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Translations in Green: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Vegetal Turn Configurations Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Banu Subramaniam, Sushmita Chatterjee
This paper explores the coloniality of botany and its transnational genealogy by examining critical questions about agency of representation of botanical nomenclature. We use two examples—Hortus Malabaricus in the seventeenth century, and the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) from the twenty-first century—as bookends to examine the legacies of colonial botany. The Hortus is a comprehensive
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Isamu Noguchi's Gardens: Yellow Peril in the Age of Information Configurations Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Huan He
The origins of the information and digital age can be traced to Norbert Weiner's wartime document "Yellow Peril," a yellow-bound book of "perilous" statistics introducing his eventual science of prediction (cybernetics). This essay situates the emergence of "prediction science" alongside the growing sentiment of Japanese "unpredictability," two corresponding experiments in perception in 1942. It also
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Abraham Cowley against Bacon's "Idols of the Mind" Configurations Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Aaron R. Hanlon
This essay examines the contributions of Abraham Cowley's poetry to the development of Royal Society scientific methods in the seventeenth century, particularly through Cowley's clarification of the forms of cognitive bias that Francis Bacon called "idols of the mind." We should understand many of Cowley's poetic choices and stylistic recommendations as part of an effort to illustrate and shape the
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Contributors Configurations Pub Date : 2024-01-09
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors Sushmita Chatterjee is chair and professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and Women's and Gender Studies at Colorado State University. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, animal studies, and queer-feminist theory. Her book Postcolonial Hauntings: Play and Transnational Feminism is forthcoming (U. Illinois
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Configurations: A Thirty-Year Retrospective Configurations Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Melissa M. Littlefield, Rajani Sudan
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Configurations: A Thirty-Year Retrospective Melissa M. Littlefield and Rajani Sudan Although many of you know that Configurations is the journal of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, you may not have been around for its founding or its shift from SLS to SLSA. You may be familiar with the journal’s current themes, but you
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From SLS to SLSA: A Brief History Configurations Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Lance Schachterle, Stephen J. Weininger
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
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Confluence and Change: The Emergence of Configurations Configurations Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Kenneth J. Knoespel
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
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Measuring the Impact of Mathematics: Towards a Critical Mathematical Studies Configurations Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Anne Brubaker, Jennifer L. Lieberman
Mathematics has been called “the queen of the sciences,” yet studies of mathematics and literature have been comparatively rare in Configurations. While Project Muse reports over 500 hits for technology in Configurations, math appears in only 26 articles, not counting reviews or bibliographies. In order to identify how mathematics has figured into the field of science, literature, and the arts, this
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Cli-fi and the Future of the Novel: Building on Helena Feder's "Ecocriticism and Biology" Special Issue Configurations Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Simon C. Estok
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
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Hearing the Living Metaphors: A Response to Serpil Oppermann's "Storied Seas" Configurations Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Başak Ağın, Z. Gizem Yılmaz
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
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Creative Writing: Embracing Unfamiliar Knowledge Configurations Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Laura Otis
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
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Playing at SLSA: A Game Studies Stream Retrospective Configurations Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Edmond Y. Chang, Patrick Jagoda, Julianne Grasso, Peter D. McDonald, Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Stephanie Boluk, Patrick LeMieux, Alenda Y. Chang, Doug Stark, Timothy J. Welsh, Jamal Russell, Ashlee Bird
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
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Roald Hoffmann: An Appreciation Configurations Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Jay A. Labinger
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
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Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity by Tom Tyler (review) Configurations Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Kaori Nagai
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity by Tom Tyler Kaori Nagai (bio) Tom Tyler, Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity. University of Minnesota Press, 2022. Game by Tom Tyler playfully explores the intersections between animals and games, especially video games. It consists of 13 concise essays and discusses a wide selection
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The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life by Peter Boxall (review) Configurations Pub Date : 2023-11-15 Zsófia Novák
