ABSTRACT:In perhaps unparalleled fashion, the ongoing pandemic has showcased the complex entanglements between science and other fields of society, such as politics and the media. This intricate and often conflictive relationship becomes particularly manifest in the controversies surrounding scientific experts, who have been transformed from science communicators into iconic figures since the outbreak of COVID-19. Accordingly, this article examines two of these “pandemIcons,” the American immunologist Anthony Fauci and the German virologist Christian Drosten, which have functioned as sites of ideological struggle. As this article shows, the cultural negotiation of these iconic figures demonstrates not only how the media have been engaging with images of scientists in Western countries during the COVID-19 pandemic but also how repertoires of (often stereotypical and hegemonic) images and rhetorical strategies employed in the formation and transformation of these figures circulate across both media and national borders.
{"title":"PandemIcons? The Medical Scientist as Iconic Figure in Times of Crisis","authors":"M. Butler, Sina Farzin, M. Fuchs","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0031","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In perhaps unparalleled fashion, the ongoing pandemic has showcased the complex entanglements between science and other fields of society, such as politics and the media. This intricate and often conflictive relationship becomes particularly manifest in the controversies surrounding scientific experts, who have been transformed from science communicators into iconic figures since the outbreak of COVID-19. Accordingly, this article examines two of these “pandemIcons,” the American immunologist Anthony Fauci and the German virologist Christian Drosten, which have functioned as sites of ideological struggle. As this article shows, the cultural negotiation of these iconic figures demonstrates not only how the media have been engaging with images of scientists in Western countries during the COVID-19 pandemic but also how repertoires of (often stereotypical and hegemonic) images and rhetorical strategies employed in the formation and transformation of these figures circulate across both media and national borders.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"435 - 451"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48699089","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 draws a parallel between the anxieties of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the historical context of “nuclear anxiety” (Cordle 2008). Considering Inger Christensen’s 1981 collection Alphabet alongside Jacques Derrida’s work on spectrality, this paper begins to develop a poetics of the pandemic by turning to a poetics of the nuclear, where contamination, recurrence, and dispersal are established as key formal techniques. This poetics of the nuclear, with its textual manifestations of anxiety and contamination, offers us a new lens with which to approach the emerging corpus of pandemic poetry.
{"title":"Toward a Pandemic Poetics: Contamination, Infiltration, and Dispersal in Inger Christensen’s Alphabet","authors":"Hannah Cooper-Smithson","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0029","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This paper draws a parallel between the anxieties of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the historical context of “nuclear anxiety” (Cordle 2008). Considering Inger Christensen’s 1981 collection Alphabet alongside Jacques Derrida’s work on spectrality, this paper begins to develop a poetics of the pandemic by turning to a poetics of the nuclear, where contamination, recurrence, and dispersal are established as key formal techniques. This poetics of the nuclear, with its textual manifestations of anxiety and contamination, offers us a new lens with which to approach the emerging corpus of pandemic poetry.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"405 - 416"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43490033","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}
1 Without long-term university-based research, our current ability to fight the virus with vaccines may not have occurred within such a short time period.2 As Basken’s article makes clear, university departments and researchers often face numerous roadblocks to having their work recognized: funding, name recognition, professional status, and even political or ideological barriers. According to Basken, the fact that Karikó’s role in mRNA was glossed over by Penn illustrates the obstacles that often accompany academic research. Basken writes, “the degree that Penn and others allow [these issues] to come out raises the prospect for academic research of high-profile pressure in key areas of long-standing concern,” which include “the federal funding of basic science, the academies treatment of the lesser privileged, and the structural biases inside governmental and journal peer review practices.” [...]we sought submissions that examined intersections between literature, science, art, and technology, making manifest the journal’s mission to encourage cross-disciplinary conversations.
{"title":"Special Issue: Science, Technology, and Literature during Plague and Pandemics","authors":"Timothy T. Urban, M. Littlefield, R. Sudan","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0026","url":null,"abstract":"1 Without long-term university-based research, our current ability to fight the virus with vaccines may not have occurred within such a short time period.2 As Basken’s article makes clear, university departments and researchers often face numerous roadblocks to having their work recognized: funding, name recognition, professional status, and even political or ideological barriers. According to Basken, the fact that Karikó’s role in mRNA was glossed over by Penn illustrates the obstacles that often accompany academic research. Basken writes, “the degree that Penn and others allow [these issues] to come out raises the prospect for academic research of high-profile pressure in key areas of long-standing concern,” which include “the federal funding of basic science, the academies treatment of the lesser privileged, and the structural biases inside governmental and journal peer review practices.” [...]we sought submissions that examined intersections between literature, science, art, and technology, making manifest the journal’s mission to encourage cross-disciplinary conversations.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"365 - 373"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41988578","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:The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to consider our relations to the atmosphere, as social distancing and masking measures focus our attention on how we might limit viral exposure through our breath. In this article I trace these relations to theorize what I call atmospheric erasure, which refers to the ways that both elements of the atmosphere and groups of people may be rhetorically constructed as removed from or only partially relating to the atmosphere. I consider the repercussions for these erasures by reading the mask as a marker of racialized models of virality and (non)humanity, ultimately arguing that the pandemic focalizes our need to attend to ecological connections and erasures through models of the atmosphere.
