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digest 2006-04-14 #003.txt
litsci-l-digest Friday, April 14 2006 Volume 01 :
Number 165
In this issue:
SUB 06: Social Darwinism and the Limits of the Literary Imagination
SUB 06: Diversity and Speciation in the Sestina: Mapping the
Evolution of a Literary Form
SUB 06: Should Feminists Clone? A Feminist Methodology for
"Re-directed" Evolution
Sub06: Unnatural Selection: Animal Death and the Struggle for
Ethics
SUB 06 - "The Stranger's Eyes:" Telegonic Transference in Ibsen's
"The Lady from the Sea"
SUB 06: AfroFuturisms (panel / stream)
SUB 06: Intelligent design does not contradict Neodarwinian logic
SUB 06: The Revolution and Evolution of Flash-ing Literature: Bob
Browns Readies and Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries
SUB 06: "Queer Diagrammatics: The Unmeasurable, Unmappable
Geometries of Queer Discursive Space."
SUB 06: The Survivalist Rhetoric of Literary Innovation
SUB 06 - "Water, Sex, and Noise: The (Meta)physics of Listening in
Germany, circa 1800"
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2006 18:48:07 +0000
From: "Mark Schiebe"
Subject: SUB 06: Social Darwinism and the Limits of the Literary
Imagination
Paper proposal: Social Darwinism and the
Limits of the Literary Imagination: The Case of Stephen Crane
Submitted by: Mark Schiebe, Ph.D. Candidate,
CUNY Graduate Center
This paper proposes to revisit Stephen Crane??s
first novel, Maggie, Girl of the Streets, focusing on the
author??s unique incorporation of the philosophy of Social
Darwinism, prevalent in American intellectual discourse during
the last quarter of the 19th Century. Crane??s engagement with
Naturalism (the literary movement influenced by Emile Zola, and
bringing to bear the principles of Social Darwinism as expounded
by Herbert Spencer), I will argue, raises the question of the
efficacy of literature, in general, to realistically imagine and
objectively depict the social and biological determinism of
Spencer and his apologists.
My reading of Crane??s Maggie, following in the wake
of Michael Davitt Bell??s revisionist reading of Crane in The
Problem of
American Realism, will attempt to show that this novel,
considered by most commentators to be Crane??s most naturalistic,
in fact makes use of formal naturalistic strategies in order to
hollow them out from the inside. That is, in this seemingly
objective depiction
of Maggie??s fatalistic progression from the tenement slums of New
York??s Lower East Side into a life of prostitution, Crane, by
deliberately cultivating a style that calls attention to itself,
subverts the two key assumptions which would lend credence to a
naturalistic rendering of the life of the abject poor: 1) the
explanatory authority of the outside observer and 2) the notion
that the brute ?¨Other?Æ of the streets is raw ?¨reality,?Æ
unmediated by style.
By distancing himself from the narrator (who occupies the
position of the
objective observer)
Crane??s novel affirms its status as a fiction critiquing
objective, journalistic renderings of social determinism, rather
than a work of Naturalism affording a privileged place for the
work of a Zolean ?¨experimental?Æ scientist-novelist.
Key Words: Stephen Crane, Naturalism, Zola,
Social Darwinism, literature and
epistemology
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2006 14:48:55 -0400
From: Matt Rowe
Subject: SUB 06: Diversity and Speciation in the Sestina: Mapping
the Evolution of a Literary Form
SLSA Abstract Submission, NYC 2006
"Diversity and Speciation in the Sestina: Mapping the Evolution
of a
Literary Form"
keywords: memetics, distant reading, poetic form, sestina,
botany,
cultivation, hybridity, Oulipo
The histories of cultural forms are typically approached as the
consequences of intersecting economic, social, linguistic, and
other
factors. The forms themselves are labeled after the fact in
virtue of
some family resemblance, allowing scholars to treat them as
coherent
slices through temporal strata. The strict forms of structured
verse
can be identified definitively, suggesting an alternative
perspective: tracing the genetic, or memetic, code guiding the
development of individual poems. The memetic view offers
compelling
interpretive paradigms for "distant reading."