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life by Peter Boxall Zsófia Novák (bio) Peter Boxall. The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. vii + 411 pages. ISBN 978-1-108-83648-7. What does the “enworlding” power of the “novel imagination”
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Contributors Configurations Pub Date : 2023-11-15
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors Başak Ağın is an associate professor of English Literature at TED University, Ankara, Türkiye. She is the author of Posthümanizm: Kavram, Kuram, Bilim-Kurgu [Posthumanism: Concept, Theory, Science Fiction] (2020, Siyasal), co-editor of Posthuman Pathogenesis: Contagion in Literature, Media, and Arts (2022, Routledge), and
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Seas of Data; or, The Oceanographer in the Archive Configurations Pub Date : 2023-08-12 Felix Lüttge
This paper examines the network of media, institutions, and actors that helped create the sea as an epistemic object in nineteenth-century US naval administration. Based on paper technologies such as lists, tables, and logbooks, early oceanography was essentially an archival practice and data processing. In contrast to pelagic histories of the “oceanic turn,” this paper argues that oceanography developed
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Feminist Digital Ecology: Mimesis, Fictocriticism and Altering Technological Space Configurations Pub Date : 2023-08-12 Zach Pearl
This paper examines the ways authors of fictocriticism—a hybrid form of writing that blurs literature and literary-critical commentary— reenvision the affordances of digital media and the rise of networked technologies in feminist materialist terms. I consider the crucial role of mimesis in fictocriticism to foster “becoming similar with” one’s environment, including its media, and how fictocritical
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What Do Sex Robots Want? Representation, Materiality, and Queer Use Configurations Pub Date : 2023-08-12 Amelia DeFalco
This essay addresses its title question by analyzing sex robots, real and imagined, as both representational objects and vital matter. Though frequently treated as perverse by popular media, actual sex robots are in fact remarkably conventional in their reproduction of a heteronormative sexual aesthetic that disavows the vibrancy of the sexualized object. Sex robot art and fictional narratives (both
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Contributors Configurations Pub Date : 2023-08-12
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors Amelia DeFalco is a professor of contemporary literature at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on contemporary cultural depictions of ageing, vulnerability, and care. Her most recent book is Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care (Oxford U. Press 2023). Previous publications include Uncanny Subjects: Aging in
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Science, Scientists, and Prehistories of SSK in Mid-Twentieth-Century British Literature Configurations Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Graham Matthews
This article investigates the diverse ways in which midtwentieth-century British writers responded to the proliferation of science and scientists in the traditionally non-scholarly spheres of industry, politics, and society and, in doing so, establishes a series of prehistories to the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). Authors such as Fred Hoyle, C. P. Snow, D. F. Jones, Michael Moorcock, Daphne
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Industries of Purity: Horses, Idols, and Affective Economy in Uma Musume Pretty Derby Configurations Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Leo Chu
This paper scrutinizes the confluence of idol and racing industries in Uma Musume Pretty Derby, a Japanese multimedia franchise centering on "horse girls," anthropomorphized characters based on racehorses. I study how the franchise elicits audience's emotional and financial investment by combining features of idol performance and racehorse breeding in an "affective economy," while highlighting its
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How Like a Leaf: Vital Energy in Greenhouse Infrastructures Configurations Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Krista Lynes
While commercial greenhouses are built as architectures to temper (climactic) precarity, this article argues that precarity abounds in the ripening conditions they enfold. Contemporary greenhouses harness the energy of the internet of things, precision agriculture, and artificial intelligence to manage inputs and outputs for optimal growth. Such growth, however, is often premised on the exploitation
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Automatic: Literary Modernism and the Politics of Reflex by Timothy Wientzen (review) Configurations Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Mark Paterson
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Automatic: Literary Modernism and the Politics of Reflex by Timothy Wientzen Mark Paterson (bio) Timothy Wientzen, Automatic: Literary Modernism and the Politics of Reflex. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. Central to Timothy Wientzen's fascinating, lively, and flawed book is the split he identifies in modernist literature
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The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies by Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka (review) Configurations Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Barbara Hof
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies by Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka Barbara Hof (bio) Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka. The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2021. How do we recognize a laboratory as a laboratory? Where are laboratories
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Video Games and American Culture: How Ideology Influences Virtual Worlds by Aaron A. Toscano (review) Configurations Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Mark T. DiMauro
