Showing papers in "New Literary History in 2007"
TL;DR: Adaptation theory has remained stubbornly rooted in often unexamined values and practices as discussed by the authors, despite the manifest ubiquity of narrative adaptations in contemporary culture notwithstanding, the critical tendency has been to denigrate them as secondary and derivative in relation to what is usually referred to as the "original."
Abstract: and journalistic discourse on the topic of narrative adaptation, the "orchid thief in Spike Jonze's film would like us to believe that adaptation is, in fact, a "profound process." In the immediate context, he means biological adaptation, of course, but in a metacinematic film about the process of adapting a book to the screen, the cultural implica tions of his positive remark should not be dismissed, despite its evident irony.1 The manifest ubiquity of narrative adaptations in contemporary culture notwithstanding, the critical tendency has been to denigrate them as secondary and derivative in relation to what is usually (and tellingly) referred to as the "original." Adaptation theory has rarely challenged this dismissive evaluation. Despite the theoretical sophistication of recent literary critical discourse, adaptation studies have remained stubbornly rooted in often unexamined values and practices. Although it seems self-evident that the insights of such theories as Bakhtinian dialogism, intertextuality, deconstruction, reception theory, cultural studies, narra tology, or performance theory might have relevance to adaptation stud ies, these connections have only begun to be made.2 In a way, therefore,
83 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that Bourdieu's account remains complicit with those tendencies in the history of western aesthetics that have functioned to exclude the working classes from full political participation.
Abstract: Habitus is a key concept in the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and plays an organizing role in his classic study Distinction where tastes are divided between different class-based habitus. These divisions are set in the context of Bourdieu's account of the French cultural field as being polarized between a bourgeois habitus defined by the Kantian ethos of disinterestedness and a working-class habitus governed by the choice of the necessary. This paper probes this account of the habitus and aesthetics and its political implications, in the light of the challenges to it that are presented by Bernard Lahire's sociology of individuals and Jacques Ranciere's account of the politics of aesthetics. It is illustrated by drawing on the evidence regarding the social distribution of cultural tastes from a recent study of the relationships between cultural practices and cultural capital in the United Kingdom. The central argument of the paper is that, far from succeeding in using the techniques of empirical sociology to map out a space that is beyond aesthetics, Bourdieu's account remains complicit with those tendencies in the history of western aesthetics that have functioned to exclude the working classes from full political participation.
72 citations
TL;DR: A critical approach to the theory and literature of the eighteenth century can help to formulate a productive critique of clini- cal empathy in contemporary medicine and to suggest possibilities for a reconfigured and strengthened understanding of empathy within the larger social context of institutions, systems, and access to care.
Abstract: ealth care institutions and medical educators assert that empathy is essential to optimum patient care, yet medical education and the practice of medicine often neglect empathy in favor of biomedical approaches to disease and injury. This essay dis- cusses the development in medical literature of the concept of "clinical empathy"—which attempts to reorient a biomedical, disease-centered approach to treating illness by accounting for an increasing fluency within the interpersonal relations between physician and patient—and examines arguments for supplementing medical training with the study of literature and the practice of reflective writing as a means of develop - ing empathy in physicians. In order to interrogate the problems as well as the possibilities of clinical empathy, I turn to theories of sympathy produced in the eighteenth century, when innovations in medical tech- nology and knowledge had only begun to create separate categories that would ultimately untwine the body from mind and culture. The eigh- teenth century was also a time when philosophy and literature, rather than being compartmentalized from medicine as distinct disciplines, informed medical understandings before medicine became specialized as a "science." A critical approach to the theory and literature of the eighteenth century can help to formulate a productive critique of clini- cal empathy in contemporary medicine and to suggest possibilities for a reconfigured and strengthened understanding of empathy within the larger social context of institutions, systems, and access to care. I. The Contemporary Debate The ongoing debate in medical education and in clinical practice about the importance of empathy illustrates a divided approach to patient care. Those who argue for empathy (or at least for concern for the patient's sociocultural and personal experience of illness) are countering what is
56 citations
TL;DR: The authors survey some of the relevant theoretical reconsiderations of the religious and the secular in the professional history of the profession of literary studies, and then serve as a basis for examining some aspects of current historical understandings and speculating about some ways that this history could be reconceived.
