{"title":"Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater by Melody Jue (review)","authors":"Pujita Guha","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"353 - 356"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44078511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This paper examines the state of utopianism in the early years of the twenty-first century. Many of history’s most memorable utopias have represented compelling alternatives to the status quo. However, this paper draws on utopian scholarship to theorize a millennial utopianism that has been absorbed by the neoliberal, free-market status quo—especially the contemporary “innovation economy,” its corporate branding, and its “multicultural” marketing rhetoric— which has co-opted the language of past revolutionaries. This discussion takes place through the lens of Colson Whitehead’s novel Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), which critiques this pseudo-utopianism in favor of a more progressive alternative.
摘要：本文考察了21世纪初乌托邦主义的现状。历史上许多最令人难忘的乌托邦都代表了对现状的令人信服的替代。然而，本文利用乌托邦学术理论，将千禧年的乌托邦主义理论化，这种乌托邦主义已经被新自由主义、自由市场的现状所吸收，尤其是当代的“创新经济”、企业品牌和“多元文化”营销修辞，这些都采用了过去革命者的语言。这场讨论是通过科尔森·怀特黑德的小说《Apex Hides the Hurt》（2006）的镜头进行的，该小说批评了这种伪乌托邦主义，支持更进步的替代方案。
{"title":"Branded Communities: Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt and the Struggle for Utopia in the New Millennium","authors":"Mark A. Tabone","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0021","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This paper examines the state of utopianism in the early years of the twenty-first century. Many of history’s most memorable utopias have represented compelling alternatives to the status quo. However, this paper draws on utopian scholarship to theorize a millennial utopianism that has been absorbed by the neoliberal, free-market status quo—especially the contemporary “innovation economy,” its corporate branding, and its “multicultural” marketing rhetoric— which has co-opted the language of past revolutionaries. This discussion takes place through the lens of Colson Whitehead’s novel Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), which critiques this pseudo-utopianism in favor of a more progressive alternative.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"321 - 351"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49313871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This paper proposes a theoretical framework for the scientific romance as a thought experiment. Following Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s account of the rise of experimentation as a collective practice that can occur either physically or in the virtual space of print, it suggests that scientific romance is such a “laboratory of the mind’s eye.” With the rise of industrialization in the nineteenth century, technoscience drastically reshaped human life and became a collective concern; drawing a parallel between two collective virtual spaces newly constituted through print at this moment—the imagined community of the nation and the imaginary spaces of fiction—it argues that the scientific romance emerged in this period as a collective virtual laboratory for the nation to interrogate the role of techno-science in its shared life. Using Jules Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages as a case study, I suggest that his adoption of scientific discourses positions his novels as experimental records that document examinations of the social effects of technoscience within a virtual laboratory. I then read Verne’s 1886 novel Robur the Conqueror as a manifesto in favor of just such a model of collective experimentation.
{"title":"The Laboratory of the Mind’s Eye: Scientific Romance as Thought Experiment and Jules Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages","authors":"Anastasia Klimchynskaya","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0020","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This paper proposes a theoretical framework for the scientific romance as a thought experiment. Following Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s account of the rise of experimentation as a collective practice that can occur either physically or in the virtual space of print, it suggests that scientific romance is such a “laboratory of the mind’s eye.” With the rise of industrialization in the nineteenth century, technoscience drastically reshaped human life and became a collective concern; drawing a parallel between two collective virtual spaces newly constituted through print at this moment—the imagined community of the nation and the imaginary spaces of fiction—it argues that the scientific romance emerged in this period as a collective virtual laboratory for the nation to interrogate the role of techno-science in its shared life. Using Jules Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages as a case study, I suggest that his adoption of scientific discourses positions his novels as experimental records that document examinations of the social effects of technoscience within a virtual laboratory. I then read Verne’s 1886 novel Robur the Conqueror as a manifesto in favor of just such a model of collective experimentation.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"289 - 320"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41470548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Scientific Imagination: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives ed. by Arnon Levy and Peter Godfrey-Smith (review)","authors":"Paul Driskill","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0015","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"233 - 235"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/con.2021.0015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48042738","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
might be even “more beneficial than inviting them to observe how the mechanism operates” (p. 277). In some instances, the heuristic value of imaginative processes seems to outweigh even direct observation. James Clerk Maxwell’s “explicitly fictionalist move” (p. 4) to use “an ‘imaginary’ fluid in his study of lines of force” (p. 156) or his famous demon (p. 324) drove contemporary understandings of unobservable properties of physical systems. Similarly, Einstein used penetrating but simple thought experiments to illustrate complex physical facts. Throughout The Scientific Imagination, authors continually demonstrate the newness and vitality of their focus on the subject of the collection’s title. References to earlier research seldom reach back more than 30 years, and authors frequently cite their own earlier work and the earlier work of other authors in the collection. As many of the authors acknowledge, attention to the imagination’s role in fiction is (relatively speaking) new and evolving. One thing that seems crucial to the topic, however, is the interdisciplinarity required to address the issue. Although this collection was written chiefly by philosophers, psychologists, and historians of science, it speaks to readers from a diversity of disciplines. Scientists (be they physicists, biologists, or engineers) and students would do well to interrogate their own thinking and their own imaginative processes as they endeavor to produce quantitative, objective knowledge about the world. With this in mind, this collection might be productively read alongside primary historical texts like John Tyndall’s “The Scientific Use of the Imagination” (1870) and John F. W. Herschel’s A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831). More recent works such as The Scientific Imagination (1998) by Gerald Holton, and Objectivity (2007) by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, also offer interesting contexts for thinking through this collection.