The sestina, a permutational form par excellence, was first
isolated
as a species by Arnaut Daniel in the late 12th century. Petrarch
developed the first durable cultivars, which were raised
successfully
across southern Europe. Around 1500, Sannazaro crossed the
sestina
with the pastoral, and this hybrid was transplanted to England by
Sidney and Spenser. The cultivation of sestinas fell out of
fashion,
but at the end of the 20th century, the French Oulipo group
proposed
re-engineering the sestina meme itself. Queneau and Roubaud's
work
alters the number of permuted elements; Jouet adapts a variant
meme
to a prose environment. It remains to be seen whether these
experiments will find suitable niches and thus signal new
speciation:
literary evolution at work.
Matt Rowe
Comparative Literature, Indiana University
morowe@indiana.edu
(Possible panel with Laura Amodeo, U of Toronto, on Calvino and
mathematical play--anyone for a third?)
- -
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------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2006 11:49:38 -0700
From: Deboleena Roy
Subject: SUB 06: Should Feminists Clone? A Feminist Methodology
for "Re-directed" Evolution
Name: Deboleena Roy
Paper Title: Should Feminists Clone? A Feminist Methodology for
"Re-directed" Evolution
This paper can be linked to papers by Valerie Hartouni and Maria
Aline Ferreira
Abstract:
Most in vitro directed evolution processes involve a molecular
engineering technology referred to as subcloning. As a feminist
scientist, I attempt to conduct an experiment in "re-directed"
evolution by transposing a feminist methodology into the natural
sciences. I aim to contribute to the growing field of feminist
theory in science and address the needs of feminist scientists
who
are left, for the most part, on their own to deal with
anxiety-producing dilemmas in the lab and in their everyday
scientific research activities. Furthermore, by using the
molecular
biology technique of subcloning as a trope for this feminist
methodology in science, I attempt to make sense out of my own
anxiety-producing dilemma "Should Feminists Clone?" and arrive at
some partial answers. For somewhere in the process of forward
and
backward movements between Chela Sandoval's Methodology of the
Oppressed, lesbian science fiction, stem cells, PCR machines,
Superman and designer kittens, I believe that subcloning can
emerge
as a new feminist methodology in science that will allow the
feminist
scientist to address her dilemmas and continue to contribute to
the
creation of new scientific knowledges.
Keywords: molecular biology, feminist theory, genetics,
technoscience, science fiction
Contact: Deboleena Roy
San Diego State University
droy@mail.sdsu.edu
- --
Deboleena Roy, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Women's Studies Department
San Diego State University
5500 Campanile Drive
San Diego, CA 92182-8138
Phone (619) 594-7146 Fax (619) 594-5218
droy@mail.sdsu.edu
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2006 12:15:51 -0700
From: Kari Weil
Subject: Sub06: Unnatural Selection: Animal Death and the
Struggle for Ethics
Unnatural Selection: Animal Death and the Struggle for Ethics
The recent interest in animals, and in animal death in
particular, =20
accompanies a turn at once ethical and counter-linguistic in
literary =20=
studies. Killing, as the Animal Studies Group reminds us, is
the =20
most widespread form of interaction with animals and the act is
=20
largely invisible. Why? What is revealed when that act is made
=20
visible, brought before our eyes, and in what language does that
=20
revelation take place? This paper will compare three scenes of
=20
animal death from three contemporary authors: Temple Grandin,
=20
Coetzee and Cixous, in which the technology of death appears to
=20
reveal what Georgio Agamben calls =93bare life=94--a zone of =20
indeterminacy between human and animal. Language falters in
that =20
experience of bare life which is at once abject and sublime, a
moment =20=
of apparent ethical intensity and potential for shared life
forms. =20
But what weight does that unspeakable ethics have? How does it
=20
affect the meaning of killing in each instance, and affect the
=20
politics that establishes man as the political sovereign,
authorized =20
to end the life of an other.