Abstract: istories of the profession of literary studies have long been underwritten by a narrative of secularization. It seems gener- ally accepted that while the discipline and its practitioners were once more religious, literary studies is now a decidedly secular enter- prise. The assumed fact of secularization thus serves as stable grounds for constructing our professional histories and identities. Recent work in a number of disciplines, however, has been challenging the general narrative of secularization, in large part by rethinking assumptions about both the religious and the secular. 1 As one of the leading voices in this effort has recently stated, "a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable." 2 If literary studies were to come to terms with such a claim, it would need to reexamine one of the major assumptions of its professional history. As a step toward making a case for that reexamination, this essay will survey some of the relevant theoretical reconsiderations of the religious and the secular. These insights will then serve as a basis for examining some aspects of current historical understandings of the profession and for speculating about some ways that this history could be reconceived. In some cases "secularization" refers specifically to the disestablishment of church affiliations with the state or the university. 3 The more general kind of secularization under consideration here is cogently summarized by Linell Cady: as part of the progress toward modernism and liberalism in the nineteenth century, the story of secularization narrates a triumph of empiricism over superstition, reason over faith, and the emancipation of all spheres—science, knowledge, the market, the state—from the oppressive and authoritarian "yoke of religion." 4 Secular thought and discourse do not so much replace religious thought and discourse as they displace them to the private domain of personal experience, belief, and practice. As a result, secular institutions—such as the emerging research university—become the place for a public discourse based on scientific evidence, objective reason, and disciplined methodology.
54 citations
TL;DR: The concept of "becoming-animal" was introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in a number of their early works as discussed by the authors, where a subject no longer occupies a realm of stability but rather is folded into a nomadic mode of existence in which one is always an anomaly, that is, inaccessible to any form of definition.
Abstract: This essay is an attempt to elucidate the concept of "becoming-animal" that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari develop in a number of their writings. Basically "becoming-animal" is a movement in which a subject no longer occupies a realm of stability but rather is folded into a nomadic mode of existence in which one is always an anomaly, that is, inaccessible to any form of definition. It is a movement from body to flesh, where the one is a figure of unity and strength, while the other is in an interminable state of disarticulation or disfigurement, as in many of Francis Bacon's paintings of faceless heads. It is not animal metamorphosis but an achievement of non-identity, which for Deleuze and Guattari is the condition of freedom (for animals as well as for the rest of us, whoever we are).
44 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the concept of intermediation is proposed, in which recursive feedback loops join human and digital cognizers to create emergent complexity, from electronic works to print books created as digital files and printed by digital presses.
Abstract: Twenty-first century literature is computational, from electronic works to print books created as digital files and printed by digital presses. To create an appropriate theoretical framework, the concept of intermediation is proposed, in which recursive feedback loops join human and digital cognizers to create emergent complexity. To illustrate, Michael Joyce's afternoon is compared and contrasted with his later Web work, Twelve Blue. Whereas afternoon has an aesthetic and interface that recall print practices, Twelve Blue takes its inspiration from the fluid exchanges of the Web. Twelve Blue instantiates intermediation by creating coherence not through linear sequences but by recursively cycling between associated images. Intermediation is further explored through Maria Mencia's digital art work and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter and its successor piece, The Error Engine, by Morrissey, Lori Talley, and Lutz Hamel.
42 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the reader's/character's/author's identification with the figure of the sacrificial animal constitutes a primal scene of narrative in both Kafka and Coetzee's works.
Abstract: Beginning with Franz Kafka's astonishing claim to Max Brod that the writer is the "scapegoat of mankind," this article discusses the treatment of the biblical figure of the scapegoat in Kafka's story "A Report to an Academy" and Coetzee's two novels, Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello. Through a comparison of these works, I argue that the reader's/character's/author's identification with the figure of the sacrificial animal constitutes a primal scene of narrative in the work of both Kafka and Coetzee.
28 citations
TL;DR: A biocultural analysis of public representations of breastfeeding is offered, identifying underlying social conflicts that infant feeding controversies mask and attends to biological and cultural narratives of lactation as constructions of maternity that together produce diverse rhetorical and material results.