{"title":"Climate and Literature ed. by Adeline Johns-Putra (review)","authors":"J. Labinger","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0014","url":null,"abstract":"might be even “more beneficial than inviting them to observe how the mechanism operates” (p. 277). In some instances, the heuristic value of imaginative processes seems to outweigh even direct observation. James Clerk Maxwell’s “explicitly fictionalist move” (p. 4) to use “an ‘imaginary’ fluid in his study of lines of force” (p. 156) or his famous demon (p. 324) drove contemporary understandings of unobservable properties of physical systems. Similarly, Einstein used penetrating but simple thought experiments to illustrate complex physical facts. Throughout The Scientific Imagination, authors continually demonstrate the newness and vitality of their focus on the subject of the collection’s title. References to earlier research seldom reach back more than 30 years, and authors frequently cite their own earlier work and the earlier work of other authors in the collection. As many of the authors acknowledge, attention to the imagination’s role in fiction is (relatively speaking) new and evolving. One thing that seems crucial to the topic, however, is the interdisciplinarity required to address the issue. Although this collection was written chiefly by philosophers, psychologists, and historians of science, it speaks to readers from a diversity of disciplines. Scientists (be they physicists, biologists, or engineers) and students would do well to interrogate their own thinking and their own imaginative processes as they endeavor to produce quantitative, objective knowledge about the world. With this in mind, this collection might be productively read alongside primary historical texts like John Tyndall’s “The Scientific Use of the Imagination” (1870) and John F. W. Herschel’s A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831). More recent works such as The Scientific Imagination (1998) by Gerald Holton, and Objectivity (2007) by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, also offer interesting contexts for thinking through this collection.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"235 - 237"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/con.2021.0014","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44600802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:In this article, I provide a media archaeology of keystroke dynamics, a contemporary biometric that identifies users by their typing patterns. In particular, I compare keystroke dynamics to nineteenth-century graphology by way of Alphonse Bertillon, who argues that each person's handwriting is unique and thus suitable for identification purposes. Though the two biometrics analyze different kinds of writing, I argue that graphology and keystroke dynamics are in three ways permutations of each other: they both assume that writing patterns are "natural" and thus immutable; they understand writing as a discrete phenomenon and have similar technical structures; and they are classified as behavioral biometrics that are haunted by the physiological. I suggest that the social and technical similarities between the two biometrics stem from the fact that they both measure and analyze handwriting, a term that describes all kinds of writing involving the hand, including penmanship, typewriting, and keyboarding.
