Wai Chee Dimock

Bio: Wai Chee Dimock is an academic researcher from University of Chicago. The author has contributed to research in topics: Literary criticism & Historicism. The author has an hindex of 16, co-authored 50 publications receiving 1301 citations. Previous affiliations of Wai Chee Dimock include Yale University.

Languages in the Time of Corona

Abstract: Dimock reflects on languages in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic On December 30, 2019, before the World Health Organization (WHO) issued warnings about the coronavirus outbreak that would be known as COVID-19, a Canadian start-up, BlueDot, noticed a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan and flagged it BlueDot doesn't just accept official statistics Kamran Khan, its founder and CEO said that they know that governments may not always be relied upon to provide information in a timely fashion Instead, a machine-learning algorithm using natural language processing combs through a vast database every day, looking for syndromes of over 150 diseases in sixty-five languages Local news stories, medical bulletins, even livestock and animal disease data are all on the algorithm's reading lists When an outbreak is identified, its location is linked to global air-travel data to pinpoint other cities at risk

Editor’s Column—Collateral Resilience

Abstract: Many things came to me during my four weeks at Spaulding Rehab: consolatory e-mails, cards, some flowers, and a care package from PMLA that kept me going for the entirety of my stay. What I never expected was a translation of a story by the Japanese writer Shiga Naoya, sent by Scott Miller, dean of the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University (BYU) and the translator.

AI and the Humanities

Abstract: A T FIRST GLANCE IT SEEMED NO DIFFERENT FROM ANY OTHER MLA session: in a midsize room at the Washington State Convention Center, well attended but not quite filled to capacity, with people leafing through their programs, checking their phones, drifting in and out. It was session 388, Being Human, Seeming Human. Arranged by the Office of the Executive Director, it was the first of its kind. Four of the six speakers were from Microsoft,1 expressly invited to start a conversation about what it means for those who selfidentify as human to share the planet with those who seem to be. The Microsoft representatives talked about OpenAI’s GPT2, a widely used text generator. Can we always tell that the writer is an algorithm? And should we object if it happens to write like us?2 These playful conundrums were exactly right for the occasion, but just the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, “seeming human” might turn out to be one of the less scary things AI can do. Replacing, supplanting, and eliminating human beings are also in the cards. From selfdriving cars to facial recognition biometrics to drones carrying out remote assassinations, AI is poised to transform the fabric of life and the future of work. The Brookings Institution, drawing on a study by the Stanford graduate student Michael Webb,3 reported on 20 November 2019 that, unlike the automation enabled by robots such as those in Amazon warehouses (Edwards), which mostly affects lowpaying jobs, the predictive and decisionmaking powers of AI—in the form of machinelearning algorithms—will affect every employment sector, hitting educated workers the hardest (Muro et al.). Those “with graduate or professional degrees will be almost four times as exposed to AI as workers with just a high school degree” (Muro et al.). This point was reiterated in a 29 January 2020 update from the Brookings Institution, further underscoring the 1 3 5 . 3 ]

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Abstract: Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

The madwoman in the attic :the woman writer and thenineteenth-century literary imagination

Abstract: I am like the needy knife-grinder — I have no story to tell. — Maria Edgeworth I dwell in Possibility — A fairer House than Prose — More numerous of Windows — Superior — for Doors — Emily Dickinson ... the modes of fainting should be all as different as possible and may be made very diverting. — The Girls’ Book of Diversions (ca. (1840) From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women. How unwomanly to discuss it! — Carolyn Kizer