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Video Games and American Culture: How Ideology Influences Virtual Worlds by Aaron A. Toscano Mark T. DiMauro (bio) Aaron A. Toscano. Video Games and American Culture: How Ideology Influences Virtual Worlds. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. Aaron A. Toscano's newest book, Video Games and American Culture, is an excellent, wide-ranging
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Material Foundations of Scientific Metaphors: A New Materialist Metaphor Studies Configurations Pub Date : 2023-03-30 David R. Gruber
Across field areas, studies of metaphor repeatedly emphasize the social and political functioning of metaphors, neglecting the role of materiality in the appearance and circulation of metaphors. This article argues for greater ecological and material engagement when examining metaphors. A material-discursive analysis of the origination of the mirror metaphor as deployed in the cognitive neurosciences
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Reading Omens in the Escape of Genetically Engineered Dinosaurs, 1970s–1990s Configurations Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Victor Monnin
The catastrophic scenario of Jurassic Park is known worldwide and across generations, thanks to two movie trilogies, as well as countless video games, toys, and other derived products inspired by Michael Crichton's 1990 novel. Despite Jurassic Park's originality, stories of genetically engineered dinosaurs on the loose made their debut during the 1970s, when genetic technologies, such as recombinant
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The Origins of Animal Art Configurations Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Deirdre Madeleine Smith
Do animals other than humans make what some humans call "art"? What might other animals' graphic and aesthetic behaviors reveal about art's "origins"? In this article, I critically examine the multidisciplinary histories of attempts to answer these questions through two cases: one on nonhuman primate painting and drawing studies, and the other on writing about bowerbirds. Rather than weigh in on the
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Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions by Katherine Keyser (review) Configurations Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Kim Adams
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions by Katherine Keyser Kim Adams (bio) Katherine Keyser, Artificial Color: Modern Food and Racial Fictions. Oxford University Press, 2019. Modernistic Concoctions: Edible Roots of Race Science in American Fiction Katherine Keyser's Artificial Color begins with F. Scott Fitzgerald's
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Nervous Fictions: Literary Form and the Enlightenment Origins of Neuroscience by Jess Keiser (review) Configurations Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Tita Chico
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Nervous Fictions: Literary Form and the Enlightenment Origins of Neuroscience by Jess Keiser Tita Chico (bio) Jess Keiser, Nervous Fictions: Literary Form and the Enlightenment Origins of Neuroscience. University of Virginia Press, 2020. Nervous Fictions: Literary Form and the Enlightenment Origins of Neuroscience takes up
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How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy (review) Configurations Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Xan Chacko, Sushmita Chatterjee, Laura Foster, Brian Sabel, sam smiley, Banu Subramaniam
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy Xan Chacko (bio), Sushmita Chatterjee (bio), Laura Foster (bio), Brian Sabel (bio), sam smiley (bio), and Banu Subramaniam (bio) Sumana Roy, How I Became a Tree. Yale University Press, 2021, ISBN 9780300260441. This is an unusual book. As you begin reading, you realize it is unlike most academic
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Contributors Configurations Pub Date : 2023-03-30
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors Kim Adams is a Humanities in the World postdoctoral fellow at the Pennsylvania State University Humanities Institute. Her book project, Building the Body Electric, follows the application of electricity to the human body in American literature and medicine from the Civil War to the Civil Rights era. She is invested in work
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The Cyber-Homunculus: On Race and Labor in Plans for Computation Configurations Pub Date : 2022-10-15 Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal
By culling through a history of computing technologies and racial capitalism from the last 150 years, this paper identifies a trans-historical figuration at work. Following, as case studies, the metaphorical lives and afterlives of the Mechanical Turk—a chess-playing automaton from the nineteenth century—and Maxwell’s Demon—a scientific thought experiment first conceived in 1867— in technical and cultural
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Scrambled Astronomy in Fatouville's French Scenes for Arlequin, Empereur dans la lune Configurations Pub Date : 2022-10-15 Daniel J. Worden
In Paris in 1684, Louis XIV’s troupe of commedia dell’arte performers staged scenes in French alongside their improvised Italian-language comedy routines in Arlequin, Empereur dans la lune [Harlequin, Emperor in the Moon]. The playwright Anne Mauduit de Fatouville composed and contributed these scenes, appropriating the era’s vocabulary of astronomy. These scenes take up, scramble up, and redeploy
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Middle-out from Bottom-up: Engineering and Close Reading Code in HBO's Silicon Valley Configurations Pub Date : 2022-10-15 Robert Nguyen
This essay examines the production and reception of a selection of computer source code briefly visible onscreen in “Founder Friendly,” an episode of the HBO satire series Silicon Valley. This text, made legible by the affordances of streaming high definition television, invited fans to engage in interrupted viewing, close reading, and tele-participation practices, in which they froze playback, examined
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H. P. Lovecraft, Photography, and the Transhumanist Imagination Configurations Pub Date : 2022-10-15 JiHae Koo