Key words: human-animal relations, life, death, technology
Kari Weil
Chair, Critical Studies
California College of the Arts
5212 Broadway at College
Oakland, CA 94618
510 594-3722
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------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2006 15:46:44 -0400
From: ss509@columbia.edu
Subject: SUB 06 - "The Stranger's Eyes:" Telegonic Transference
in Ibsen's "The Lady from the Sea"
Name: Shilarna Stokes
Paper Title: ?¨The Stranger??s Eyes:?Æ Telegonic Transference in
Ibsen??s "The Lady from the Sea"
Defined by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle in Anomalies and
Curiosities of Medicine (1896), telegony refers to ?¨those
doubtful
instances in which the offspring is said to resemble, not the
father but an earlier mate of the mother.?Æ This paper
investigates
Henrik Ibsen??s 1888 play, ?¨The Lady from the Sea,?Æ arguing that,
despite telegony??s ambiguous place in 19th century evolutionary
discourse, and because of its similarity to other ?¨occult?Æ
devices
within the play, the instance of telegonic transference that
occurs
between Ellida and The Stranger in ?¨The Lady from the Sea?Æ
serves
both to interrupt and to reimagine biological and narrative
linearity, thus opening a space for a critique of patriarchal
order, marriage, and patterns of heterosexual domesticity.
Moreover, because in this case the ?¨mother?Æ and the ?¨earlier
mate?Æ
are also mermaid and merman (perhaps), the emergence of telegony
in
the play allows for the reemergence of a disavowed evolutionary
past: the life of the sea. Through this reevocation, the play
offers both an alternative to and a critique of the evolutionary
narrative in which adaptation to life on land is regarded as a
mark
of the species?? progress.
Keywords: telegony, drama, narrative, 19th century, occultism,
heredity, marriage, domesticity
Shilarna Stokes
Dept. of English and Comparative Literature, Theatre Subcommittee
Columbia University, New York
Email: Ss509@columbia.edu
- -
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------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2006 15:43:22 -0400
From: "tobias c. van Veen [McGill]"
Subject: SUB 06: AfroFuturisms (panel / stream)
**Open for submissions. Recent work posted here in Science
Fiction welcome!
Negative Evolution: AfroFuturisms*
STREAM: Music/Sound/Noise of EBR.com [moderator Trace Reddell]
=======
"Futurism" is often associated with the 20th Century's Italian
and Russian
avant-garde, and with ambiguously fascist and communist
approaches to
imagining futurity and technology respectively. Are there other
futurisms
and has futurism evolved - or critically devolved - from these
influential
perspectives? A complex relation to these earlier "futurisms" is
found in
"AfroFuturism." AfroFuturism loosely articulates a broad spectrum
of
practices, discourses and philosophies - literature, music,
science,
writing, politics - tied to the technological imaginaries of the
black
diasporia and, significantly, beyond. This panel invites
submissions from
various scholars working in questions of (Afro)futurisms,
including but not
limited to:
- - AfroFuturisms: sonic, cyborg, cybernetic
- - (Afro)Futurisms in literature (Samuel R. Delaney, Octavia
Butler)
- - discourses of the alien (Sun Ra, Underground Resistance)
- - sonic futurisms (acid house, electro, Detroit techno,
jungle...)
- - hip-hop (Rammellzee, Kool Keith)
- - discourses of the mothership, alien race & the programmers
- - sampladelic narratology and double-consciousness
- - AfroFuturist writing: Kodwo Eshun, Paul D. Miller...
- - AfroFuturist scholarship
- - theoretical approaches to (Afro)futurisms in general
Moderator: tobias c. van Veen, McGill University
contact: tobias.c.vanVeen @ mail . mcgill . ca
* "Negative Evolution" title provided by Underground Resistance,
Detroit.
- -
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------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2006 21:38:45 +0200
From: "Martin Potschka"
Subject: SUB 06: Intelligent design does not contradict
Neodarwinian logic
Intelligent design does not contradict Neodarwinian logic
Martin Potschka
Independent Scholar
martin.potschka@univie.ac.at
Neodarwinism has been challenged along two lines. One, by
Creationists who
take a literal reading of the Bible. The second line focuses on
intelligent
design, claiming that there is evidence for irreducible
complexity that
depend on a blueprint. Proponents usually overlook the fact that
the
blueprint needs to be designed itself, i.e. has its own
evolution.