Abstract: This article offers a biocultural analysis of public representations of breastfeeding, identifying underlying social conflicts that infant feeding controversies mask If the traditional biocultural approach to breastfeeding emphasizes a need to take account of biological facts from within an evolutionary perspective, this version attends to biological and cultural narratives of lactation as constructions of maternity that together produce diverse rhetorical and material results Analyzing breastfeeding from this kind of perspective brings attention to social norms of male embodiment, the role of technology in mediating social anxieties about mother's bodies, and the ambivalent cultural impacts of the medicalization of infant feeding The analysis focuses on three different representational domains: television programs and other mass media forms, the US Department of Health and Human Services 2004 National Breastfeeding Promotion Campaign, and feminist scholarship and activism addressing breastfeeding In each domain, the same controversies circulate—for example, the physical difficulties of breastfeeding, whether breastfeeding in public is appropriate, how much breastfeeding contributes to health, or whether breastfeeding necessitates a technological apparatus to insure success These debates really concern maternal responsibility and sexuality: the "problem of breastfeeding" is really another problem, namely the one initiated by women's attempts to enter into public life as women, with all the attendant difficulties of asserting equality and difference simultaneously and of challenging reigning public norms about women's proper place
26 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored the relationship between eros, desire, and medicine in the modern and post-modern era with reference to the work of four writers: Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde, Anatole Broyard, and Rafael Campo.
Abstract: Theorist Georges Bataille asserts that while sex is common to all animals, only humankind turns sexual activity into erotic activity. Professional medicine today is situated in a space remote from erotic experience. Especially because doctors openly deny that eros and desire hold any relevance to illness, a denial echoed by patients who learn to repeat what doctors believe, it is important to explore a contradictory argument (with its strong supporting evidence) holding that illness and medicine operate within an intrinsically erotic dimension. In this argument, Hippocrates stands as the founder and representative of rational medicine—call it medical logos. The great antagonist of Hippocrates, in a typological division useful in clarifying specific historical moments, is the ancient Greek god, Asclepius. Asclepius and Hippocrates reflect a continuing split within medicine between eros and logos. It is a split some patients and doctors today are openly beginning to question. Especially with reference to the work of four writers—Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde, Anatole Broyard, and Rafael Campo—this study begins an exploration of interrelations in the modern and postmodern era among eros, illness, and medicine.
20 citations
TL;DR: This article provided an account of traditional narratives as self-organizing adaptive systems, the stories that "tell themselves." Rather than being products of a single mind, traditional narratives evolve over extensive periods of time and arise from networks of interrelated individuals: epic singers, storytellers/writers/scribes, audience members.
Abstract: The paper raises the issue of inadequacy of the current narratological vocabulary when it comes to the question of who is speaking in traditional (oral and orally derived) narratives. Drawing on the concepts of "emergence" and "distributed representation" from the sciences of complexity, I attempt to provide an account of traditional narratives as self-organizing adaptive systems, the stories that "tell themselves." Rather than being products of a single mind, traditional narratives evolve over extensive periods of time and arise from networks of interrelated individuals: epic singers, storytellers/writers/scribes, audience members. Each of these individuals (network nodes) makes a local (if creative, or even unique) contribution, but none in particular is responsible for the character/identity of the whole text. This creativity relates irreducibly to the levels of organization beyond the individual, and is to be credited to the evolutionary dynamics of the narrative production itself, here termed the distributed author. The paper focuses on the sagas of Icelanders and Serbian epic poetry as they, due to the strong prevalence of decentralizing social factors in the milieus in which they evolved, represent exemplary products of distributed authorship.
19 citations
TL;DR: Using a biocultural approach, this article considers the wider social and cultural complications of the global health movement and questions whether the movement can really offer an untainted Rx for the world's ills.
Abstract: female doctor and a desk laid out with numerous vials contain ing medicines and pills. The doctor looks at the younger of the two children and says reassuringly, "She's doing well. She's so much happier than she was when she was first coming." Holding her child tightly, Mma smiles and nods with approval. Both Mma and her daughter are HIV-positive, and both are responding to an tire tro viral medicines recently made available to them and 43,000 fellow Botswanaians.2 This gripping portrayal of Mma and her family comes from Rxfor Survival, a six-part PBS documentary series devoted to the emerging global health movement.3 According to Brad Pitt, the narrator, Mma Oganne and her children are symbols of hope that AIDS can be managed and contained throughout the world, even in the poor African countries like Botswana where almost 30 percent of the population are HIV-positive. The overall message of Rx for Survival, however, is not positive. The documentary, filmed in over twenty countries, tells a story of world health at a critical crossroads. Malaria, tuberculosis, river blindness, polio, and HIV/AIDS ravage many parts of the globe, and new diseases such as West Nile virus, SARS, and avian flu threaten to relocate almost anywhere in a matter of hours. Underwritten by the Gates Foundation and Merck pharmaceuticals, the PBS series is part of an emerging global health movement which seeks to bring medical solutions to these immense world health problems. Heterogeneous, multinational, and constantly evolving, this movement is also made up of world leaders (for example, George Bush, Jacques Chirac, and Tony Blair), economists (Jeffrey Sachs),
