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digest 2006-04-10 #001.txt
litsci-l-digest Monday, April 10 2006 Volume 01 : Number
159
In this issue:
SUB 06 The "Bad" Patient: Lauren Slaters Lying
sub 06 evolutionary aesthetics of sensuality
SUB 06: Darwinism and its Discontents: Art and Evolutionist
Controversies
SSUB 06 J. Robert Oppenheimer and "Dr. Robert Stadler" in Ayn
Rand's Atlas Shrugged
SUB 06 =?iso-8859-1?b?k1RoZQ==?= Stuff of Future
=?iso-8859-1?b?U3RhcnOUOg==?= Corporeality and Poetics in the Cultural
Flows of Science
SUB06: Vertigo of the Post-anthropocentric Condition
Fwd: Interdisc. Conf. on History of Human Sciences
SUB 06 Seeking 3rd panelist on evolution of emotional/rhetorical
expression
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2006 06:22:22 -0700 (PDT)
From: Elizabeth Donaldson
Subject: SUB 06 The "Bad" Patient: Lauren Slaters Lying
The "Bad" Patient:
Lauren Slater??s Lying
As the public awareness of anti-depressant
medication surged in the 1990s, Lauren Slater??s Prozac Diary
became the quintessential auto-pathography, documenting her life
with major depression and the subsequent alleviation of her
symptoms with the new media-darling wonder-drug Prozac. However,
Slater??s pronounced ambivalence about her Prozac-inspired ?¨cure?Æ
or recovery??like Peter Kramer??s cautions about the ethics of the
ever-increasing medication of people with minor depressive
disorders in Listening to Prozac??was relatively ignored by a
culture swept up by the Prozac enthusiasm. Slater??s later
?¨metaphorical memoir,?Æ Lying, on the other hand, is not so easily
appropriated. A parody of the illness narrative, a pathological
pathography, Lying is the dark sister text of Prozac
Diary--Slater??s subversion of the autobiographical conventions
and imperatives of illness narratives. As such, Lying reveals
the shortcomings of reading practices in medical humanities,
which have often used patient narratives as transparent evidence
of the illness experience. In this model, reading patients??
narratives become moral exercises, ideally fostering empathy and
teaching doctors to practice medicine humanely. Slater??s Lying,
however, is unreliable (some would say unlikable) and
purposefully resists this sort of reading. Slater??s
autobiographical writings, I will argue, force us to recognize
and to rethink the assumptions about the patient and the text
that structure the genre of illness narratives.
Key words: medical humanities??illness narratives??literature and
medicine--autobiography--mental illness
Elizabeth Donaldson
Chair, Interdisciplinary Studies
Assistant Professor, English
New York Institute of Technology
Old Westbury NY 11568
516-686-7712 voice
516-686-7807 fax
edonalds@nyit.edu
- ---------------------------------
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------------------------------
Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2006 11:13:14 -0600 (GMT-06:00)
From: Chris Fields
Subject: sub 06 evolutionary aesthetics of sensuality
Wine, sunshine, and daydreaming: Toward an evolutionary aesthetics of
sensuality
Chris Fields
chrisfields38@earthlink.net
Currently Associate VP Research, New Mexico State University; soon to be
an independent scientist
Keywords: aesthetics, evolution, daydreaming, cognition, sensuality
Nearly everybody puts down daydreaming as a symptom of indolence and
sloth, even meditation teachers. Why then do people do it, and why does
it feel so good? Evolution generally associates positive affect with
activities or experienced outcomes that conferred fitness advantages in
the Pleistocene, such as sex, winning dominance competitions, and eating
lots of sugar and fat. The positive affect associated with daydreaming,
and with the relaxed, sensually appreciative state that often
accompanies it, suggests that these states were beneficial in the deep
past, and that they do not deserve the pious disapproval they generally
receive today.
Daydreams that do not focus on worries, fears, sex, or status tend to
involve relaxed vigilance, wandering attention, and a lack of critical
executive oversight. They do not involve imaginative rehearsals of past
or future events, but rather openness to sensory impressions and
self-generated imagery. Such states combine profound relaxation and
rejuvenation with a subtle sense of excited anticipation similar to that
associated with discovery and artistic creation, and may be the basis of
an evolved aesthetic sense. This view of aesthetics as emerging from
relaxed sensuality contrasts with current theories that attempt to
derive aesthetic preferences from practical Pleistocene concerns.
