Download or read book Science and Affect in Contemporary Literature written by Shannon Lambert and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-11-14 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving from the micro world of quantum physics to the macro scales of earth science and ecology, this book considers how, in contemporary literature, affective experiences like desire, suffering, anxiety, and joy shape scientific persons, practices, and products. This book brings into dialogue close readings of scientific writing and contemporary literary works by authors like Jeanette Winterson, Richard Powers, Hanya Yanagihara, Thalia Field, and Jenny Offill. Combining narrative and affect studies, it uses formal strategies such as moving metaphor, visceral or affective description, plot-level analogy, contraction, and rhythm to engage with western scientific epistemologies, which still tends towards the impassive, universal, and objective. While each chapter focuses on a different field (or fields) of science, all foreground bodies-human and nonhuman-as a way of exploring knowledge production. Through close readings, the book argues that select 'scientific stories' raise important questions about how 'knowledge' is defined and who (and what) is invited into its processes of production.
Download or read book Disability Literature Genre written by Ria Cheyne and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title brings cultural disability studies and genre fiction studies into dialogue for the first time. Analysing representations of disability in contemporary science fiction, romance, fantasy, horror, and crime fiction, it offers new and transformative insights into both the workings of genre and the affective power of disability.
Download or read book Ecosickness in Contemporary U S Fiction written by Heather Houser and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1970s brought a new understanding of the biological and intellectual impact of environmental crises on human beings, and as efforts to prevent ecological and human degradation aligned, a new literature of sickness emerged. “Ecosickness fiction” imaginatively rethinks the link between ecological and bodily endangerment and uses affect and the sick body to bring readers to environmental consciousness. Tracing the development of ecosickness through a compelling archive of modern U.S. novels and memoirs, this study demonstrates the mode’s crucial role in shaping thematic content and formal and affective literary strategies. Examining works by David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marge Piercy, Jan Zita Grover, and David Wojnarowicz, Heather Houser shows how these authors unite experiences of environmental and somatic damage through narrative affects that draw attention to ecological phenomena, organize perception, and convert knowledge into ethics. Traversing contemporary cultural studies, ecocriticism, affect studies, and literature and medicine, Houser juxtaposes ecosickness fiction against new forms of environmentalism and technoscientific innovations such as regenerative medicine and alternative ecosystems. Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction recasts recent narrative as a laboratory in which affective and perceptual changes both support and challenge political projects.
Download or read book Writing Shame written by Kaye Mitchell and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through readings of an array of recent texts - literary and popular, fictional and autofictional, realist and experimental - this book maps out a contemporary, Western, shame culture
Download or read book Beyond Cartesian Dualism written by Steve Alsop and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-02-15 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is surprisingly little known about affect in science education. Despite periodic forays into monitoring students’ attitudes-toward-science, the effect of affect is too often overlooked. Beyond Cartesian Dualism gathers together contemporary theorizing in this axiomatic area. In fourteen chapters, senior scholars of international standing use their knowledge of the literature and empirical data to model the relationship between cognition and affect in science education. Their revealing discussions are grounded in a broad range of educational contexts including school classrooms, universities, science centres, travelling exhibits and refugee camps, and explore an array of far reaching questions. What is known about science teachers’ and students’ emotions? How do emotions mediate and moderate instruction? How might science education promote psychological resilience? How might educators engage affect as a way of challenging existing inequalities and practices? This book will be an invaluable resource for anybody interested in science education research and more generally in research on teaching, learning and affect. It offers educators and researchers a challenge, to recognize the mutually constitutive nature of cognition and affect.
Download or read book Being Modern written by Robert Bud and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2018-10-10 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early decades of the twentieth century, engagement with science was commonly used as an emblem of modernity. This phenomenon is now attracting increasing attention in different historical specialties. Being Modern builds on this recent scholarly interest to explore engagement with science across culture from the end of the nineteenth century to approximately 1940. Addressing the breadth of cultural forms in Britain and the western world from the architecture of Le Corbusier to working class British science fiction, Being Modern paints a rich picture. Seventeen distinguished contributors from a range of fields including the cultural study of science and technology, art and architecture, English culture and literature examine the issues involved. The book will be a valuable resource for students, and a spur to scholars to further examination of culture as an interconnected web of which science is a critical part, and to supersede such tired formulations as 'Science and culture'.
