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

Through its temporal reordering, Memento attempts to provide the audience with an experience analogous to Leonard's and thus heighten our understanding of how memory makes us human. When watching the film, we, like Leonard cannot make reference to a past of events - because they are inaccessible to us - or project toward a future of events - because they have been left behind. Although we may construct a chronological sequence of events as the "what happened," the story cannot be disentangled from the backwards-moving plot; there is no reverse arrow of time in our viewing experience. Yet, we, unlike Leonard, remember what has gone before in the film's order and eventually can shape it into a transcendent view of the whole, a memory of the future. Ultimately, by demonstrating Leonard's plight and reversing the forward motion of time and thus depriving us of a chronological past - but not, it should be added, a viewed past - the film compels us to consider the very nature of our nootemporal umwelt, which, with its quality of directed time, defines our humanity.

Remembering the Future: Memento , the Reverse of Time's Arrow, and the Defects of Memory

A Brief History of the International Society for the Study of Time

The following paper explores how J. M. Coetzee’s 1986 Foe provides a postcolonialist critique of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 Robinson Crusoe through revising its temporal structure and reconceptualizing its treatment of time. I begin with Foe, explaining its function as a fictional urtext to Robinson Crusoe, an urtext whose characters listlessly while away their time and whose narrative lacks plot potential. Turning next to Robinson Crusoe, I discuss how its linear time-scheme reinforces the key colonialist assumptions about progress. I then return to Foe, explaining its reshaping of the past in service of a hoped-for future.

Crusoe’s Foe, Foe’s Cruso, and the Origins and Future of the Novel

Gendering the Robot: Stanislaw Lem's "The Mask"

In a Wall Street Journal article appearing prior to the U.S. premiere of the film Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell addresses the challenges of turning his complex novel into a film. Revealing that he considered the novel’s “there-and-back” structure as “unfilmable,” he comments favorably on the new structure devised by the screenwriters/directors Lana and Andy Wachowski (The Matrix trilogy, V for Vendetta) and Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run; Heaven): “It [the novel] has now been adapted for the screen, but as a sort of pointillist mosaic: We stay in each of the six worlds just long enough for the hook to be sunk in, and from then on the film darts from world to world at the speed of a plate-spinner, revisiting each narrative for long enough to propel it forward” (Mitchell, “Translating”). Significantly, whereas the “there-and-back” structure—or “Time’s Boomerang,” as Mitchell calls it in a sly self-referential section of the novel (147)––suggests a dynamic state of affairs, the pointillist mosaic metaphor suggests a quasistatic one.1 I would argue that, through its restructuring, the film shifts its emphasis from a future in flux to a future that is fixed––as in a frame. The film certainly works on its own terms, the filmmakers deftly managing the mind-boggling task of tying together the six separate storylines of Mitchell’s novel through cinematic means. The changes in key plot points and in temporal structure, however, transform the novel’s theme that one can change the future (a “virtual future,” in Mitchell’s terms) to a theme

Jo Alyson Parker

Papers

Remembering the Future: Memento , the Reverse of Time's Arrow, and the Defects of Memory

A Brief History of the International Society for the Study of Time

Crusoe’s Foe, Foe’s Cruso, and the Origins and Future of the Novel

Gendering the Robot: Stanislaw Lem's "The Mask"

From Time's Boomerang to Pointillist Mosaic: Translating Cloud Atlas into Film