Download or read book The Poetics of DNA written by Judith Roof and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Poetics of DNA, Judith Roof examines the rise of this powerful symbol and the implications of its ascendancy for the ways we thinkÑabout ourselves, about one another, and about the universe. A hyperbolized notion of DNA has become a vector, Roof argues, through which older ways of thinking can merge with the new, advancing long-discredited and insidious ideas.
Download or read book Poetics of Liveliness written by Ada Smailbegović and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-29 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can poetry act as an aesthetic amplification device, akin to a microscope, through which we can sense minute or nearly imperceptible phenomena such as the folding of molecules into their three-dimensional shapes, the transformations that make up the life cycle of a silkworm, or the vaporous movements that constitute the ever-shifting edges of clouds? We tend to think of these subjects as reserved for science, but, as Ada Smailbegović argues, twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. Their works can be envisioned as laboratories within which the methodologies of experimentation, natural historical description, and taxonomic classification allow poetic language to register the rhythms and durations of material transformation. Poetics of Liveliness moves across scales to explore the realms of molecules, fibers, tissues, and clouds. It investigates works such as Christian Bök’s insertion of a poetic text into the DNA code of living bacteria in order to generate a new poem in the shape of a protein molecule, Jen Bervin’s considerations of silk fibers and their use in biomedicine, Gertrude Stein’s examination of brain tissues in medical school and its subsequent influence on her literary taxonomies of character, and Lisa Robertson’s studies of nineteenth-century meteorology and the soft architecture of clouds. In their attempt to understand physical processes unfolding within lively material worlds, Smailbegović contends, these poets have developed a distinctive materialist poetics. Structured as a poetic cosmology akin to Lucretius’s “On the Nature of Things,” which begins at the atomic level and expands out to the vastness of the universe, Poetics of Liveliness provides an innovative and surprising vision of the relationship between science and poetry.
Download or read book Genetics and the Literary Imagination written by Clare Hanson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oxford Textual Perspectives is a series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures, and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. This is the first book to explore the dramatic impact of genetics on literary fiction over the past four decades. After James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 and the subsequent cracking of the genetic code, a gene-centric discourse developed which had a major impact not only on biological science but on wider culture. As figures like E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins popularised the neo-Darwinian view that behaviour was driven by genetic self-interest, novelists were both compelled and unnerved by such a vision of the origins and ends of life. This book maps the ways in which Doris Lessing, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro wrestled with the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of human nature and with the challenge it posed to humanist beliefs about identity, agency, and morality. It argues that these novelists were alienated to varying degrees by neo-Darwinian arguments but that the recent shift to postgenomic science has enabled a greater rapprochement between biological and (post)humanist concepts of human nature. The postgenomic view of organisms as agentic and interactive is echoed in the life-writing of Margaret Drabble and Jackie Kay, which also explores the ethical implications of this holistic biological perspective. As advances in postgenomics, especially epigenetics, provoke increasing public interest and concern, this book offers a timely analysis of debates that have fundamentally altered our understanding of what it means to be human.
Download or read book The Xenotext written by Christian Bök and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bök has realized, it all comes down to the durability of your materials."—The Guardian Internationally best-selling poet Christian Bök has spent more than ten years writing what promises to be the first example of "living poetry." After successfully demonstrating his concept in a colony of E. coli, Bök is on the verge of enciphering a beautiful, anomalous poem into the genome of an unkillable bacterium (Deinococcus radiodurans), which can, in turn, "read" his text, responding to it by manufacturing a viable, benign protein, whose sequence of amino acids enciphers yet another poem. The engineered organism might conceivably serve as a post-apocalyptic archive, capable of outlasting our civilization. Book I of The Xenotext constitutes a kind of "demonic grimoire," providing a scientific framework for the project with a series of poems, texts, and illustrations. A Virgilian welcome to the Inferno, Book I is the "orphic" volume in a diptych, addressing the pastoral heritage of poets, who have sought to supplant nature in both beauty and terror. The book sets the conceptual groundwork for the second volume, which will document the experiment itself. The Xenotext is experimental poetry in the truest sense of the term. Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (1994) and Eunoia (2001), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.