TL;DR: In the early days of Bulgarian literature, there were always too many books in the house and the librarians were always coming up with plans for new shelving to hold them; meanwhile, the books accumulated in the bedrooms and the hallways, forming fragile piles that I had to crawl between as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: As far back as I can remember, I see myself surrounded by books. Both of my parents were professional librarians; there were always too many books in our house. They were always coming up with plans for new shelving to hold them; meanwhile, the books accumulated in the bedrooms and the hallways, forming fragile piles that I had to crawl between. I quickly learned to read and began to devour classic stories in children's versions: the Arabian Nights, the tales of Grimm and Andersen, Tom Sawyer, Oliver Twist, and Les Mis?rables. One day when I was eight, I read a whole novel; I must have been very proud because I wrote in my diary: "Today I read On Grandpa's Knees, a 223-page book, in an hour and a half!" As a student in junior high school and high school, I continued to love reading. It always gave me a shiver of delight to plunge into the world of the writers?classics or contemporaries, Bulgarian or foreign?whose books I now was reading in complete editions. I could satisfy my curios ity, live adventures, experience fright and happiness, without putting up with the frustrations that troubled my dealings with boys and girls of my own age, among whom I lived. I did not know what I wanted to do when I grew up, but I was certain that it would have something to do with literature. Would I be a writer myself? I gave it a try: I composed poems in doggerel verses, a play in three acts on the lives of dwarfs and giants, I even started a novel?but I didn't get past the first page. I soon felt that such writing was not my vocation. Without knowing for sure what would come later, I chose my major at the university: I was going to study literature. In 1956 I went to the University of Sofia; my profession would be talking about books. Bulgaria was then part of the Communist bloc, and all humanities disciplines were shaped by the official ideology. Literature courses were half scholarship and half propaganda: literary works past and present were weighed and measured according to the standards of Marxism-Le ninism. We were required to show how books represented the correct ideology?or, otherwise, how they failed to do this. Neither believing in Communism nor being especially rebellious, I retreated into a stance that many of my countrymen took: in public, silence or lip service to
TL;DR: The authors argue that the idea of the sublime lies at the heart of Auerbach's notion of realism as developed in Mimesis and show that his concept of realistic representation, far from being relativistic and radically contingent, is actually structural and implicitly theoretical.
Abstract: This paper argues that the idea of the sublime lies at the heart of Auerbach's notion of realism as developed in Mimesis. Through a close examination of Auerbach's approach to literary history, I show that his concept of realistic representation, far from being relativistic and radically contingent as Auerbach himself asserts, is actually structural and implicitly theoretical. Auerbach's well-known notion of the mixture of styles is not a mixture or fusion of stylistic levels, but a dialectic of the human drama: a dynamic synthesis between sublimitas and humilitas, the high and the low, which created a new conception of the human being as a self-transcending entity that can be the subject of history. Thus Auerbach can be interpreted as proffering a notion of the sublime that is not merely stylistic, but sociological and humanistic.
TL;DR: The London Review of Books published a review of the book "How to Read a Poem" by Eagleton as mentioned in this paper, which was widely criticised as a "structure of feel ing" metaphor.
Abstract: the London Review of Books. The thrashing, now famously, begins: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology." Dawkins would find his like, said Eagleton, among the Cambridge dons who lined up eagerly to vote down Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree without ever having read a word he wrote. "There are always topics on which otherwise scrupulous minds will cave in with scarcely a struggle to the grossest prejudice," he observed. "For a lot of academic psychologists, it is Jacques Lacan; for Oxbridge philosophers it is Heidegger; for former citizens of the Soviet bloc it is the writings of Marx; for militant rationalists it is religion."1 The review circulated rapidly online, where retribution was likewise swift. Science-blog wags made many variations on the point that decrying belief in God from a position of theological ignorance was like putting letters to Santa in the dead-letter bin without having first mapped the North Pole, or foregoing the historical study of textiles and fashion before declaring that the emperor has no clothes. The implication that theol ogy might warrant from intelligent readers the same level of respect as literary theory was not a target of reproof. Hocus pocus, mumbo jumbo: Hadn't this Eagleton fellow heard of the Sokal hoax} Several who com mented in Dawkins's defense noted that Eagleton's most recent book was called?get this?How to Read a Poem. That settled it, surely. The web being the web, scholars of literature who read "Lunging, Flail ing, Mispunching" online had only to click to find themselves lumped in with Bible-bleaters and jihadists by Eagleton's detractors. Yet few rushed in to defend a member of the guild. In literary forums one found tepid praise for Eagleton's evocation of Christian belief as a "structure of feel ing," in the manner of Raymond Williams, some meandering discussion of Kierkegaard or William James, but more typically, exasperation: Derrida, Zizek, Judith Butler, for heaven's sake, now Eagleton. Like leftists who took the Fourth International's vision of permanent revolution too much
TL;DR: Lilley as discussed by the authors argued that the sentimental romance secretly longs for the prestige of singular and private differences that have been ruined by, and excluded from, this new political community and its concepts of universal feelings and rights.