Download or read book Affect Emotion and Children s Literature written by Kristine Moruzi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the relationship between representation, affect, and emotion in texts for children and young adults. It demonstrates how texts for young people function as tools for emotional socialisation, enculturation, and political persuasion. The collection provides an introduction to this emerging field and engages with the representation of emotions, ranging from shame, grief, and anguish to compassion and happiness, as psychological and embodied states and cultural constructs with ideological significance. It also explores the role of narrative empathy in relation to emotional socialisation and to the ethics of representation in relation to politics, social justice, and identity categories including gender, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality. Addressing a range of genres, including advice literature, novels, picture books, and film, this collection examines contemporary, historical, and canonical children’s and young adult literature to highlight the variety of approaches to emotion and affect in these texts and to consider the ways in which these approaches offer new perspectives on these texts. The individual chapters apply a variety of theoretical approaches and perspectives, including cognitive poetics, narratology, and poststructuralism, to the analysis of affect and emotion in children’s and young adult literature.
Download or read book How Literature Changes the Way We Think written by Michael Mack and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: >
Download or read book The Cement Garden written by Ian McEwan and published by RosettaBooks. This book was released on 2011-02-08 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orphaned siblings create a macabre secret world for themselves in this “irresistibly readable” novel by the New York Times-bestselling author (The New York Review of Books). This “powerful and disconcerting” novel by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Children Act and Atonement (The Daily Telegraph) tells the story of a dying family who live in a dying part of the city. A father of four children decides, in an effort to make his garden easier to control, to pave it over. In the process, he has a heart attack and dies, leaving the cement garden unfinished and the children to the care of their mother. Soon after, the mother too dies and the children, fearful of being separated by social services, decide to cover up their parents’ deaths: they bury their mother in the cement garden. The story is told from the point of view of Jack, one of the sons, who is entering adolescence with all of its attendant curiosity and appetites. Julie, the eldest, is almost a grown woman. Sue is rather bookish and observes all that goes on around her. And Tom is the youngest and the baby of the lot. The children seem to manage in this perverse setting rather well—until Julie brings home a boyfriend who threatens their secret by asking too many questions. “[A] beautiful but disturbing novel.”—The AV Club “McEwan’s evocative detail and perfect British prose lend a genteel decorum to the death and decay that surround the family.”—The New Yorker
Download or read book The Science of Reading written by Margaret J. Snowling and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Science of Reading: A Handbook brings together state-of-the-art reviews of reading research from leading names in the field, to create a highly authoritative, multidisciplinary overview of contemporary knowledge about reading and related skills. Provides comprehensive coverage of the subject, including theoretical approaches, reading processes, stage models of reading, cross-linguistic studies of reading, reading difficulties, the biology of reading, and reading instruction Divided into seven sections:Word Recognition Processes in Reading; Learning to Read and Spell; Reading Comprehension; Reading in Different Languages; Disorders of Reading and Spelling; Biological Bases of Reading; Teaching Reading Edited by well-respected senior figures in the field
Download or read book Communicating Science Effectively written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2017-03-08 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science and technology are embedded in virtually every aspect of modern life. As a result, people face an increasing need to integrate information from science with their personal values and other considerations as they make important life decisions about medical care, the safety of foods, what to do about climate change, and many other issues. Communicating science effectively, however, is a complex task and an acquired skill. Moreover, the approaches to communicating science that will be most effective for specific audiences and circumstances are not obvious. Fortunately, there is an expanding science base from diverse disciplines that can support science communicators in making these determinations. Communicating Science Effectively offers a research agenda for science communicators and researchers seeking to apply this research and fill gaps in knowledge about how to communicate effectively about science, focusing in particular on issues that are contentious in the public sphere. To inform this research agenda, this publication identifies important influences â€" psychological, economic, political, social, cultural, and media-related â€" on how science related to such issues is understood, perceived, and used.
Download or read book The Outward Mind written by Benjamin Morgan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as incontrovertibly intertwined.
Download or read book Infowhelm written by Heather Houser and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do artists and writers engage with environmental knowledge in the face of overwhelming information about catastrophe? What kinds of knowledge do the arts produce when addressing climate change, extinction, and other environmental emergencies? What happens to scientific data when it becomes art? In Infowhelm, Heather Houser explores the ways contemporary art manages environmental knowledge in an age of climate crisis and information overload. Houser argues that the infowhelm—a state of abundant yet contested scientific information—is an unexpectedly resonant resource for environmental artists seeking to go beyond communicating stories about crises. Infowhelm analyzes how artists transform the techniques of the sciences into aesthetic material, repurposing data on everything from butterfly migration to oil spills and experimenting with data collection, classification, and remote sensing. Houser traces how artists ranging from novelist Barbara Kingsolver to digital memorialist Maya Lin rework knowledge traditions native to the sciences, entangling data with embodiment, quantification with speculation, precision with ambiguity, and observation with feeling. Their works provide new ways of understanding environmental change while also questioning traditional distinctions between types of knowledge. Bridging the environmental humanities, digital media studies, and science and technology studies, this timely book reveals the importance of artistic medium and form to understanding environmental issues and challenges our assumptions about how people arrive at and respond to environmental knowledge.
