Reading Mutant Narratives : The Bodily Experientiality of Contemporary Ecological Science Fiction
21 Feb 2020-
TL;DR: The work in this paper explores how narratives of environmental and personal transformation in contemporary ecological science fiction can develop more-than-human modes of embodied experience, and traces and describes experiential changes that take place while reading works of science fiction, and synthesizes these approaches into a method of close reading, performative enactivism, that helps to articulate bodily, environmental, and morethanhuman aspects of readerly engagement.
Abstract: Reading Mutant Narratives explores how narratives of environmental and personal transformation in contemporary ecological science fiction can develop more-thanhuman modes of embodied experience. More specifically, it attends to the conflicted yet potentially transformative experientiality of mutant narratives. Mutant narratives are viewed as uneasy hybrids of human-centered and posthumanist science fiction that contain potential for ecological understanding. Drawing on narrative studies and empirical reading studies, the dissertation begins from the premise that in suitable conditions, reading fiction may give rise to experiential change. The study traces and describes experiential changes that take place while reading works of science fiction. The bodily, subjective and historical conditions of reading are considered alongside the generic contexts and narrative features of the fictional works studied. As exemplary cases of mutant narratives, the study foregrounds the work of three American science fiction authors known for their critiques of anthropocentrism and for their articulations of more-than-human ecologies: Greg Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer. While much of contemporary fiction naturalizes embodied experience and hides their own narrative strategies, mutant narratives have the potential to defamiliarize readers’ notions of bodies and environments while also estranging their embodied experience of reading fiction. As a theoretical contribution to science fiction studies, the study considers such a readerly dynamic in terms of embodied estrangement. Building on theoretical and practical work done in both embodied cognitive and posthumanist approaches to literature, the study shows how engagements with fictional narratives can, for their part, shape readers’ habitual patterns of feeling and perception. These approaches are synthesized into a method of close reading, performative enactivism, that helps to articulate bodily, environmental, and more-thanhuman aspects of readerly engagement. Attending to such experiential aspects integrates ecological science fiction more deeply into the contemporary experiential situation of living with radical environmental transformation.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose that the brain produces an internal representation of the world, and the activation of this internal representation is assumed to give rise to the experience of seeing, but it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness.
Abstract: Many current neurophysiological, psychophysical, and psychological approaches to vision rest on the idea that when we see, the brain produces an internal representation of the world. The activation of this internal representation is assumed to give rise to the experience of seeing. The problem with this kind of approach is that it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness. An alternative proposal is made here. We propose that seeing is a way of acting. It is a particular way of exploring the environment. Activity in internal representations does not generate the experience of seeing. The outside world serves as its own, external, representation. The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the governing laws of sensorimotor contingency. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a natural and principled way of accounting for visual consciousness, and for the differences in the perceived quality of sensory experience in the different sensory modalities. Several lines of empirical evidence are brought forward in support of the theory, in particular: evidence from experiments in sensorimotor adaptation, visual \"filling in,\" visual stability despite eye movements, change blindness, sensory substitution, and color perception.
2,271 citations
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01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: In this paper, a what-if scenario on what could happen if we plan for the horse and who else that could benefit from that is presented, where the horse is the centre of the stable and the equestrian sport.
Abstract: Lunds Civila Ryttarforening, LCR, is one of Sweden’s largest equestrian clubs with its facilities located in between Norra Faladen to the north and LTH to the south. To the west of the horse facilities is “Smorlyckans Idrottsplats” with football pitches, tennis courts, a Jujutsu club and a Home Guard’s building. The club has approximately 500 weekly riders and offers a wide range of activities within the the riding school, as well as stalls for private horses. Discussions on whether the equestrian centre should be relocated or not have reached a standstill as it has been going on for about 50 years. I believe that if LCR is to stay on its current site it can not continue to be an island. Therefore this project is an investigation into how the centre could be developed meeting and integrating with its surroundings. As much as the horse is the centre of the stable and the equestrian sport it’s also the centre of this project. “When Species Meet” is a what-if scenario on what could happen if we plan for the horse and who else that could benefit from that. In addition to the architectural proposal, one major question with the project has been to develop my own method and investigate how it’s possible to keep a high rate of complexity when working with a project. This is something I have done by taking the position of the horse instead of the architect. This change of position has provided me with a possibility to see the site, with all its opportunities, from a perspective that I couldn’t have without the horse. Therefore, this project is also a try on how it could be possible to take on other projects by relocating my investigation to several other positions relevant for those projects. (Less)
1,140 citations
01 Jan 1992
TL;DR: The body politics of Julia Kristeva and the Body Politics of JuliaKristeva as discussed by the authors are discussed in detail in Section 5.1.1 and Section 6.2.1.