Abstract: Scholars often read the sentimental romance as a democratizing genre in which marginalized subjects, excluded by their gender or race, can make their feelings and voices heard in the public sphere. Lilley's essay complicates this approach by identifying mutual aesthetic processes of inclusion and exception that enable these feelings to be collected by the sentimental community. He argues that while Mackenzie's work promotes the public principles of sympathy and affection, it also mourns the ruin of utterly private feeling that such publicity entails. Rather than simply championing liberal ideas of freedom, charity, and public equality, the sentimental romance secretly longs for the prestige of singular and private differences that have been ruined by, and excluded from, this new political community and its concepts of universal feelings and rights. By examining how this erotics of private ruin fragments heterosexual desire and stains the body with the fateful force of race, Lilley shows how the aesthetics of sentimental romance inflects the formal structure of our modern systems of identity and belonging.
TL;DR: The authors consider the different moments of the literary experience and how diffracted "nows" lead us to nonrational and exceeding thought, and show how the literary responds to the disciplines (such as anthropology, history, psychoanalysis or criticism) in such a way that the very forms of our knowledge should be altered.
Abstract: Yes, it is still time to read literature and to write about it. In this essay, I consider the different moments of the literary experience and how diffracted "nows" lead us to nonrational and exceeding thought. If poetical oeuvres always come after other discourses (and not before them, as it is usually said), we need to reinspect the very notions of time and history through the prism of literature. In reading several discrete corpus (from the Francophone negritude movement to Aristotle and Ranciere, from John Ashberry to Ovid or Freud), I show how the literary responds to the disciplines (such as anthropology, history, psychoanalysis or criticism) in such a way that the very forms of our knowledge should be altered.
TL;DR: The dominant psychoanalytic theories in the humanities promote a myth of origins in which the infant is originally asocial, and motivated only by selfish hedonism, or by a desire to return to a state of syncretic merger with its environment.
Abstract: The dominant psychoanalytic theories in the humanities promote a myth of origins in which the infant is originally asocial, and motivated only by selfish hedonism, or by a desire to return to a state of syncretic merger with its environment. Developmental psychology, however, has demonstrated that infants are social agents, rather than selfish narcissists. Psychoanalytic theory of culture must therefore recognise the masculine "taboo on tenderness" which underlies its own early formulations, and which is apparent in a diverse range of cultural phenomena—from the eighteenth-century revolt against sensibility, to the commodification of sentiment, and the contemporary sexualisation of both love and touch.
TL;DR: A New Account of the East Indies as discussed by the authors describes the beginning of his decades-long career as a merchant and ship's captain in the Far East, where he spent between five and six and thirty years.
Abstract: n the preface to his 1727 work A New Account of the East Indies, Alexander Hamilton describes the beginning of his decades-long career as a merchant and ship's captain in the Far East. "Having a rambling Mind, and a Fortune too narrow to allow me to travel like a Gentleman," he writes, "I applied myself to the Study of nautical Affairs at Neptune's School"; after an apprenticeship in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, he sailed, probably before he was twenty, "to the East- Indies, where (he) spent between five and six and thirty Years." 1 While little is known of Hamilton's life besides what he tell us in his New Account, the success of his "Observations and Memorandums" is indicative of his contemporaries' fascination with the trade to the Far East—a fascination that dominated European commercial and travel writing before 1800. 2 Given the East India Company's obsession with expanding trade to India, China, and the sultanates of the Indonesian archipelago during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, firsthand accounts of the region typically sold well, but Hamilton takes pains to tell his readers that he is "no mercenary Scribbler, for altho' (he was) proffered a good round Sum" for his manuscript, he refused it and instead gave his manuscript to a friend who "print(ed) (it) for his own Benefit" (1:xxvii). Hamilton's disdain for cashing in on his experience is matched only by his contempt for "Map-Travelers," those armchair geographers whose secondhand and thirdhand accounts extol prospects for the India trade without describ- ing the forms of local knowledge—derived from a lifetime's experi- ence among the islands, coasts, and kingdoms of maritime Asia—that Hamilton deems essential to commercial success. In its geographical, environmental, and cultural specificity, his New Account rejects generic overviews of foreign lands and peoples in favor of a socioecological account of South, Southeast and Far Eastern Asia. To a greater extent than most eighteenth-century writers on the East, Hamilton devotes his energies to describing the interanimating processes of acculturation to the peoples, languages, and cultures he encounters and acclimatization
TL;DR: Improved race relations within American medicine will come about when the medical profession confronts its own legacy of medical racism and requires physicians to learn something about how doctors think about race.