Download or read book The Genome Incorporated written by Kate O'Riordan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Genome Incorporated examines the proliferation of human genomics across contemporary media cultures. It explores questions about what it means for a technoscience to thoroughly saturate everyday life, and places the interrogation of the science/media relationship at the heart of this enquiry. The book develops a number of case studies in the mediation and consumption of genomics, including: the emergence of new direct-to-the-consumer bioinformatics companies; the mundane propagation of testing and genetic information through lifestyle television programming; and public and private engagements with art and science institutions and events. Through these novel sites, this book examines the proliferating circuits of production and consumption of genetic information and theorizes this as a process of incorporation. Its wide-ranging case studies ensure its appeal to readers across the social sciences.
Download or read book A Companion to American Poetry written by Mary McAleer Balkun and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2022-04-11 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A COMPANION TO AMERICAN POETRY A Companion to American Poetry brings together original essays by both established scholars and emerging critical voices to explore the latest topics and debates in American poetry and its study. Highlighting the diverse nature of poetic practice and scholarship, this comprehensive volume addresses a broad range of individual poets, movements, genres, and concepts from the seventeenth century to the present day. Organized thematically, the Companion’s thirty-seven chapters address a variety of emerging trends in American poetry, providing historical context and new perspectives on topics such as poetics and identity, poetry and the arts, early and late experimentalisms, poetry and the transcendent, transnational poetics, poetry of engagement, poetry in cinema and popular music, Queer and Trans poetics, poetry and politics in the 21st century, and African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous poetries. Both a nuanced survey of American poetry and a catalyst for future scholarship, A Companion to American Poetry is essential reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, academic researchers and scholars, and general readers with interest in current trends in American poetry.
Download or read book Biomedia written by Eugene Thacker and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Human Programming written by Scott Selisker and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do our ways of talking about contemporary terrorism have a history in the science, technology, and culture of the Cold War? Human Programming explores this history in a groundbreaking work that draws connections across decades and throughout American culture, high and low. Scott Selisker argues that literary, cinematic, and scientific representations of the programmed mind have long shaped conversations in U.S. political culture about freedom and unfreedom, and about democracy and its enemies. Selisker demonstrates how American conceptions of freedom and of humanity have changed in tandem with developments in science and technology, including media technology, cybernetics, behaviorist psychology, and sociology. Since World War II, propagandists, scientists, and creative artists have adapted visions of human programmability as they sought to imagine the psychological manipulation and institutional controls that could produce the inscrutable subjects of totalitarian states, cults, and terrorist cells. At the same time, writers across the political spectrum reimagined ideals of American freedom, democracy, and diversity by way of contrast with these posthuman specters of mental unfreedom. Images of such “human automatons” circulated in popular films, trials, travelogues, and the news media, giving form to the nebulous enemies of the postwar and contemporary United States: totalitarianism, communism, total institutions, cult extremism, and fundamentalist terrorism. Ranging from discussions of The Manchurian Candidate and cyberpunk science fiction to the cases of Patty Hearst and the “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, Human Programming opens new ways of understanding the intertwined roles of literature, film, science, and technology in American culture.
Download or read book Estonian Pragmapoetics from Poetry and Fiction to Philosophy and Genetics written by Arne Merilai and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-18 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book outlines an innovative approach to the study of literature called pragmapoetics, a philosophy of poetic utterances. The book posits that studies are as much a branch of linguistics as they are of the philosophy of language and mind, and considers the poetic self-referential function a profound feature of life and intentionality. As a structuralist thinker, the author is drawn towards graphical definitions for their greater elucidative power. This collection contains three sections: “General Poetics,” “Pragmapoetics,” and “Estonian and Comparative Poetics,” consisting of nineteen of the author’s works from 1996 up to 2022, which best represent his approach.