Download or read book Magic Science and Empire in Postcolonial Literature written by Kathleen Renk and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-29 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the ways in which contemporary British and British postcolonial writers in the after-empire era draw connections between magic (defined here as Renaissance Hermetic philosophy) and science. Writers such as Tom Stoppard, Zadie Smith, and Margaret Atwood critique both imperial science, or science used in service to empire, and what Renk calls "imperical science," a distortion of rational science which denies that reality is holistic and claims that nature can and should be conquered. In warning of the dangers of imperical science, these writers restore the connection between magic and science as they examine major shifts in scientific thinking across the centuries. They reflect on the Copernican Revolution and the historic split between magic and science, scrutinize Darwinism, consider the relationship between Victorian science and pseudo-science, analyze twentieth-century Uncertainty theories, reject bio/genetic engineering, call for a new approach to science that reconnects science and art, and ultimately endeavor to bring an end to the imperial age. Overall, these writers forge a new discourse that merges science with the arts and emphasizes a holistic philosophy, a view shared by both Hermetic philosophy and recent scientific theories, such as chaos or complexity theory. Along with recent books that focus on the relationship between contemporary literature and science, this work focuses on contemporary British literature’s critique of science and the ways in which postcolonial literature addresses the relationship between magic, science, and empire.
Download or read book Technologies of Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc written by Claire Shaw and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-11-16 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The project to create a 'New Man' and 'New Woman' initiated in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc constituted one of the most extensive efforts to remake human psychophysiology in modern history. Playing on the different meanings of the word 'technology' - as practice, knowledge and artefact - this edited volume brings together scholarship from across a range of fields to shed light on the ways in which socialist regimes in the Soviet bloc and Eastern Europe sought to transform and revolutionise human capacities. From external, state-driven techniques of social control and bodily management, through institutional practices of transformation, to strategies of self-fashioning, Technologies of Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc probes how individuals and collectives engaged with - or resisted - the transformative imperatives of the Soviet experiment. The volume's broad scope covers topics including the theory and practice of revolutionary embodiment; the practice of expert knowledge and disciplinary power in psychotherapy and criminology; the representation and transformation of ideal bodies through mass media and culture; and the place of disabled bodies in the context of socialist transformational experiments. The book brings the history of human 're-making' and the history of Soviet and Eastern Bloc socialism into conversation in a way that will have broad and lasting resonance.
Download or read book Representations of Science in Twenty First Century Fiction written by Nina Engelhardt and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-06-28 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores current thematic and aesthetic directions in fictional science narratives in different genres, predominantly novels, but also poetry, film, and drama. The ten case studies, covering a range of British and American texts from the late twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, reflect the diversity of representations of science in contemporary fiction, including psychopharmacology and neuropathology, quantum physics and mathematics, biotechnology, genetics, and chemical weaponry. This collection considers how texts engage with science and technology to explore relations between bodies and minds, how such connectivities shape conceptions and narrations of the human, and how the speculative view of science fiction features alongside realist engagements with the Victorian period and modernism. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, contributors offer new insights into narrative engagement with science and its place in life today, in times past, and in times to come.
Download or read book Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction written by James Peacock and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this collection address the current preoccupation with neurological conditions and disorders in contemporary literature by British and American writers. The book places these fictional treatments within a broader cultural and historical context, exploring such topics as the two cultures debate, the neurological turn, postmodernism and the post-postmodern, and responses to September 11th. Considering a variety of materials including mainstream literary fiction, the graphic novel, popular fiction, autobiographical writing, film, and television, contributors consider the contemporary dimensions of the interface between the sciences and humanities, developing the debate about the post-postmodern as a new humanism or a return to realism and investigating questions of form and genre, and of literary continuities and discontinuities. Further, the essays discuss contemporary writers’ attempts to engage the relation between the individual and the social, looking at the relation between the "syndrome syndrome" (referring to the prevalence in contemporary literature of neurological phenomena evident at the biological level) and existing work in the field of trauma studies (where explanations tend to have taken a psychoanalytical form), allowing for perspectives that question some of the assumptions that have marked both these fields. The current literary preoccupation with neurological conditions presents us with a new and distinctive form of trauma literature, one concerned less with psychoanalysis than with the physical and evolutionary status of human beings.
