Configurations最新文献

Roald Hoffmann’s unsurpassed accomplishments on both sides of the humanities/sciences border (which much of his career has been aimed at demolishing) have been recognized by, inter alia, the 2022 SLSA Lifetime Achievement Award and the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His work spans a wide range of SLSA-related topics: the creative nature of science in general and chemistry in particular, the central role of narrative in scientific investigation and reporting, the nature of the scientific article, the importance of artistic representation for chemistry, and others. He has also written several science-themed plays and an extensive body of poetry, and worked to make chemistry accessible to the nonspecialist. This essay highlights some of his most significant contributions to SLSA’s mission and goals.

What can someone learn, if anything, by reading or writing fiction? If people can gain new knowledge by imagining, of what does that knowledge consist, and how can we characterize it? This reflection on SLSA creative writing sessions approaches these questions by considering the kinds of discussions that can emerge when writers read their work to literary scholars, scientists, and artists. To show how writers differ in their appeals to diverse readers’ sensory imaginations, the essay refers to stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Junot Díaz, and Lauren Groff. The author argues that if artists and scholars can approach each other’s work as alternate but legitimate knowledge-building processes, we may be better equipped to meet the many twenty-first-century challenges we face.

In this paper, we evaluate Serpil Oppermann’s “Storied Seas and Living Metaphors in the Blue Humanities” as a turning point in the theoretical development of ecocriticism. Oppermann’s application of her own theory, material ecocriticism, in the reading of the water bodies that entwine the biological and the textual, situates material-ecocritical undertakings as a landmark of the ecocritical map. The well-known metaphor of the wave, used in explicating the growth of ecocriticism, was replaced by the metaphor of the rhizome in an earlier essay by Oppermann herself. By affirming both metaphors as valid, we argue that Oppermann’s 2019 Configurations essay initiated the fourth wave of ecocriticism and showcased what it means to follow a rhizomatic pattern. In our response, we take Oppermann’s open call to hear the voices of marine creatures as an invitation to explore the limits of the environmental humanities and seek to push our ocularcentric academic borders. Developing a new framework to study the soundscape of the ocean, we intend to literally hear the voices of marine entities (provided to the reader/audience through QR codes) and investigate what kind of new narratives might emerge out of this experience.

This reflection recognizes the diligence of many colleagues and institutions that participated in founding Configurations. Founding the journal came through building on important changes in university education. Its presence enabled research between multiple disciplines and contributed to the emergence of new curricula, degrees, and critical theory. Kate Hayles and Bruno Latour were central in building the vision for the new journal, and they remain a lasting legacy for its future.

This retrospective essay weaves together the reflections of 12 diverse voices on the inclusion of game studies at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) annual meetings. The first game studies stream was organized in 2011 and brought together a series of interdisciplinary scholars, presentations, and panels on video games, virtual worlds, art, storytelling, war, time, platform, and identity. The stream was then and continues now to be a community of graduate students, scholars, developers, teachers, and artists, some of whom have published in Configurations. These are a few of their stories.

We sketch here the background of the founding of what was originally known as the Society for Literature and Science and its first years of operation, with a few comments on some of our early landmarks and some later developments. We thank our colleagues Carol Colatrella, Mark Greenberg, Judith Yaross Lee, Manuela Rossini, and David Porush for their suggestions about our draft. We ask the forbearance of many other colleagues and friends who soon joined these original co-founders but are not named here because of time limitations.

The topic of climate change is epic in every sense of the word. Established conventions of the novel simply may not be equal to the task of representing the enormity of the issues we currently face, and climate change fiction authors are radically refashioning the novel. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future shakes the genre with its innumerable narrators and points of view, nonlinear narratives, radically weakened characterizations, dizzying narrative jolts and spasms, and its wealth of mechanically scripted hard science. In The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh offers a more engaging narrative with a more passive science that listens not only to the data but also to local knowledges. Drawing on the work of Vandana Shiva and Macarena Gómez-Barris and building in the spaces opened up by the 2010 Configurations issue “Ecocriticism and Biology” (one of which has come to be known as “the blue humanities”), this article shows that how we conceptualize science will in large part determine the impact of the narrativization of scientific data on literary genres. Focusing on a facet of “the blue humanities,” this article argues that increasingly, there is serious attention—in both theoretical and fictional work dealing with climate change—to questions about what happens to biological systems and microfauna when aquatic systems are disrupted, to ways in which our oceans are becoming slimy, and to what our responses to this sliming may mean, questions that are vital to how we will proceed and how literary genres will fare.