Download or read book We Other Utopians written by Eva Šlesingerová and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We, Other Utopians is the first book to analyze the topics of genome editing/recombinant DNA on the basis of ethnographic research in the post-communist context. The book focuses on the topics of human DNA editing and genome repair on two levels. First, inspired by texts analyzing the concept of life and the body in general, it conceptually and analytically works with various approaches to engineered life and embodiments from the perspective of anthropology, sociology, and science and technology studies. Second, it presents an analysis of artificial life, and biotechnological embodiments on concrete technologies – genome editing, recombinant DNA, and biological computing. The book explores the theme of genome editing based on ethnographic research conducted at a biochemical laboratory in the Czech Republic. The fieldwork was carried out from 2017 to 2019, mainly in a lab focusing on DNA damages and genomic risk of complex diseases or genetic vulnerabilities like breast cancer, infertility, and ageing. Recombinant DNA is understood here as the exchange of DNA strands to produce and design new nucleotide sequence arrangements to heal or enhance human bodies and health in the future. The book analyzes various economies of hope, hype, expectations, politics, and poetics of false promises and better or worse predictions from the point of view of sociology, anthropology, and science and technology studies.
Download or read book Consuming History written by Jerome de Groot and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-08 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consuming History examines how history works in contemporary popular culture. Analysing a wide range of cultural entities from computer games to daytime television, it investigates the ways in which society consumes history and how a reading of this consumption can help us understand popular culture and issues of representation. In this second edition, Jerome de Groot probes how museums have responded to the heritage debate and how new technologies from online game-playing to internet genealogy have brought about a shift in access to history, discussing the often conflicted relationship between ‘public’ and academic history and raising important questions about the theory and practice of history as a discipline. Fully revised throughout with up-to-date examples from sources such as Wolf Hall, Game of Thrones and 12 Years a Slave, this edition also includes new sections on the historical novel, gaming, social media and genealogy. It considers new, ground-breaking texts and media such as YouTube in addition to entities and practices, such as re-enactment, that have been underrepresented in historical discussion thus far. Engaging with a broad spectrum of source material and comparing the experiences of the UK, the USA, France and Germany as well as exploring more global trends, Consuming History offers an essential path through the debates for readers interested in history, cultural studies and the media.
Download or read book Biofictions written by Josie Gill and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Winner of the 2020 British Society for Literature and Science book prize. In this important interdisciplinary study, Josie Gill explores how the contemporary novel has drawn upon, and intervened in, debates about race in late 20th and 21st century genetic science. Reading works by leading contemporary writers including Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Octavia Butler and Colson Whitehead, Biofictions demonstrates how ideas of race are produced at the intersection of science and fiction, which together create the stories about identity, racism, ancestry and kinship which characterize our understanding of race today. By highlighting the role of narrative in the formation of racial ideas in science, this book calls into question the apparent anti-racism of contemporary genetics, which functions narratively, rather than factually or objectively, within the racialized contexts in which it is embedded. In so doing, Biofictions compels us to rethink the long-asked question of whether race is a biological fact or a fiction, calling instead for a new understanding of the relationship between race, science and fiction.