This essay explores photography’s relationship to the transhumanist imaginary of American weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft; transhumanism refers to the belief that humans can evolve through technological advancements. I argue that Lovecraft’s seemingly naïve conception of photography as unerringly “objective” actually reflects his understanding of photography as a transhuman technology that can
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The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch (review) Configurations Pub Date : 2022-10-15 Anton Borst
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch Anton Borst (bio) John Tresch, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021. In John Tresch’s The Reason for the Darkness of the Night:
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How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre (review) Configurations Pub Date : 2022-10-15 Michael Filas
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre Michael Filas (bio) Lee McIntyre, How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason. MIT Press, 2021, 264 pages, $24.95 cloth. This book
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Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France by Kari Weil (review) Configurations Pub Date : 2022-10-15 Mary Sanders Pollock
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France by Kari Weil Mary Sanders Pollock (bio) Kari Weil, Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France. University of Chicago Press, 2020. “Horses,” Weil offers in the preface to this volume, give “one perspective into the massive
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Contributors Configurations Pub Date : 2022-10-15
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors Anton Borst is an instructional consultant at New York University’s Center for Faculty Advancement, where he develops programs and services to support effective teaching practices across disciplines. Specializing in antebellum American literature and Romanticism and science, he received his PhD in English from the Graduate
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The Cyber-Homunculus: On Race and Labor in Plans for Computation Configurations Pub Date : 2022-10-15 Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal
By culling through a history of computing technologies and racial capitalism from the last 150 years, this paper identifies a trans-historical figuration at work. Following, as case studies, the metaphorical lives and afterlives of the Mechanical Turk—a chess-playing automaton from the nineteenth century—and Maxwell’s Demon—a scientific thought experiment first conceived in 1867— in technical and cultural
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Scrambled Astronomy in Fatouville's French Scenes for Arlequin, Empereur dans la lune Configurations Pub Date : 2022-10-15 Daniel J. Worden
In Paris in 1684, Louis XIV’s troupe of commedia dell’arte performers staged scenes in French alongside their improvised Italian-language comedy routines in Arlequin, Empereur dans la lune [Harlequin, Emperor in the Moon]. The playwright Anne Mauduit de Fatouville composed and contributed these scenes, appropriating the era’s vocabulary of astronomy. These scenes take up, scramble up, and redeploy
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Middle-out from Bottom-up: Engineering and Close Reading Code in HBO's Silicon Valley Configurations Pub Date : 2022-10-15 Robert Nguyen
This essay examines the production and reception of a selection of computer source code briefly visible onscreen in “Founder Friendly,” an episode of the HBO satire series Silicon Valley. This text, made legible by the affordances of streaming high definition television, invited fans to engage in interrupted viewing, close reading, and tele-participation practices, in which they froze playback, examined
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H. P. Lovecraft, Photography, and the Transhumanist Imagination Configurations Pub Date : 2022-10-15 JiHae Koo
This essay explores photography’s relationship to the transhumanist imaginary of American weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft; transhumanism refers to the belief that humans can evolve through technological advancements. I argue that Lovecraft’s seemingly naïve conception of photography as unerringly “objective” actually reflects his understanding of photography as a transhuman technology that can
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The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch (review) Configurations Pub Date : 2022-10-15 Anton Borst
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch Anton Borst (bio) John Tresch, The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021. In John Tresch’s The Reason for the Darkness of the Night:
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How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre (review) Configurations Pub Date : 2022-10-15 Michael Filas
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre Michael Filas (bio) Lee McIntyre, How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason. MIT Press, 2021, 264 pages, $24.95 cloth. This book
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Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France by Kari Weil (review) Configurations Pub Date : 2022-10-15 Mary Sanders Pollock
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France by Kari Weil Mary Sanders Pollock (bio) Kari Weil, Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France. University of Chicago Press, 2020. “Horses,” Weil offers in the preface to this volume, give “one perspective into the massive
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Contributors Configurations Pub Date : 2022-10-15
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors Anton Borst is an instructional consultant at New York University’s Center for Faculty Advancement, where he develops programs and services to support effective teaching practices across disciplines. Specializing in antebellum American literature and Romanticism and science, he received his PhD in English from the Graduate
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Introduction: Museums in Science Fiction, Science Fiction in Museums Configurations Pub Date : 2022-08-25 Verity Burke, Will Tattersdill
