Robert Pasquini

Bio: Robert Pasquini is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Extinction (optical mineralogy) & Aesthetics. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 18 citations.

Posthuman Ecology and Immersive Materiality in M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud

Abstract: Abstract:M.P. Shiel's novel The Purple Cloud (1901) spectacularly dramatizes the material processes of becoming. Its protagonist, Adam Jeffson, travels an earth ravaged by poisonous gas as a Last Man figure, setting fire to cities and reflecting on a physical world no longer oriented toward the species. Taking up contemporary discourses concerning ecology and extinction, the novel points to the regenerative potential of catastrophe. The ecological rather than the eschatological matters most; it is not a matter of being last but of becoming new.Ecological imagery charges the novel's recurring posthuman fantasies. The dialogical give-and-take between object/subject, human/non-human, and body/world draws attention to the relatability between the unbounded individual self and the immense external world. This brand of posthumanism stems from the ecological, requiring deep observations of radical ontology within an expansive network of affinities and kinships. These visions depict the immediate experience of becoming from first-person accounts of the phenomenological body, thereby providing access to the inner phenomena of a subject who experiences the linked states of interconnected biota and matter.However,The Purple Cloud also demonstrates the limits of posthumanism as evidenced by Jeffson's misogynist and xenophobic musings on a remodelled species. This failure to absolutely embrace the radical ontology of becoming establishes the persistence of humanist thinking in the period's evolutionary and ecological imaginaries, as well as the period's fraught relationship to the prospect of posthumanism due to competing anthropocentric and materialist frameworks.

Love Story's Ontology: Species Feeling in New Grub Street

Abstract: Abstract:Naturalism is an under-acknowledged posthumanism, and George Gissing's New Grub Street helps to reveal its ontologically and formally intricate aesthetics. Posthumanism challenges conventional humanism in insisting on the self as materially embodied, situated, and impinged: the self is not transcendent or etherealized, as in Cartesian philosophy. Gissing's Darwinian fiction often, interestingly, implies the premise of human non-specialness through stories of love and marriage. This essay claims that New Grub Street—with all its attention to writing, the print marketplace, and consumer appeal—metafictionally suggests the popular love story of the marriage plot as a particularly delusive product in that it encourages the false notion of human species distinction. New Grub Street's characters absorb this plot as a pattern for their own lives, which then fools them into thinking that a mere emotion, love, has a grand power to shape their futures, whatever their material circumstances. In other words, Gissing represents the feeling of love as a rhapsodic exaggeration of interiority and of interiority's supposed freedom from embodied conditions. But New Grub Street does not simply satirize its characters' ontological mistake. Rather, it demonstrates naturalism's complicated formal tendency to oscillate between two scales: the macroscale—deep, long species history—and, every bit as important, the microscale, or characters' small, daily, felt sense of their lives. Naturalism holds both versions of reality as equally valid; it is a fundamentally dual, dynamic form of realism, whose aesthetics, moreover, also works dynamically with readers themselves, implicating them, too, in a perplexed account of human being.

Evolution and Ethics

Abstract: THE correspondence in NATURE of Nov. 29 under the heading “Heredity and Predestination” raises a topic of surpassing interest.