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------------------------------
Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2006 15:46:14 -0500
From: "Barbara Larson"
Subject: SUB 06: Darwinism and its Discontents: Art and Evolutionist
Controversies
PANEL ABSTRACT: Darwinism and its Discontents: Art and Evolutionist
Controversies
Fae Brauer, The University of New South Wales and Barbara Larson, The
University of West Florida; Co-Chairs
e-mail: faebrauer@aol.com; blarson@uwf.edu
When The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man and Selection in
Relation
to Sex were published, Darwin and his acolytes were animalized in
popular
visual culture as "Monkeyana" while conversely, apes were humanized.
Artists' responses to Darwinism were not dissimilar. In 1859, Emmanuel
Fremiet submitted his sculpture of a gorilla carrying off a woman to the
French salon. Although rejected, when a similar piece was submitted
some
thirty years later, after Darwin's Origin and The Descent of Man had
been
absorbed by mainstream culture, it was not only accepted, but awarded a
medal of honour. Although not a Darwinist himself, in his imaging of
human-ape relations Fremiet was part of a popular current in high and
low
art. While Matthias Duval was conducting his course, Le Darwinisme, at
the
Ecole d'Anthropologie. Albert Besnard was preparing his mural for the
Ecole
de Pharmacie in which Prehistoric Man was portrayed as a transitional
human-ape man. The biblical murderer Cain was depicted by Fine Arts
Academician, Fernand Cormon, as an ape-like caveman. However, in France
Darwinism was discredited in many quarters through the reinstated
evolutionist ideas of Lamarck, and many artists and scientists
discontented
with Darwinism pursued neo-Lamarckian zoological theories of
transformism
which resisted the Darwinist mechanisms of natural selection, sexual
selection, and ultimately "the monkey hypothesis." Those repulsed by
the
possibility of their immediate ancestor being a "hairy, tailed
quadruped"
turned to the pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories of Buffon, Etienne
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Louis Agassiz as well as Erasmus Darwin.
Others disenchanted with the capitalist and colonialist "civilization"
thought to have arisen from the uneven evolution of the human species,
explored "primitivism" and strove to capture a purer, earlier time in
evolutionary history. Elsewhere, with Weismann's discovery of germ
plasm
and the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics, the advent of Galtonian
eugenics,
Ernest Haeckel's "Spartan Selection" and Herbert Spencer's "Survival of
the
Fittest" the concept of "fit" bodies championed as "pure-blooded" had
ramifications in England, America, Third Republic France, and Nazi
Germany,
and art and its relation to evolutionism became more complex. This
complexity also included the anti-evolutionist controversies that
erupted
during the Catholic revival in France and the spread of "creationist"
Evangelicalism in Britain and America, leading to the Tennessee House of
Representatives outlawing the teaching of evolution in 1925 and the
notorious "monkey trial." This session will not just examine art in its
relationship to these aspects of Darwinism and its discontents, but
these
anti-evolutionist controversies in 1925 and the present day.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2006 18:09:25 -0400
From: dashiell
Subject: SSUB 06 J. Robert Oppenheimer and "Dr. Robert Stadler" in Ayn
Rand's Atlas Shrugged
J. Robert Oppenheimer and "Dr. Robert Stadler" in Ayn Rand's Atlas
Shrugged:
Fact and Fiction
In January, 1946, Ayn Rand interviewed J. Robert Oppenheimer as part of
her
research for a film, tentatively titled Top Secret, about the
development of
the atomic bomb. Although she ultimately decided not to complete her
screenplay, she made use of her research when she created the fictional
character of Dr. Robert Stadler for her novel Atlas Shrugged (1957).
Stadler,
who is sometimes called simply "the scientist," is dedicated, brilliant,
and
tormented by moral conflict. In the screenplay Top Secret, "Oppenheimer"
would
have been a hero; in the novel Atlas Shrugged, "Dr. Robert Stadler" was
a
villain. This paper--which makes use of her interview notes, her
projection of
the "Oppenheimer" character in the unproduced screenplay, her notes for
the
character of the scientist in Atlas Shrugged, and the text of the
novel's
depiction of Dr. Robert Stadler--shows how a novelist, in different
texts and
with different purposes, portrayed a scientist, in the context of the
moral
consequences of the ways he chose to use his mind.