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Introduction: Museums in Science Fiction, Science Fiction in Museums Verity Burke (bio) and Will Tattersdill (bio) “It’s really hard running a natural history museum on Gora.”“Because visitors are so unpredictable?”“No, because there’s no life here.”1 When we think of museums and science fiction (sf), we might first think of museums in
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I Cannot Tell You All the Story: Narrative, Historical Knowledge, and the Museum in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine Configurations Pub Date : 2022-08-25 Jordan Kistler
In H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the Time Traveller visits a museum. The episode does little more than supply the Time Traveller with a new box of matches, yet the text is structured to suggest that the Palace of Green Porcelain will provide important information. A vast museum, the Palace houses paleontological, geological, chemical, military, ethnographic, and classical collections, as well as
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Erotic Surgery: J. G. Ballard's Crash, Octavia Butler's "Bloodchild," and the Visual Legacy of the Medical Museum Configurations Pub Date : 2022-08-25 Lauren A. Mitchell
This essay delves into medicine’s historically strange relation to erotic intimacy by juxtaposing an analysis of the exhibitionary objects of medical museums, with particular attention to the eighteenth-century Anatomical Venus wax models, against speculative fictions by Octavia Butler (“Bloodchild,” 1995) and J. G. Ballard (Crash, 1973). The historically legitimizing structure of dissection and the
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Science Fiction Worldbuilding in Museum Displays of Extinct Life Configurations Pub Date : 2022-08-25 Verity Burke, Will Tattersdill
While museums are considered to present authoritative representations of natural and cultural history, it is widely accepted that no display neutrally presents an objectively realized exterior world. In this piece, we further that argument by drawing attention to the narrative techniques implicit in staging extinct life, focussing in particular on the similarity between museum display and the tropes
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Science Fiction at the Natural History Museum Configurations Pub Date : 2022-08-25 Mark Carnall
This paper explores the “science fictions” encapsulated in natural history museums through an exploration of select examples at Oxford University Museum of Natural History. In this context, the scaffold of historical myths, half-truths, and assumptions behind facts presented in natural history museums as well as epistemological holes papered over when presenting complex information succinctly in museum
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I Just Don't Think about It: Engaging Students with Critical Heritage Discourse through Science Fiction Configurations Pub Date : 2022-08-25 Rhianedd Smith
What does sci fi have to say about and to the people who collect and preserve? Using a scene from Cuarón’s Children of Men as a starting point, the author explores some popular representations of heritage professionals and their spaces in science fiction. These chime with critically engaged museological theory and practice in recognizing the role of museums in past and present injustices. The author
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The Digitized Museum and the Troubling Reliance on Technology to Manage Knowledge in E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops Configurations Pub Date : 2022-08-25 Grace Anne Paizen
This paper explores the digitized museum in E. M. Forster’s science fiction novella The Machine Stops (1909). Forster replaces the physical space of museums with a digitized platform, complete with information censorship and broadcast through the technological home of humanity, the Machine. In examining Forster’s warning of tasking a machine to manage knowledge, this paper considers the real-life technological
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Coda on Curation: Thoughts on Science Fiction and Museums Configurations Pub Date : 2022-08-25 Dolly Jørgensen
An encounter in a museum—viewing objects in a display case or a wall filled with art—is always an encounter with curation. Science fiction gives insights into the power inherent in the curator’s role. Although curators are scarce in science fiction, one major science fiction character who is deliberately positioned by writers as a curator stands out: the Doctor of the popular British television series
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Contributors Configurations Pub Date : 2022-08-25
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors Verity Burke is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of literary analysis, the environmental humanities, and museum studies. She is currently a Government of Ireland postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Trinity College Dublin. Her current project, Still Lives: Organic
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The Hermeneutics of Computer-Generated Texts Configurations Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Leah Henrickson, Albert Meroño-Peñuela
As cultural circumstances become increasingly digital, the importance of theoretical frameworks guiding calculated considerations of authorial intention and reader response is being reaffirmed. The framework proposed in this article is that of hermeneutics: the study of understanding, of processes of meaning-making. Although explicit application of hermeneutics has fallen out of fashion, the field
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Fabric Bodies: The Craft of Vascular Anastomosis Configurations Pub Date : 2022-04-28 Paul Craddock
Vascular anastomosis, the surgical process of connecting blood vessels to one another, was made viable by Alexis Carrel at the turn of the twentieth century. His technique became fundamental to modern vascular surgery, and is central to his legacy as the "father" of vascular surgery. Carrel was, however, taught by the famous Lyon embroiderer Marie Anne Leroudier, the significance of which has yet to