{"title":"Breathing in a Pandemic: Covid-19’s Atmospheric Erasures","authors":"Sara DiCaglio","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0027","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to consider our relations to the atmosphere, as social distancing and masking measures focus our attention on how we might limit viral exposure through our breath. In this article I trace these relations to theorize what I call atmospheric erasure, which refers to the ways that both elements of the atmosphere and groups of people may be rhetorically constructed as removed from or only partially relating to the atmosphere. I consider the repercussions for these erasures by reading the mask as a marker of racialized models of virality and (non)humanity, ultimately arguing that the pandemic focalizes our need to attend to ecological connections and erasures through models of the atmosphere.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"375 - 387"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47508780","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}
In the 1960s, Calvin Schwabe, a veterinarian and parasitologist, advocated that human and nonhuman physicians join forces under the term “One Medicine”;and in 2004, the Wildlife Conservation Society published the twelve Manhattan Principles, which formed the basis of the One Health, One World paradigm, including its international, interdisciplinary approach to preventing disease.5 Today, embraced by both the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control, One Health is less an organization than a transdisciplinary, multinational, and multispecies approach to global health. Underwriting this approach is this set of fundamental assumptions: human health is closely and increasingly connected to that of other animals and the environment;as human populations expand, more people are living in close contact with other animals, wild and domestic;as people, animals, and animal products move around the world, diseases spread more quickly;as trade and growing human populations contribute to climate change, they further degrade habitats;and habitat disruptions create even more opportunities for cross-species disease. In 2008, the American Veterinary Association’s One Health Initiative summary emphasized that we are facing “demanding, profound, and unprecedented challenges” associated with a rising demand for dietary animal protein, a loss of biodiversity, and the 75 percent of emerging infectious diseases that are zoonotic.6 In what follows, working in the spirit of One Health, I use an iconic science fiction story—John W. Campbell’s 1938 “Who Goes There?”—to consider what is at stake in cultivating anti-anthropocentrism during pandemic times.7 Published under the name Don A. Stuart, “Who Goes There?” may be familiar to most of you through its multiple film adaptations bearing the title The Thing. 9 Their position relies less on their knowledge of biology or their confidence that the alien is dead than it does on a collective faith in species difference. Because “Who Goes There?” is science fiction, they, of course, quickly turn out to be wrong: the thing comes to life.
{"title":"Aliens, Plagues, One Health, and the Medical Posthumanities","authors":"Lucinda Cole","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0032","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1960s, Calvin Schwabe, a veterinarian and parasitologist, advocated that human and nonhuman physicians join forces under the term “One Medicine”;and in 2004, the Wildlife Conservation Society published the twelve Manhattan Principles, which formed the basis of the One Health, One World paradigm, including its international, interdisciplinary approach to preventing disease.5 Today, embraced by both the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control, One Health is less an organization than a transdisciplinary, multinational, and multispecies approach to global health. Underwriting this approach is this set of fundamental assumptions: human health is closely and increasingly connected to that of other animals and the environment;as human populations expand, more people are living in close contact with other animals, wild and domestic;as people, animals, and animal products move around the world, diseases spread more quickly;as trade and growing human populations contribute to climate change, they further degrade habitats;and habitat disruptions create even more opportunities for cross-species disease. In 2008, the American Veterinary Association’s One Health Initiative summary emphasized that we are facing “demanding, profound, and unprecedented challenges” associated with a rising demand for dietary animal protein, a loss of biodiversity, and the 75 percent of emerging infectious diseases that are zoonotic.6 In what follows, working in the spirit of One Health, I use an iconic science fiction story—John W. Campbell’s 1938 “Who Goes There?”—to consider what is at stake in cultivating anti-anthropocentrism during pandemic times.7 Published under the name Don A. Stuart, “Who Goes There?” may be familiar to most of you through its multiple film adaptations bearing the title The Thing. 9 Their position relies less on their knowledge of biology or their confidence that the alien is dead than it does on a collective faith in species difference. Because “Who Goes There?” is science fiction, they, of course, quickly turn out to be wrong: the thing comes to life.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"453 - 467"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46015620","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:Pandemics are media events in that they reveal the hidden materialities of influence that shape the connections among bodies embedded in wider ecological and technocultural systems. Examining the relationship between communicable disease and communication networks, this article offers an analysis of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) and Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984), two American novels that focus on subjectivities in flux and radically exposed to the forces of their material-semiotic environment. Drawing on insights from elemental media theory, cybernetics, and ecocriticism, I illustrate how coming to terms with the specter of pandemics entails a critical awareness of physical communication infrastructures.