Keywords; Oppenheimer, Rand, bomb, cinema, fictional scientist
Shoshana Milgram [Knapp]
Associate Professor of English
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24061
dashiell@vt.edu
SLSA membership number 283061
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------------------------------
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 14:57:07 +0930
From: Lisa McDonald
Subject: SUB 06 =?iso-8859-1?b?k1RoZQ==?= Stuff of Future
=?iso-8859-1?b?U3RhcnOUOg==?= Corporeality and Poetics in the Cultural
Flows of Science
Evolution: Biological, Cultural, and Cosmic, New York, NY, November
9-12, 2006.
Proposal:
?¨The Stuff of Future Stars?Æ: Corporeality and Poetics in the Cultural
Flows of
Science
Abstract:
"Between the lines of prose, or as a shadow in the photographic
negative, the
energies of the everyday world appear as ghosts, as phantom traces that,
although casting a penumbra over the page or photograph, always remain
beyond
the eye" (Chambers, 1994).
Recent writing in the intersections between feminist and science
philosophies
articulates the basis for innovative dialogue between biological science
and the
humanities, what one writer considers an inquiry into ?¨how the
biological
prefigures and makes possible the various permutations of life that
constitute
natural, social, and cultural existence?Æ (Grosz, 2004).
In this paper, I consider the prosthetic contract between bodies and
light in a
recent reprise of Darwin??s ?¨biological resonances,?Æ and explore some
limitations
of the epistemological imagination, the making-do of words in notions of
the
biological body. My interest is in the poetic, or transformative,
momentum
offered by advances in reproductive science and in the quiescent spaces
of its
lived negotiations, the ?¨soma-tones?Æ of imagistic force (Bergson,
1896/1988).
With volatility in mind, then, I ask, ?¨What is the question which seeks
temporality as its answer??Æ
?¨?ñas though to suggest the outside of knowing an image coalesces to a
single
point of light then disappears?ñ?Æ
Key concepts: ecologies, time, ?¨the body,?Æ affect, writing/the
written, cultural
studies/theory
- --
Dr Lisa McDonald
Lecturer, Discipline of Media
School of Humanities
The University of Adelaide
Room 804, Napier Building
North Terrace Campus
Adelaide SA 5005
AUSTRALIA
Ph : +61 8 8303 3807
Fax : +61 8 8303 4341
e-mail: lisa.mcdonald@adelaide.edu.au
http://www.arts.adelaide.edu.au/humanities/media/
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------------------------------
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 04:14:11 -0700 (PDT)
From: Monika Bakke
Subject: SUB06: Vertigo of the Post-anthropocentric Condition
Paper proposal for the panel: On Mutaphobia (Adam
Zaretsky)
Title: Vertigo of the Post-anthropocentric Condition
Abstract:
Post-anthropocentrism exists but it is still a rare
and rather marginalized condition. For some it means
the catastrophic end of the human, for others the
beginning of a new and less lonely species. The
post-anthropocentric mood can be traced in the realm
of art practices and literary, philosophical and
scientific writings, but most unsettling is the
observation of its consequences. Hence most of us
still cannot imagine what it is like to really
perceive a non-human life form as subject. In my
paper, I would like to examine some bio art practices
which while questioning human essentialism explore the
unsettling effects of post-anthropocentric
convictions. The latter can be observed as 1) vertigo
of excess (Bataille) felt confronting the opening up
of endless connections with other life forms, those
already existing and future ones; 2) vertigo of not
knowing (de Certau) evoked by this unprecedented
situation in western culture, and finally 3) vertigo
of voluptuous panic (Caillois) which is experienced by
those anti-essentialist humans who do not believe that
only post-humans could be post-anthropocentric.
Key words:
post-anthropocentrism, bio art, non-human life forms,
anti-essentialism
Monika Bakke, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Philosophy Department
Adam Mickiewicz University
Poznan, Poland
Phone: 48 61 8510 448
bakkemonika@yahoo.com
__________________________________________________
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------------------------------
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 08:45:26 -0400
From: "Wayne Miller"
Subject: Fwd: Interdisc. Conf. on History of Human Sciences
From: Peter Logan peter.logan@temple.edu :
Dear Litsci-l,
Here's an announcement I thought might be of interest to list members.
_________________________________________________________________
"Histories of the Human Sciences: Different Disciplinary Perspectives."
Conference on May 6th, 2006, University of Pennsylvania, sponsored by
the
Department of History and Sociology of Science.
During recent decades, interest in the history of human sciences has
grown
considerably. Research has been undertaken by practitioners of the
human
sciences as well as by historians, and also by scholars in other
discipline=
s.=20
Not surprisingly, scholars have typically addressed their own
disciplinary
audiences. The objective of this conference is to stimulate discussion
=
across
disciplinary boundaries.