We do not understand how an intelligence might interact with the
genetic
mechanisms as studied by biology. But it must be admitted that
not every
detail of evolution is already understood. To proceed, we must
distinguish
the need for an augmented more complex interpretation of
evolution than that
given by traditional Darwinism from a refutation of Neodarwinian
logic.
Cultural evolution which features intelligence operates with
higher
complexity than genetics and with different mechanisms. We do not
know the
structural base of intelligence but if we assume that it
resembles natural
language, some conclusions are possible. According to the
hypothetico-deductive paradigm of epistemology supported by
Popper, Einstein
and many others, inference from facts to principles is an
impossibility.
Goal directed action unconsciously is executed by a
trial/variation-and-error procedure, a testing in virtual space
before
selecting and remembering the optimal action path.
Following the principle that complexity can only increase in
small
increments (the key presumption of intelligent design advocates),
we are
left to consider how intelligence itself has been subject to
evolution and
conclude that bootstrapping intelligence in its initial stages
was highly
dependent on Neodarwinian principles of variation and selection.
Intelligent
design therefore is no alternative to Darwinism but may add
features as yet
undiscovered.
keywords: evolution, intelliegent design, neodariwnism,
epistemology,
complexity
possible matches: Barbara Larson, Jeremy Paul Smyczek, Victoria
N. Alexander
~~~~~~~~~~~
Martin Potschka
martin.potschka@univie.ac.at
+43-1-3175713 (fon+fax+voice recorder)
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/martin.potschka/
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2006 13:43:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: Jessica Pressman
Subject: SUB 06: The Revolution and Evolution of Flash-ing
Literature: Bob Browns Readies and Young-hae Chang Heavy
Industries
Keywords: new media, electronic literature, reading
technologies, speed, cinema, literary history
The Revolution and Evolution of Flash-ing Literature:
Bob Brown??s Readies and Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries
This paper participates in charting the ?¨evolution?Æ of new
media and, in particular, electronic literature by examining the
connections between two techno-literary projects separated by
seventy years: Bob Brown??s Readies machine and Young-hae Chang
Heavy Industries?? digital literature. In 1930 avant-garde writer
Bob Brown published an essay in the international avant-garde
journal transition in which he boldly proclaimed, ?¨The written
word hasn??t kept up with the age. The movies have outmanoeuvered
it. We have the talkies, but as yet no Readies.?Æ He claims,
?¨Books are antiquated word containers?ñ. modern word-conveyors are
needed now, reading will have to be done by machine.?Æ To advance
the ?¨Revolution of the Word,?Æ Brown proposed to build a reading
machine that would speed up the pace of reading literature and
thereby change the kind of literature we read. His plans reflect
a techno-determinist view that our reading machines affect both
how and what we read; they also
inspired such heavy-hitting modernists as Gertrude Stein,
William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound to contribute poems to
his collection Readies for Bob Brown??s Machine (1931). Although
Brown has been nearly forgotten by literary history, his Readies
are important to contextualizing a more contemporary form of
avant-garde, machine-based literature: Young-hae Chang Heavy
Industries produce some of the most innovative electronic
literature online, Flash works that flash onscreen at heightened
speeds. The aesthetic of these digital works and the reading
experiences they produce are uncannily connected to Brown??s
pre-computer plans for the Readies and, in their own way, propel
the evolution of what and how we read. In this paper, I read
between and across these two literary endeavors to examine what
is illuminated about our contemporary literary moment by exhuming
its relationship to a related but relatively unknown artistic and
technological past.
Jessica Pressman
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of English, UCLA
Jessicapressman@sbcglobal.net
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2006 15:59:19 -0500
From:
Subject: SUB 06: "Queer Diagrammatics: The Unmeasurable,
Unmappable Geometries of Queer Discursive Space."
Name: Jennifer Lieberman
Institution: University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Keywords: Math, Theory, Representation, Diagram, Rhetoric
"Queer Diagrammatics: The Unmeasurable, Unmappable Geometries
of Queer Discursive Space."