Abstract: The idea that discredited (and even disgraceful) ideas about racial differences might play a role in medical diagnosis and treatment is a possibility that some doctors find profoundly dis turbing The racially biased treatment of patients would appear to be a grievous violation of medical ethics and a direct threat to the dignity of the profession Yet, in the course of the last two decades, the medical literature has published hundreds of peer-reviewed studies that point to racially motivated decisions by physicians either to deny appropriate care to black patients or to inflict on them extreme procedures (such as amputations) that many white patients would be spared “How are we to explain, let alone justify, such broad evidence of racial disparity in a health care system committed in principle to providing care to all patients?” Dr H Jack Geiger asked in 1996 His reply to his own question offered two possible explanations The first option was to attribute the observed disparity to “unspecified cultural differences” or decisions made by black patients who did not understand that they needed medical care The second and more discomfiting explanation was, as Dr Geiger phrased it, “racism—that is, racially discriminatory rationing by physicians and health care institutions” Confronting the data that he had felt compelled to present to the medical community, Dr Geiger could not bring himself to categorize the documented behavior of his medical colleagues as racist Indeed, he added, “if racism is involved it is unlikely to be overt or even conscious” 1 For this conscientious physician, medical racism that implied individual culpability was still somehow unreal, a specter to be exorcized rather than a threat to be acknowledged and confronted Over the past twenty years our most prestigious medical journals have produced a mountain of evidence confirming that racially biased diagnosis and treatments are a fact of life in American medicine 2 These analyses of racially biased behaviors eventually prompted an official report by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies (Unequal Treatment 2003) but no disciplinary proceedings The systematic detection,
TL;DR: In this paper, a comparison of H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau and Thomas Huxley's writings with recent U.S. policy decisions concerning stem cell research and the creation of chimeras is made.
Abstract: Through a comparison of H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau and Thomas Huxley's writings with recent U.S. policy decisions concerning stem cell research and the creation of chimeras, this article proposes that literary study should play a greater role in genetics policy debates. Cultural representations of genetics carry wide influence, and ethics commissions increasingly invoke literary and historical precedents to buttress their conclusions. Yet literary scholars and others in the humanities have largely been absent from the policy arena. Because of institutional shifts in the policy sphere, humanists have an opportunity to affect public policy more profoundly than at any time since the Victorian era.
TL;DR: The authors argue that the question framing this symposium, "What Is Literature Now?" is itself always already an interrogation of the nature of globalization in our contemporary moment, by way of a detailed discussion of William Gibson's most recent novel, Pattern Recognition (2003).
Abstract: I argue that the question framing this symposium, "What Is Literature Now?" is itself always already an interrogation of the nature of globalization in our contemporary moment. I do so by way of a detailed discussion of William Gibson's most recent novel, Pattern Recognition (2003). The questions Gibson asks in this work concern the future role of one of the most important forms of modern literature, the novel, in a world in the midst of dramatic political, economic, and technological changes. In a present rendered so fluid and unstable as to make the classical vocation of the realist novel impossible—any picture of the present hopelessly obsolete long before the work sees the light of day—the novelist's task shifts to the labor of what Gibson names "pattern recognition," a mapping of broader trends and directions in which our global situation tends. There is a deeply polemical element at work here as well: for Gibson, the novel, like the nation-state to which it is inextricably linked, is a residual form, and the unfinished projects of modernist innovation and Utopian communal formation will be continued only through new electronic media forms allegorized in Pattern Recognition by the "footage." However, underlying this vision is a deeper anxiety that the potentialities opened up by the end of the Cold War and the globalizing 1990s will in fact be derailed by the virulent forms of U.S. nationalism unleashed following the events of September 11, 2001, events too that Gibson's novel is among the first to incorporate directly into its thematic structure. There is thus a performative as well as a constative force to the operation of pattern recognition outlined in this work: Gibson asks us to recognize the real movement of the present before we commit ourselves to a course of action from the "gray muck and bones" of which we may not be able to extricate ourselves for a long time.