Speakers: Matti Bunzl; John Carson; Susan Hegeman;
Barbara Herrnstein Smith; Peter Logan; Philip Mirowski; Jill Morawski; =
Alice
O=C2=92Connor; Leila Zenderland.
Commentators include Elizabeth Lunbeck and George W. Stocking, Jr.
Attendance space is limited. Those interested in attending the
conference
should declare their intention of doing so. Further particulars will be
=
sent
to them. Please send an e-mail message headed =C2=93Conference on May =
6th=C2=94 to
Patricia Johnson, pjohnson@sas.upenn.edu.
- --=20
Henrika Kuklick
History and Sociology of Science
303 Logan Hall
249 South 36th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 14:42:26 -0400
From: Kara Kendall
Subject: SUB 06 Seeking 3rd panelist on evolution of
emotional/rhetorical expression
We are seeking a third presenter for a panel centered on the
(co)evolution and physiology of expression and/or rhetoric. The panel
title has yet to be determined but might be something like one of the
following (depending on where the papers share common ground):
"Darwin, Expression, and the Genres of Scientific Discovery"
"Darwin and the Disciplines: Intersections with Humanities Methods"
"(Co)evolution and the Expression of Emotions"
Individual abstracts are below. If interested, please contact Kara
Kendall
(klkendal@indiana.edu).
Thank you,
Kara Kendall
Associate Instructor
Department of English
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405
Sarah Winter
Assoc. Professor, English, University of Connecticut, Storrs
sarah.winter@uconn.edu
The Physiology of Discourse: Darwin??s The _Expression of the Emotions
in Man and Animals and the Nineteenth-Century Demise of Rhetoric
This talk explores the emergence of a Darwinian evolutionary science of
_expression in the context of the histories of rhetoric and
nineteenth-century theories of race. Charles Darwin??s The _Expression
of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), supersedes a series of
earlier studies of gesture and _expression, including rhetorical
treatises on elocution, manuals of stage acting and physiognomy, and
works of natural philosophy, such as Charles Bell??s The Anatomy and
Philosophy of _Expression (1806), which defined _expression as an
indication of uniquely human intelligence and divine design, based on
examples from art and comparative physiology. Darwin??s study explains
facial expressions as a repertoire of automatic responses resulting
from natural selection and shared with animals. While Darwin??s
argument contradicts the racial differentiation of human forms common
in both aesthetics and physiology by arguing for the universal meaning
of _expression, it also undermines the roles of rhetoric and aesthetics
in defining _expression as a form of discourse. In suggesting that
language is supplemental to instinctive and involuntary modes of
communication, Darwin??s biology of _expression also subordinates the
humanistic to the scientific disciplines, and participates in the
demise of rhetoric as the practical study of the emotive and gestural
forms of communication.
Keywords: Darwin; _expression; rhetoric; race; aesthetics; language;
physiology
Kara Kendall
Assoc. Instructor, English, Indiana University, Bloomington
klkendal@indiana.edu
Of Mongrels and Men: Levinasian Humanism and Human-Dog Coevolution
A central project of Western humanism has been the establishment of a
concrete distinction between humans and nonhumans. But Darwinian
continuity, coupled with a growing body of scientific knowledge of
nonhuman animals and their capacities, renders any universal
distinction tenuous at best. Recent theories of human/canine
coevolution further problematize the category of the humanist subject.
If, as some studies suggest, the human brain has been literally shaped
by the presence of our canine counterparts, then the concept of the
human as an autonomous subject becomes radically unintelligible.
Emmanuel Levinas grapples with this unintelligibility in his essay,
?¨The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights.?Æ This paper explores
Levinas??s
struggle to preserve human uniqueness in light of the evident
?¨humanity?Æ of his canine doppelganger, Bobby. Levinas holds that the
human alone possesses a face which both articulates and recognizes the
commandment, ?¨Thou shalt not kill.?Æ Nevertheless, he seems tempted to
grant that the dog, too, has a face. While others have noted Levinas??s
struggle to preserve his categorical distinction when ?¨thinking of
Bobby,?Æ I argue that it is precisely the (co)evolutionary intimacy of
humans and dogs which enables the mongrel to so thoroughly confound the
face as an ethical category.
Keywords: Levinas; Darwin; coevolution (human/canine); humanist ethics;
expression of emotions; domestication