{"title":"Writing as Biometric: The Case of Graphology and Keystroke Dynamics","authors":"Akrish Adhikari","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0010","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In this article, I provide a media archaeology of keystroke dynamics, a contemporary biometric that identifies users by their typing patterns. In particular, I compare keystroke dynamics to nineteenth-century graphology by way of Alphonse Bertillon, who argues that each person's handwriting is unique and thus suitable for identification purposes. Though the two biometrics analyze different kinds of writing, I argue that graphology and keystroke dynamics are in three ways permutations of each other: they both assume that writing patterns are \"natural\" and thus immutable; they understand writing as a discrete phenomenon and have similar technical structures; and they are classified as behavioral biometrics that are haunted by the physiological. I suggest that the social and technical similarities between the two biometrics stem from the fact that they both measure and analyze handwriting, a term that describes all kinds of writing involving the hand, including penmanship, typewriting, and keyboarding.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"155 - 178"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/con.2021.0010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41993875","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England by Julie Orlemanski (review)","authors":"Aylin Malcolm","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0016","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"19 11","pages":"231 - 233"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/con.2021.0016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41276150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Understanding real-time as an orientation toward the present and its documentation as opposed to a concrete (digitally determined) technological affordance, this article locates real-time in the burgeoning photographic tabloid culture of 1930s Britain. It traces how technical innovations in information transmission and circulation during the interwar years impacted the circuits between readers and their "real life" environment. Moreover, by engaging with Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies (1930), a text strung between novel and tabloid supplement, it suggests how real-time's newly habituated, melancholic modes of reading might push individuals to stand by in the face of individual pain and mass violence.
{"title":"The Passing Hour: 1930s Real-Time, Vile Bodies, and the Ethics of Reading","authors":"A. Greene","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Understanding real-time as an orientation toward the present and its documentation as opposed to a concrete (digitally determined) technological affordance, this article locates real-time in the burgeoning photographic tabloid culture of 1930s Britain. It traces how technical innovations in information transmission and circulation during the interwar years impacted the circuits between readers and their \"real life\" environment. Moreover, by engaging with Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies (1930), a text strung between novel and tabloid supplement, it suggests how real-time's newly habituated, melancholic modes of reading might push individuals to stand by in the face of individual pain and mass violence.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"119 - 154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/con.2021.0009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43935539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This article examines a discourse about computer-generated planets that emerged in the 1980s, just as computer graphics practitioners became interested in what they called the "simulation of natural phenomena." These graphics engineers helped to develop standards of realism and methods for modeling and simulation that were supported by a science-fictional version of mimesis, with realism as an extension of, rather than a reproduction of, reality. Through the computer-generated imagery of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and 2010: The Year We Make Contact, and illustrations by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, I show how representations of planets were prethematized by science fiction stories about planets being "grown." This influenced scholarly conversations about particle systems, fractal landscapes, and other procedurally generated graphical simulation methods, and helped to authorize an epistemology combining physical and "visual"—that is, non-physics-based—simulation as a means of getting closer to the realistic rendering of natural phenomena.
{"title":"Genesis Effects: Growing Planets in 1980s Computer Graphics","authors":"K. Buse","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0012","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article examines a discourse about computer-generated planets that emerged in the 1980s, just as computer graphics practitioners became interested in what they called the \"simulation of natural phenomena.\" These graphics engineers helped to develop standards of realism and methods for modeling and simulation that were supported by a science-fictional version of mimesis, with realism as an extension of, rather than a reproduction of, reality. Through the computer-generated imagery of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and 2010: The Year We Make Contact, and illustrations by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, I show how representations of planets were prethematized by science fiction stories about planets being \"grown.\" This influenced scholarly conversations about particle systems, fractal landscapes, and other procedurally generated graphical simulation methods, and helped to authorize an epistemology combining physical and \"visual\"—that is, non-physics-based—simulation as a means of getting closer to the realistic rendering of natural phenomena.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"201 - 230"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/con.2021.0012","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47861859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:Reading the transmedial oeuvre of Michael Joyce, this essay traces shifts in literary culture—and, potentially, the literary imagination—in the digital era. Using John Cayley's theorizing on digital language art as a critical intertext, I view Joyce's ambivalent place in digital-literary studies through the figure of the portal, which serves equally in his writing as a mode of escape and confinement. Against more common reception narratives for Joyce, I suggest that his putative "hypertextuality" is incidental rather than integral to his poetics, serving as just another mode of seeing into, and moving through, moments of imaginative experience.
{"title":"Through the Portal, and What Michael Joyce Found There","authors":"David Ciccoricco","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0011","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Reading the transmedial oeuvre of Michael Joyce, this essay traces shifts in literary culture—and, potentially, the literary imagination—in the digital era. Using John Cayley's theorizing on digital language art as a critical intertext, I view Joyce's ambivalent place in digital-literary studies through the figure of the portal, which serves equally in his writing as a mode of escape and confinement. Against more common reception narratives for Joyce, I suggest that his putative \"hypertextuality\" is incidental rather than integral to his poetics, serving as just another mode of seeing into, and moving through, moments of imaginative experience.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"179 - 199"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/con.2021.0011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48071749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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