Download or read book Rites of Return written by Marianne Hirsch and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-29 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a passionate engagement with the losses of the past. Rites of Return examines the effects of this legacy of historical injustice and documented suffering on the politics of the present. Twenty-four writers, historians, literary and cultural critics, anthropologists and sociologists, visual artists, legal scholars, and curators grapple with our contemporary ethical endeavor to redress enduring inequities and retrieve lost histories. Mapping bold and broad-based responses to past injury across Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, Australia, the Middle East, and the United States, Rites of Return examines new technologies of genetic and genealogical research, memoirs about lost family histories, the popularity of roots-seeking journeys, organized trauma tourism at sites of atrocity and new Museums of Conscience, and profound connections between social rites and political and legal rights of return. Contributors include: Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University; Nadia Abu El-Haj, Barnard College; Elazar Barkan, Columbia University; Svetlana Boym, Harvard University; Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University; Amira Hass, journalist; Jarrod Hayes, University of Michigan; Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University; Eva Hoffman, writer; Margaret Homans, Yale University; Rosanne Kennedy, Australian National University; Daniel Mendelsohn, writer; Susan Meiselas, photographer; Nancy K. Miller, CUNY Graduate Center; Alondra Nelson, Columbia University; Jay Prosser, University of Leeds; Liz Sevchenko, Coalition of Museums of Conscience; Leo Spitzer, Dartmouth College; Marita Sturken New York University; Diana Taylor, New York University; Patricia J. Williams, Columbia University
Download or read book Population Genetics and Belonging written by Venla Oikkonen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how human population genetics has emerged as a means of imagining and enacting belonging in contemporary society. Venla Oikkonen approaches population genetics as an evolving set of technological, material, narrative and affective practices, arguing that these practices are engaged in multiple forms of belonging that are often mutually contradictory. Considering scientific, popular and fictional texts, with several carefully selected case studies spanning three decades, the author traces shifts in the affective, material and gendered preconditions of population genetic visions of belonging. Topics encompass the debate about Mitochondrial Eve, ancient human DNA, temporality and nostalgia, commercial genetic ancestry tests, and tensions between continental and national genetic inheritance. The book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of science and technology studies, cultural studies, sociology, and gender studies.
Download or read book The Story Within written by Amy Boesky and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A compelling collection of essays that address the experiences of many who have genetically based illnesses.” —Library Journal The contributors to The Story Within share powerful experiences of living with genetic disorders. Their stories illustrate the complexities involved in making decisions about genetic diseases: whether to be tested, who to tell, whether to have children, and whether and how to treat children medically, if treatment is available. More broadly, they consider how genetic information shapes the ways we see ourselves, the world, and our actions within it. People affected by genetic disease respond to such choices in varied ways. These writers reflect that breadth of response, yet they share the desire to challenge a restricted sense of what “health” is or whose life has value. They write hoping to expand conversations about genetics and identity—to deepen debate and generate questions. They or their families are affected by Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, genetic deafness or blindness, schizophrenia, cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, fragile X, or Fanconi anemia. All of their stories remind us that genetic health is complicated, dynamic, and above all, deeply personal. Contributors include: Misha Angrist, Amy Boesky, Kelly Cupo, Michael Downing, Clare Dunsford, Mara Faulkner, Christine Kehl O’Hagan, Charlie Pierce, Kate Preskenis, Emily Rapp, Jennifer Rosner, Joanna Rudnick, Anabel Stenzel, Isabel Stenzel Byrnes, Laurie Strongin, Patrick Tracey, Alice Wexler
Download or read book Ecoprecarity written by Pramod K. Nayar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-13 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture presents an examination of ecoprecarity - the precarious lives that humans lead in the process and event of ecological disaster, and the increasing precarious state of the environment itself as a result of human interventions - in contemporary literary-cultural texts. It studies the representation of 'invasion narratives' of the human body and the earth by alien life forms, the ecodystopian vision that informs much environmental thought in popular cultures, the states of ontological integrity and genetic belonging in the age of cloning, xenotransplantation and biotechnology's 'capitalisation' of life itself, and the construction of the 'wild' in these texts. It pays attention to the ecological uncanny and the monstrous that haunts ecodystopias and forms of natureculture that emerge in the bioeconomies since the late twentieth century.
Download or read book Genetic Codes of Culture written by William R. Schultz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-19 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this text, first published in 1994, the author examines the interdisciplinary significance of the theory of science, literature and philosophy according to the figures who achieved prominence in those fields - Kuhn, Bloom and Derrida. Each scholar's theory is discussed in terms of its major concepts, and the book then relates their fields within the context of deconstruction's interdisciplinary movement. This title will be of interest to students of literature and philosophy.