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
1,125 citations
TL;DR: In The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti offers a roadmap for navigating the global effects of this post-human predicament, one in which clear distinctions between the human and the non-human no longer hold, the nature-culture divide is destabilised, and man's privileged status is under attack as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: It can be said that we inhabit a post-human world—an existence characterised by smartphones and social media, genetically modified food and IVF babies, life-extending technologies and prosthetic enhancements. In The Posthuman (2013), Rosi Braidotti offers a roadmap for navigating the global effects of this post-human predicament—one in which clear distinctions between the human and the non-human no longer hold, the nature–culture divide is destabilised, and man’s privileged status is under attack. The situation we find ourselves in, Braidotti argues, is neither dystopian technological nightmare nor futuristic fantasy but one that requires complex and nuanced critical responses to issues of subjectivity, ethics and politics. In the four chapters comprising The Posthuman, Braidotti outlines her vision of the post-human future based on an affirmative politics, which ‘combines critique with creativity in the pursuit of alternative visions and projects’ (54). As a feminist antihumanist, Braidotti expresses little nostalgia for the concept of ‘Man’ and its associated individualism, Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism. Chapter 1 ‘Post-Humanism: Life Beyond the Self’ charts the Humanist/anti-humanist debates to draw attention to the crisis of the human and the opportunity it affords to imagine alternative subjectivities grounded in relationality and the interconnection between the self and others (49). Methodologically, Braidotti adopts a feminist politics of location in her critique of various Humanist traditions. There is a profound reflexivity to her writing as she guides the reader through the intellectual trajectory that has resulted in her nomadic, affirmative politics. It is a legacy that incorporates social movements of the 1960s/1970s, as well as the continental feminism of Irigaray and Kristeva. Spinoza and Deleuze and Guattari also feature as philosophical touchstones from which she advances her vision for the posthuman as a ‘relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity, that is to say a subject that works across differences and is also internally differentiated, but still grounded and accountable’ (49). By framing her argument within the narrative of her own intellectual story, the book conveys an immediacy and intimacy not often found in academic prose. Stylistically, it is as though we are inside her head—a post-human experience, indeed. Her writing is as expansive and impressive as you would expect—a swarm of ideas assuredly curated into a compelling argument for generating new forms of subjectivity and ethical relations to confront the challenges of a post-human existence. Consistent with existing feminist appraisals of the post-human (Halberstam and Livingston 1995; Hayles 1999; Toffoletti 2007), Braidotti acknowledges the complexity of the post-human predicament, seeking alternative frameworks to think about post-human subjectivity in non-dualistic ways. What Braidotti brings to these debates is an emphasis on materialism by way of Spinozist monism. In championing the relational, embodied and embedded qualities of post-human existence, Braidotti reprises the concept of zoe—a generative and vitalist force that allows for connections and affinities to be made across
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04 Jan 2015
TL;DR: Preface ix Acknowldgements xv I Introduction The Affordances of Form 1 II Whole 42 III Rhythm 49 IV Hierarchy 82 V Network 112 VI The Wire 132 Notes 151 Index 169
Abstract: Preface ix Acknowldgements xv I Introduction The Affordances of Form 1 II Whole 42 III Rhythm 49 IV Hierarchy 82 V Network 112 VI The Wire 132 Notes 151 Index 169
340 citations
01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: In this paper, the authority of interpretive communities is defined as "the text in this class that people have searched hundreds of times for their favorite novels like this, but end up in infectious downloads".
Abstract: Thank you very much for downloading is there a text in this class the authority of interpretive communities. Maybe you have knowledge that, people have search hundreds times for their favorite novels like this is there a text in this class the authority of interpretive communities, but end up in infectious downloads. Rather than enjoying a good book with a cup of tea in the afternoon, instead they juggled with some malicious bugs inside their laptop.
322 citations
Book•
28 Dec 1998
TL;DR: Cohn's The Distinction of Fiction as discussed by the authors was the best book of the year in the field of Comparative Literature and won the MLA's Aldo Scaglioni Prize.