{"title":"Media Exposure: Communicable Disease and Communication Networks in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Don DeLillo’s White Noise","authors":"M. Ingwersen","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0030","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Pandemics are media events in that they reveal the hidden materialities of influence that shape the connections among bodies embedded in wider ecological and technocultural systems. Examining the relationship between communicable disease and communication networks, this article offers an analysis of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) and Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984), two American novels that focus on subjectivities in flux and radically exposed to the forces of their material-semiotic environment. Drawing on insights from elemental media theory, cybernetics, and ecocriticism, I illustrate how coming to terms with the specter of pandemics entails a critical awareness of physical communication infrastructures.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"417 - 433"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42835587","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 Monster Theory Reader ed. by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (review)","authors":"Cody Jones","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0023","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"356 - 358"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42242665","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 discuss the interplay between human and nonhuman realities in Shaun Tan’s collection of stories Tales from Outer Suburbia. Although recent discussions of children’s literature take into account the mesh of human and nonhuman elements in several classic and contemporary examples of children’s literature, studies addressing Tan’s works tend to focus more on their political and social aspects, ignoring thus their intense engagement with the nonhuman. By discussing the interconnectedness between human and nonhuman realities in Tan’s stories, I argue that children’s literature can be a powerful tool to engage with debates in the posthumanities concerning our relation to nonhuman animals and to objects. Moreover, whereas such theoretical debates generally tend to keep separate analyses of human-animal and human-objects interaction, I show that literary work such as Tan’s can help us draw connections between the two areas of inquiry and thus offer new directions for philosophical and scientific research.
{"title":"The Interplay of Human and Nonhuman Realities in Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia","authors":"Andrei Ionescu","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0019","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In this article I discuss the interplay between human and nonhuman realities in Shaun Tan’s collection of stories Tales from Outer Suburbia. Although recent discussions of children’s literature take into account the mesh of human and nonhuman elements in several classic and contemporary examples of children’s literature, studies addressing Tan’s works tend to focus more on their political and social aspects, ignoring thus their intense engagement with the nonhuman. By discussing the interconnectedness between human and nonhuman realities in Tan’s stories, I argue that children’s literature can be a powerful tool to engage with debates in the posthumanities concerning our relation to nonhuman animals and to objects. Moreover, whereas such theoretical debates generally tend to keep separate analyses of human-animal and human-objects interaction, I show that literary work such as Tan’s can help us draw connections between the two areas of inquiry and thus offer new directions for philosophical and scientific research.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"267 - 287"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48636998","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":"Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction by David Farrier (review)","authors":"B. Platt","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0024","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"358 - 361"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43268596","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:With an especial focus on Endgame, the author demonstrates how a number of Beckett’s works exhibit a strong affinity with ideas put forth by quantum physicists in the early twentieth century. Many of Beckett’s novels present a failure of ontology and depict elements of discontinuity that appear to be in direct conversation with discoveries in the subatomic universe, and these ideas culminate in his later play. The author argues that parody becomes a key component in Beckett’s conception of new form, and that he uses it to undermine traditional ways of ordering the universe, including humanist, religious, and empirical conceptions and beliefs. In their place, Beckett creates a world for his characters that embodies Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Niels Bohr’s theory of complementarity.
{"title":"Quantum Theory and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame","authors":"P. Brown","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0018","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:With an especial focus on Endgame, the author demonstrates how a number of Beckett’s works exhibit a strong affinity with ideas put forth by quantum physicists in the early twentieth century. Many of Beckett’s novels present a failure of ontology and depict elements of discontinuity that appear to be in direct conversation with discoveries in the subatomic universe, and these ideas culminate in his later play. The author argues that parody becomes a key component in Beckett’s conception of new form, and that he uses it to undermine traditional ways of ordering the universe, including humanist, religious, and empirical conceptions and beliefs. In their place, Beckett creates a world for his characters that embodies Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Niels Bohr’s theory of complementarity.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"241 - 265"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45938706","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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