Gloss on Charles Darwin: Conservative Messiah? On Joseph Carroll’s Literary Darwinism
Stefanie Boese
August 1, 2009
P:nth-child(8)
A decade ago, Laura Dassow Walls already critiqued the colonization of the humanities by one marginal branch of the sciences and specifically E.O. Wilson’s tendency to reduce complex issues to evolutionary history. Her essay “Consilience Revisited” is available here.
Gloss on Beyond Representation: Deliberate Reading in a Panarchic World
Stefanie Boese
August 1, 2009
P:nth-child(21)
Bruce Clarke’s review of Joseph Carroll’s Literary Darwinism similarly challenges the Neo Darwinists’ supposed scientific objectivity. Their project can only fail to see beyond the category of the human precisely because the circularity of their argument presupposes that which it seeks to analyze: “the only scientific observers of ‘human nature’ available are themselves human beings.”
Gloss on Beyond Representation: Deliberate Reading in a Panarchic World
Stefanie Boese
August 1, 2009
P:nth-child(20)
Laura Dassow Walls’ call for ‘deliberative’ reading practices echo her earlier critique of E.O. Wilson’s notion of ‘consilience’. Here Walls argues, Wilson’s attempt to forge an alliance between the sciences and the humanities fails because “Wilson writes as a scientist, imbuing every page with the sublime authority that allows him to mangle history without penalty and dismiss his opponents without argument.”
Gloss on Global Warming, Globalization, and Environmental Literary History
Brian Lennon
May 4, 2009
P:nth-child(10)
Ursula K. Heise makes a consonant argument in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford UP, 2008), which looks at (among other dimensions of the evolution of ecocritical thought itself) the dynamic tension through which the globalist-environmentalist thought of the 1960s-70s propelled itself forward in tension with the U.S American line of antimodernist environmentalist and ecocritical localism.
Gloss on Global Warming, Globalization, and Environmental Literary History
Brian Lennon
May 4, 2009
P:nth-child(14)
Still, all this might require imagining a methodology which, beyond marking positive connective relations between positive (visible) figures (Thoreau and Commandante Marcos), however far flung from each other, sees in “deep time” (the cue taken from Dimock’s work, below) the figure of erasure that any insurgent self-critical project of Euro-Atlantic modernity itself—such as a renovated ecocritical or any other criticism—must also face. We mustn’t forget, perhaps, that there is no properly “global scale” for comparison: “the globe” is a circumscriptive figure, in equal or greater measure as… continue
Gloss on Global Warming, Globalization, and Environmental Literary History
Brian Lennon
May 4, 2009
P:nth-child(9)
There is perhaps nothing in either R/romanticism or neo-Romanticism that requires identification with critical naivete and ignorance, here, or with necessarily less theoretically sophisticated approaches than the alternatives to be proposed in what follows. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that R/romanticism is in fact the best name for that “masocritical” insurgency, undertaken from within the Erinnerung of Euro-Atlantic modernity, which, in its preservation of a figure of strong and even incommensurable “local” difference, stands the best chance of contacting the opposition traced by… continue
Gloss on Tom LeClair’s Passing Trilogy: Recovering Adventure in the Age of Post-Genre
April 2, 2009
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Passing On’s bleak climactic scene provides the starting point for Stephen Schryer’s essay on LeClair’s fiction.
Gloss on Electronic Literature: Where Is It?
February 17, 2009
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A provocative question. I would add to it also the question: “Who are we in relation to it?” Otherwise put, after the cyborg and the posthuman, is there a way of thinking subjectivity that is commensurate with e-lit? Is e-lit intelligible to us? If not, how could it be? Mark Poster briefly and obliquely considers such questions in Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines (Durham: Duke UP, 2006).
Gloss on Locating the Literary in New Media
Dave Ciccoricco
February 9, 2009
P:nth-child(24)
Indeed, the technology of the telegraph and its institutions are with us today, though no longer under Western Union’s name, which suspended the service indefinitely in 2006. Today, there are a handful of companies that will do you a telegram (some arriving after Western Union’s departure), to some extent revisioning its role as a priority messaging system with a touch of old world charm. (In New Zealand, business clients can have a courier-delivered telegram for the primary purpose of debt recovery). These services are arguably vestigial, banking off nostalgia more than anything else. But fro… continue
Gloss on Electronic Literature: Where Is It?
Dave Ciccoricco
February 5, 2009
P:nth-child(13)
Though this suggestion may set up a misleading comparison (not to mention that moving from ‘if’ – ‘potential’ – to ‘when’ oversteps the mark). Clearly, video games are gaining what we can understand as literary sophistication, in particular those described by Juul as “coherent world” games. But there’s no reason to think that this sort of literary game is on course to subsume the non-literary variety (for lack of a better binary pair). After all, there will always be books and video games that occupy opposite sides of a literary continuum, so it is difficult to see what is actually being compa… continue