Abstract: Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. 197 pp. $42.00 hardcover. Reading Dorrit Cohn's The Distinction of Fiction made me feel proud of myself. Along the way I kept thinking, "this is the best book I've read this year," only to learn, some weeks later, that The Distinction of Fiction had won the MLA's Aldo Scaglioni Prize for the best book of the year in the field of Comparative Literature. Anyone now reading Cohn's fascinating, magisterial essay on the specificity of fictional narration ("artifiction") can recover this thrill: pride in oneself and pride in one's community. "Community" is a key term: this book is the outcome of Cohn's reflection on the nature and workings of fictional discourse within the systematic knowledge elaborated by a community of narratologists, Cohn prima inter pares. Her conclusions arise from a fine assaying of the scholarship that has accumulated around such fundamental questions as: how does the (fictional) substance of the literary work come to light? With what authority? With what distinction? The matter in parenthesis is crucial because what is always at stake in Cohn's reflections is the differentiation-and, hence, the salvaging - of fictional works from those that, for Cohn, are decidedly nonfictional; works, like history and biography, that claim to refer to a pre-given world and by such conventions of claiming, do so. Not all narrative is fiction; everything is not (the same kind of) text. On this path of thinking one continually has glimpses of the depth and importance of the issues involved-glimpsed, like a wide exhilarating landscape through a precisely framed window: fundamental issues of truth, reference, authority. From the start The Distinction of Fiction argues for the existence of inalienable markers of fictional narrative and maintains continuity by returning to them. The existence of such "distinctions" flies in the face of claims held by speech-act theorists such as John Searle, who argues: "There is no textual property, syntactic or semantic, that will identify a text as a work of fiction" (20). Yet, for Cohn, various markers of fiction make themselves felt. All fiction is constituted by a preterite or by an "absolute" present that departs from ordinary conceptions of past or present. Here the past "no longer needs to refer to the speaker's own past;" for example, "it can refer to the 'now' of an individual whose plane 'left tomorrow'" (25). As in all narrative, however, the narrated event precedes the event of narration. The language of fiction cannot say what is the plot-event in the instant of its emergence; such language may be its own event but cannot coincide with the event of what is narrated-and this is true too, as Cohn shows in a tour de force, even in the first-person present-- tense "artifiction" of J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. The difference between the verb tense of the fiction and its peculiar disjunctive temporality is one of its eternal distinctions. Cohn's distinctions have immediate practical force. For example: from the foregoing, it would appear that Alexander Nehamas's provocative thesis in Nietzsche: Life as Literature that Nietzsche becomes in his work the literary character that he is-Nietzsche as narrator "fusing" with Nietzsche as character-must collide with the untenable supposition that the substance of the narrated could coincide with that of the narrating instance. The second feature marking the difference between fiction and factual writing is that peculiar device of extrospection which Cohn, in a previous work of narratology, has called "transparent minds" (Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978]). This is the privilege of the narrator only of fiction, who may report with authority the contents of consciousness of some person other than the narrator. The mind of the other is presented as if it were transparent. …
302 citations
University of Iceland1, Lancaster University2, Royal Institute of Technology3, European Science Foundation4, Stockholm Resilience Centre5, International Social Science Council6, Trinity College, Dublin7, Environmental Change Institute8, École Normale Supérieure9, Charles III University of Madrid10, University of Strasbourg11
TL;DR: In this article, the authors formulate the need for an innovative research agenda based on a careful consideration of the changing human condition as linked to global environmental change, and call for a meaningful research agenda to acknowledge the profound implications of the advent of the Anthropocene epoch.
301 citations
"Reading Mutant Narratives : The Bod..." refers background in this paper
...In criticism, the term has been accused of rendering invisible both the differences within and between human populations (see Palsson et al. 2013, Toivanen & Pelttari 2017) and the nonhuman agency (see Alaimo 2016, 143–168)....
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...…for a change in the ways humans perceive their role in wider ecological and geophysical systems, and have stated that it is in the humanities, arts, and social sciences where this transitory work has to be initiated (e.g. Barnosky & Hadly 2015, Hansen et al. 2016, see also Palsson et al. 2013)....
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Posted Content•
University of Iceland1, Lancaster University2, Royal Institute of Technology3, European Science Foundation4, Stockholm Resilience Centre5, International Social Science Council6, Trinity College, Dublin7, Environmental Change Institute8, École Normale Supérieure9, Charles III University of Madrid10, University of Strasbourg11
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors formulate the need for an innovative research agenda based on a careful consideration of the changing human condition as linked to global environmental change, and call for a meaningful research agenda to acknowledge the profound implications of the advent of the Anthropocene epoch.
Abstract: There is growing recognition that humans are faced with a critical and narrowing window of opportunity to halt or reverse some of the key indicators involved in the environmental crisis. Given human activities' scale and impact, as well as the overly narrow perspectives of environmental research's dominant natural sciences, a major effort is necessary to place the perspectives and insights of the humanities' and social sciences' perspectives and insights at the forefront. Such effort will require developing integrated approaches, projects, and institutions that truly do so. This article's goal is to help mobilize the social sciences and the humanities on the topic of sustainability transitions, but also call for a meaningful research agenda to acknowledge the profound implications of the advent of the Anthropocene epoch. We formulate the need for an innovative research agenda based on a careful consideration of the changing human condition as linked to global environmental change. The humanities and social sciences will need to change and adapt to this pressing, historic task.
297 citations