This paper will investigate the function of scientific
illustration in canonical queer theoretic texts by beginning
with the premise that queer theory is invested in
rearticulating tropes from mathematics, statistics, psychology
and evolutionary biology. The deployment of geometric
rhetoric, detached from the visual discourse of geometry,
makes conspicuous the queer revision of this traditionally
scientific genre. I will claim that the unconventionality and
the conspicuous omission of graphics in these texts
participate in a "queer diagrammatics": a mode of
representation that destabilizes the privileged role of
visibility in the production and authorization of knowledge.
I will invoke Latour, Rotman, and other critics of visual
scientific discourse in order to analyze the performative
function of this atypical diagrammatic. Ultimately, I will
argue that the queer redefinition of the I and of identity are
rhetorically linked to the repositioning of the function of
the eye, in a way that has broad implications for the genre of
queer and scientific imag(in)ing.
- -
---------------------------------
Daniel Tripp
4/14/2006 4:49:09 PM
SUB 06: The Survivalist Rhetoric of Literary Innovation
SLSA 2006 Submission
Name: Daniel Tripp
Affiliation: East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania
Email: dtripp@po-box.esu.edu
Paper Title: The Survivalist Rhetoric of Literary Innovation
Abstract:
Ever since Marshall McLuhan helped popularize a Darwinist view of
medial
evolution, American literature has been increasingly imagined as
participating in a grand competition for representational
supremacy, a
competition it is often considered to be losing on most fronts.
This paper
examines what I call, the survivalist rhetoric of literary
innovation, or
the critical discourse through which scholars, critics, and
writers alike
have sought to recalibrate the specificity, and in some cases the
superiority, of print literature in an expanding media ecology.
The
challenges posed to print literature by intermedial rivalry have
necessitated both the defense and revision of the literary
exceptionalism
that for several centuries has taken for granted the privilege
and prestige
of literature as a mode of representation. Among other things, I
argue that
the mediatization of American literature, and the subsequent
drive to
reinvent mimesis, has sparked an arms race for the real that can
be read in
the accelerated speciation of literary forms and the
proliferation of
survivalist rhetorics since the 1960s.
Keywords: literary innovation, obsolescence, exceptionalism,
realism,
postmodernism.
------------------------
Daniel Tripp
Assistant Professor
Department of English
East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania
East Stroudsburg, PA 18301
Phone: 570-422-3992
Email: dtripp@po-box.esu.edu
-----------------------------------
"Veit Erlmann"
4/14/2006 4:51:15 PM
SUB 06 - "Water, Sex, and Noise: The (Meta)physics of Listening
in Germany, circa 1800"
Name: Veit Erlmann
Title of paper: Water, Sex, and Noise: The (Meta)physics of
Listening in Germany, circa 1800
This paper explores the juxtaposition of the emerging
neurophysiology of hearing, Kantian transcendental aesthetics and
early romanticism in Germany, c.1800. Using the ?´transcendental
physiology?? of anatomist Samuel Thomas S?Äìmmerring (1755-1830) and
the work of novelist Wilhelm Heinse (1746-1803), I argue for the
central role of discourses of auditory perception in early
romanticism - arguably one of the key sources of modernism ?± and
thus modernity more broadly. Rather than revisiting the
?¨invention?Æ of ?¨absolute music?Æ by poets such as Wackenroder or
E.T.A.Hoffmann and its significance for the emergence in the
nineteenth century of structural listening, I suggest that the
roots of the new forms of auditory awareness lie in the
materiality and physiology of the inner ear, its fluids, the
structure of the auditory nerve and its proximity to the liquor
cerebrospinalis. The site of fierce philosophical, scientific and
aesthetic debate, the ear??s central position in S?Äìmmerring??s and
Heinse??s thought highlights the tensions and shifts in post
Enlightenment medicine and culture as it evolved from a concern
with Cartesian mechanism to vitalism and organicism, from the
aesthetics of affect to that of the sublime.
Keywords: history of medicine, history of science, aesthetics,
musicology, ear, senses
Veit Erlmann
Professor
School of Music
University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station E3100
Austin, TX 78712
tel. (512) 232-2092
P.S. I??d love to hear from people who are interested in sound,
hearing, audio-technology.
