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Abstract: 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 may not be aware of the significant roles that Configurations and SLSA played in fostering so many of the interdisciplinary (sub)fields that have risen to prominence in the past decades: game studies, animal studies, the environmental humanities, graphic medicine, and electronic literature(s), not to mention numerous literature/science crossovers into neuroscience, mathematics, and biotechnology, as well as historical scholarship. What you hold in your hands or see ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Literature and science has existed as a field of study since the 1920s, at least in the US, when the Modern Language Association (MLA) established a division by that name. Its practitioners were almost solely literary scholars, and its reigning paradigm was the “influence” model that focused on the one-way interaction from science to literature. Walter Schatzberg (Clark University), with Ronald A. Waite and Jonathan K. Johnson, edited the MLA volume The Relations of Literature and Science: An Annotated Bibliography of Scholarship, 1880–1980 (NY: MLA, 1987) that well embodied this tradition.By the 1980s it was clear that the field as currently defined was rapidly becoming an anachronism. The few scientists who ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The celebration of Configurations’ span of three decades is a recognition of its contributors, its readers, and its support from the Johns Hopkins University Press. Many institutions have supported the journal over these years. Melissa M. Littlefield and Rajani Sudan, the current editors, deserve thanks for the opportunity to reflect on the early history of the journal. At the outset, I also want to recognize Jim Bono’s role in shaping the community of Configurations. His presence was important at the origin and remains so today.The steps that led to the journal followed a decision by the Society for Literature and Science in 1990 to explore the prospect for a new publication that would further enhance the work of ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Configurations has been the home to multidisciplinary knowledge production for 30 years, creating a much-needed forum where scholars could bridge the perceived divide between the arts, humanities, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. The research supported by this journal has demonstrated how much we gain when these important areas of knowledge are brought into conversation with one another—or, to put it another way, the types of knowledge we can produce when these fields are not artificially separated. Vibrant subfields have sprung forth from these pages, ranging from the study of posthumanism to explorations of medicine and literature. Yet, as scholars who are interested in ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In the 13 years since Helena Feder’s Configurations special issue, “Eco-criticism and Biology,” environmental crises and climate change have accelerated and gotten much worse, renewing questions about how the increasing urgency of presenting scientific data as literary narratives will impact literary genres. “Ecocriticism and Biology” covered a broad range of material and arguably set the stage for new areas of research, one of which came to be known as “the blue humanities.” This field of enquiry has in some ways built on and filled a significant opening that the inaugural work in Feder’s special issue offered and has yielded possibilities for discussion of the huge biological and philosophical impacts of water ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In her 2019 Configurations article, “Storied Seas and Living Metaphors in the Blue Humanities,” Serpil Oppermann pinpointed “the sea’s twofold condition” as “a physical geographical site” and “a vast domain of imagination that can never be conclusively charted.”1 This twofold condition is the springboard from which this response takes its cue. In what follows, first, we explore Oppermann’s article as the landmark that initiated the fourth wave of ecocriticism, and secondly, we discuss how we can push our human borders of ocularcentrism within this fourth wave by putting the blue humanities and posthumanities into expanded dialogue. This dialogue could deepen through taking Oppermann’s initiative as a transmediatic ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: For almost 20 years, art has contributed to the emergence of knowledge at SLSA conferences. Creative writing sessions where writers share their essays, poems, and stories have complemented art exhibits that explore what happens when scientific learning rubs up against other ways of knowing. Since literary studies emerged as a professional field in the late nineteenth century, scientific empiricism has haunted it. In German, the word for literary studies—Literaturwissenschaft (the creation of knowledge about literature)—is modeled on the word for science, Naturwissenschaft (the creation of knowledge about nature). That someone can build knowledge by analyzing literature already seems like a stretch. That people ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: While it is difficult to pinpoint when the first game studies paper was delivered at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) annual meeting, then called SLS, the earliest mentions of video games in the organization’s conference programs include Lahti Martti’s “Computerized Skin: Cyborgian Pleasures of Computer and Video Games” and Bob Rehak’s “Playing at Being: Avatarial Operations in First Person Videogames,” both in 2000. Since then, game studies research and presentations have become a staple at SLSA, culminating in 2011 with the first game studies “stream,” an interdisciplinary series of panels organized by Patrick Jagoda, Stephanie Boluk, Patrick LeMieux, and others. The first wave of the ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Roald Hoffmann, the recipient of the 2022 SLSA Lifetime Achievement Award, is only the second practicing scientist to receive it (the other was physicist Sidney Perkowitz, in 2015). This is perhaps not surprising, given the relative paucity of active scientists in SLSA, or literature and science (henceforth L&S) more generally.1 He has been widely recognized for his scientific work, with many honors, including the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His nontechnical work, which includes essays, plays, poetry, and other forms, eloquently demonstrates how the similarities between the activities in which scientists and humanists are engaged vastly outweigh any differences. Here I highlight a selection of his writings that ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: 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 of video games spanning various decades, including the earliest periods of the gaming industry, the 1970s and 80s. The book provides a fascinating glimpse into how ubiquitous animals have always been in video games, as companions, adversaries, targets for hunting, items for trading and food, and even as paw prints, scent trails, and stools. Fittingly for a book on games, moreover, it makes us aware of the rules and conventions of the game and takes pleasure in unsettling them at every opportunity. This makes the book deeply thought-provoking ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: What does the “enworlding” power of the “novel imagination” consist in' How does the world-making capacity of fiction relate to the junction between the mind and the body, where consciousness makes itself manifest' How and why does the novel become the form that is particularly suited to the exploration of that shifting bridge between the self and the prostheses by which it extends itself into the world' These are some of the main questions addressed in The Prosthetic Imagination, Peter Boxall’s latest book, in which the University of Sussex academic and literary critic offers a highly original account of the novel genre, conceptualized as the site where the evolution of the prosthetic condition—developing in ... Read More PubDate: 2023-11-16T00:00:00-05:00
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