Abstract: In a startling passage of his argument for a model of the sciences based on communal trust and tacit knowledge, the mid-twentieth-century chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi cited a pair of telling cases where he reckoned the sciences had too hastily rejected phenomena later apparently proved real: mesmerism and meteorites. While "ordinary people were convinced of the fall of a meteorite," academicians "managed, during the whole of the eighteenth century, to explain the facts away to their own satisfaction." Similarly, "scientific scepticism" had rejected hypnotism for "another century after Mesmer's first appearance." Polanyi declared that "we regard these acts of scepticism as unreasonable and indeed ... Read More Keywords: Poetry; Technology; Aesthetics; Alternative histories (Fiction) PubDate: 2018-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In 1950, just four years after the "first digital, general-purpose, electronic computer,"1 ENIAC ("Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator"), was put into operation at the University of Pennsylvania, Kurt Vonnegut published a short story entitled "EPICAC." The story's narrator, a mathematician, confides in EPICAC, a computer, about his love for his coworker Pat. His first attempts to woo her have fallen flat:I knew what I wanted, and was willing to ask for it, and did so several times a month. "Pat, loosen up and marry me."One night, she didn't even look up from her work when I said it. "So romantic, so poetic," she murmured, more to her control panel than to me. "That's the way with mathematicians—all ... Read More Keywords: Poetry; Technology; Aesthetics; Alternative histories (Fiction) PubDate: 2018-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: This is our chance—"our" meaning all of humanity, not only a few who are exceptionally fortunate—to … do our human work, to live human lives, to devote ourselves … to poetry and politics.At least since the mid-twentieth century, universalist hopes for global peace and collective productivity have been coupled to technologies of accelerated travel, labor, and telecommunication.1 In the United States in the 1960s, this link appears forged in consensus, and expressed most acutely in the dedication of the 1964 New York World's Fair. The Fair's theme was "Peace through Understanding," and its dedication was to "Man's Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe." The divergent ideals of peace, species ... Read More Keywords: Poetry; Technology; Aesthetics; Alternative histories (Fiction) PubDate: 2018-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: One summer afternoon in 1933, George Spicer and his wife were visiting Inverness, Scotland and driving along the road that skirts the shore of Loch Ness. Suddenly, they noticed something strange on the road ahead of them. The Inverness Courier published the letter that Spicer later wrote regarding the incident. "I saw the nearest approach to a dragon or a prehistoric animal that I have ever seen in my life," Spicer recalled. "It crossed my road about fifty yards ahead and appeared to be carrying a small lamb or animal of some kind. It seemed to have a long neck which moved up and down, in the manner of a scenic railway, and the body was fairly big, with a high back."1 In the months preceding this encounter ... Read More Keywords: Poetry; Technology; Aesthetics; Alternative histories (Fiction) PubDate: 2018-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Dear SLSA colleagues:Configurations publishes three to five reviews of scholarly books in each quarterly issue. Beginning in 2018, we would like to add review essays of fiction that is in conversation with issues relevant to the SLSA. Fiction informs, reflects, and influences our understanding of science in the twenty-first century, and can lead us to think about things like global warming, medical ethics, and even basic science differently.We welcome proposals for review essays of two thousand to three thousand words that consider the works of a specific author of fiction in relation to any of the issues that the SLSA addresses. We are particularly interested in review essays that focus on the diversity of ... Read More Keywords: Poetry; Technology; Aesthetics; Alternative histories (Fiction) PubDate: 2018-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: As animal studies work continues to engage with the theoretical turn of the early twenty-first century, volumes like Jeff Karnicky's Scarlett Experiment introduce fresh literary histories and historicist readings of biology and naturalist approaches that reveal the deep roots of a careful thinking about the animal. The field has no shortage of readers and introductions by now—too many to list or to choose from—yet was in need of a brief, accessible account like Matthew Calarco's recent Thinking Through Animals. Together, these two books demonstrate a field constantly spreading its wings and reconsidering its fundamental intentions and assumptions. Both of these works also achieve a legibility that critical theory ... Read More Keywords: Poetry; Technology; Aesthetics; Alternative histories (Fiction) PubDate: 2018-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In recent years, some scholars have expressed concern that burgeoning interest in fields like neuroaesthetics, cognitive literary studies, and digital humanities is indicative of a large-scale turn away from traditional modes of humanistic study toward scientific—or, less charitably, scientistic—methods of inquiry. Benjamin Morgan's The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature offers a timely and welcome corrective to the assumption that the incorporation of scientific methods in humanistic study is a relatively recent development by calling our attention to an overlooked branch of scientific thinking in Victorian aesthetics. Morgan neither blindly endorses scientific methods nor ... Read More Keywords: Poetry; Technology; Aesthetics; Alternative histories (Fiction) PubDate: 2018-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In a moment of ecological destruction and species extinction on a grand scale, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa speculatively explores possibilities of care in multispecies and diverse worlds. Matters of Care is ambitious and successful, as Puig de la Bellacasa extends both feminist care ethics and science and technology studies (STS) understandings of the relational complexity of more than human worlds. Part 1 of Matters of Care extends the work of Donna Haraway, Joan Tronto, and Bruno Latour as Puig develops a philosophical framework and ethics of care capable of challenging dominant technoscientific productionist ways of thinking and acting. Puig argues for the importance of caring as well as possible in a complicated ... Read More Keywords: Poetry; Technology; Aesthetics; Alternative histories (Fiction) PubDate: 2018-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The unprecedented effects of the Anthropocene on the environment seem to counter the fact that on the geological time scale, humans are almost nonexistent. At the same time, conceptualizing linear, anthropocentric time can enable us to critique and understand the environmental consequences of human existence. Roger Whitson addresses these concerns in his recent monograph Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities: Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories, published in Routledge's Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature series. In the book, Whitson challenges anthropogenic, hegemonic conceptions of time and the world using techniques from steampunk and the digital humanities. ... Read More Keywords: Poetry; Technology; Aesthetics; Alternative histories (Fiction) PubDate: 2018-05-29T00:00:00-05:00
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