or breaks in temporal continuity that the novel so prominently highlights. Although what we might arguably call the main narrative covers Holly Sykes’s lifetime, most of that span is not narrated. Drawing on current discussions of the Anthropocene and climate change, I explore how The Bone Clocks, through its narrative ellipses, spurs readers to link past causes and future effects and to pay attention to the attritional environmental destruction that is taking place across a vast time-scale. Mitchell writes a history of the future that cautions us to mind the gaps.

https://c21.openlibhums.org/article/558/galley/748/download/

Jo Alyson Parker

Papers

Narrative Form and Chaos Theory in Sterne, Proust, Woolf, and Faulkner

Complicating a Simple Story: Inchbald's Two Versions of Female Power

The Author's Inheritance: Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, and the Establishment of the Novel

Time: Limits and Constraints

Mind the Gap(s): Holly Sykes’s Life, the ‘Invisible’ War, and the History of the Future in The Bone Clocks