TL;DR: The authors argue that three versions of materialist theorizing ironically fail to give adequate accounts of two basic features of literary experience: its ways of being sensuous and its manifestation of particular features of labor that can produce compelling singularity for the reader.
Abstract: I argue that three versions of materialist theorizing ironically fail to give adequate accounts of two basic features of literary experience—its ways of being sensuous and its manifestation of particular features of labor that can produce compelling singularity for the reader. Ultimately I reject materialist ontologizing because it is has now no significant other—our basic task is to characterize fully how sensuousness is achieved and put to work for the imagination.
TL;DR: For instance, Map's De nugis curialium as discussed by the authors argues for authorship and writing within twelfth-century European literary culture, and argues for a form of authorship based on his ambivalence toward his immediate court context and the alterity of his being a subordinate, belated writer.
Abstract: Walter Map's De nugis curialium stakes a radical claim for authorship and writing within twelfth-century European literary culture. Map imagines a form of authorship based on his ambivalence toward his immediate court context and the alterity of his being a subordinate, belated writer. He privileges materials from the margins of established literary discourse, and he fashions reading not just as the application of fit moral lessons but as an active, potentially unstable site of intellectual labor and textual meaning. In key episodes of his book, Map goes beyond self-reflexive commentary to test the limits of his precepts and the artistic freedom they allow.
TL;DR: Caregiving is returned to as a concept for applying a biocultural approach to the medical humanities, after I have set out my own way of thinking ofBiocultural processes and how I see the papers in this special issue contributing to humanistic studies of science and medicine.
Abstract: It may surprise readers, but caregiving has relatively little to do with medicine. The two helping professions that have made caregiving central to their knowledge and practice are lower in status: nursing and social work. The real experts in caregiving are usually lower still on the status ladder: families and the sick or disabled themselves. Caregiv ing is, at the existential core, a primary quality of what it means to be human. It is telling that it seems inversely correlated with status. I will return to caregiving as a concept for applying a biocultural approach to the medical humanities, after I have set out my own way of thinking of biocultural processes and how I see the papers in this special issue contributing to humanistic studies of science and medicine Life overflows with many things, yet much of it is about danger and uncertainty. Financial pressure, job problems, accidents, chronic illness, man-made and natural disasters, disappointments in relationships and careers, and the fears and anxiety they induce affect just about all of us?the poor most of all. In spite of the claims (and splendid achieve ments) of scientists, physicians, and asset managers, most of what is now described as "risk management" concerns unknowable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable dangers, ordinary and extraordinary, that make liv ing uncertain and very serious. The progressivism central to the hyping of science and medicine is balanced by a humanities perspective that is more realistic about disappointment and defeat. In an ethnographic and social-historical sense, one that seems to perplex philosophers, life is moral because living turns on the most serious questions of what really matters and what to do.1 These are the lived values that define what moral experience means for people in a local world and what moral life is about for the individual. The moral, in this existential sense, connects affect with social life, physiology with culture, illness and disability with politics and economics, and medicine with life. Here "the moral"?the lived values of groups and individuals?is different than "ethics"?what laypersons and professionals aspire toward in the way of doing good, being just, and so on. Thus the moral can in practice be injuring or outright destructive.
TL;DR: The authors examined recent work on the history of the novel in English in light of Vincent Pecora's book Secularization and Cultural Criticism, and contrasted PECora's approach to Talal Asad's in Formations of the Secular.
Abstract: Making the relationship between the religious and the secular a special object of inquiry represents less a new way of thinking about the role of religion in literary studies, as Michael W. Kaufmann contends, than a return to the status quo. This essay articulates that status quo by examining recent work on the history of the novel in English in light of Vincent Pecora's book Secularization and Cultural Criticism. Next, it contrasts Pecora's approach to Talal Asad's in Formations of the Secular. Finally, the essay briefly describes some of the terrain between the religious and the secular in the novel that Asad leaves unexplored in his criticism.
TL;DR: The authors argue that the self-negotiated profiles of our own identities are both sharpened by, and indeed in part constituted by, literary engagement, and that the comparison we make between ourselves and literary characters yields self-knowledge.
Abstract: Of a rather extended family or ways we engage with literary works, one constitutes an occasion for self reflection of a distinctive kind. The relational conception of selfhood as developed in American pragmatic thought, viewed against the Cartesian picture of the self, allows us to see the way in which the comparisons we make between ourselves and literary characters yields self-knowledge. And more strongly, the relational conception of experience derived from pragmatism allows us to see the way in which autobiographical or reflexively-engaged literary experience itself becomes self-constitutive. In short, the self-negotiated profiles of our own identities are both sharpened by, and indeed in part constituted by, literary engagement. If we are in part composed of relations, the selves that enter those imaginary worlds do not remain unchanged.
TL;DR: The authors consider the relationship between literature and knowing and point out the way in which historical understanding, as the basis for the organization of knowledge in the human sciences, restricts the epistemological import of the literary.
Abstract: In this essay, I consider the relationship between literature and knowing. In pursuing this reflection, I underscore the way in which historical understanding, as the basis for the organization of knowledge in the human sciences, restricts the epistemological import of the literary. In distinction with this prevailing historical model of literary discourse, I elaborate an understanding of literature – viewed as imaginary projection or idealized discourse – that places in the foreground its necessary role in thinking.
TL;DR: For example, this paper showed that the act of modeling almost always brings to the surface of awareness things you didn't know you knew, and often shows you significant gaps in your knowledge that?of course?you didn't even know were there.
Abstract: "Imagining what you already know" is a good description of modeling in many humanities contexts: for example, in building a model of Salisbury Cathedral, or the Crystal Palace, as we did at the Institute in Virginia, you could say that we were imagining what you already know about those structures. However, interestingly, the act of modeling almost always brings to the surface of awareness things you didn't know you knew, and often shows you significant gaps in your knowledge that?of course?you didn't know were there. Of course, in some cases?maybe even in all cases that I've mentioned?one could (in principle) do this kind of modeling and even the quantitative analysis without computers: you could model the crystal palace with toothpicks and plastic wrap; you could do the painstaking word-counting and frequency comparison by hand. But you wouldn't, because there are other interesting things you could do in far less time.1
TL;DR: The question "What is literature?" is not, like 'What is hematite?" asked out of ignorance as mentioned in this paper. It is a question of interest only to those who already have a sense of the extension of the concept and who want, for whatever reason, to think about the defining or differen tial qualities of the phenomena to which, as they know perfectly well, the term is generally applied.
Abstract: The question "What is literature?" is not, like "What is hematite?" asked out of ignorance. It is a question of interest only to those who already have a sense of the extension of the concept and who want, for whatever reason, to think about the defining or differen tial qualities of the phenomena to which, as they know perfectly well, the term is generally applied. In attempting to respond, one can talk about what literature does, how it functions in this or that society or institutional context, or one can inquire whether there are properties that literary works share and features that distinguish literature from other cultural objects or activities. The first approach can generate much interesting discussion of the role of literature in establishing or contesting a national culture, in giving concrete, vivid expression to moral, ethical, and developmental scenarios, in teaching disinterested appreciation, in establishing bourgeois hegemony, and so on. Literature has been given diametrically opposed functions?a set of stories that seduce readers into accepting the hierarchical structures of society, and a practice where ideology is challenged or subverted?but unless the functioning of literature is described in rather vacuous terms, there is not likely to be a single function that all literary works perform, and as soon as the functions or effects are described with enough specificity to become pertinent and interesting, one finds that each of these functions (constituting a nation, contesting ideology) can also be performed by nonliterary discourses. Adopting the second approach and trying to identify the defining features of works deemed literary leads to discussion of important charac teristics of literary works, such as their fictionality, their noninstrumental use of language, their high degree of organization that extends to levels and to linguistic features usually regarded as transparent, their dependent yet transformative relation to other texts regarded as literary; but, again, each of these qualities is likely also to be shared with works not usually regarded as literature. One of the major lessons of theory has been that literariness is not confined to literature but can be studied in historical
TL;DR: The authors examines the historical and the political aspects of the theory of exhausted art that Barthes developed as an expansion of his notion of degre zero, which suggests that exhausted art is politically committed.
Abstract: With a plan to trace the relationship between a purely formal history of writing and the deeper levels of history, Barthes's project in Le degre zero de l'ecriture seems to have failed because it remains unclear what degre zero historically represents. Drawing on Le degre zero de l'ecriture, as well as Barthes's later texts on film and photography, this essay examines the historical and the political aspects of the theory of "exhausted art" that Barthes developed as an expansion of his notion of degre zero. As I demonstrate, Barthes's theory suggests that exhausted art is politically committed. By remaining semantically and historically ambiguous, this art not only proposes a new aesthetic paradigm, but, as Barthes believed, also represents a socially reflective type of art—it poses an alternative to the novel and its depiction of the subject as separated from others.