scholarly journals Species Thinking Without Agency: The Afterlife of Slavery, Clones, and Blurring Subject and Object in the Anthropocene

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-45
Author(s):  
Joey Song
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Kazuo Ishiguro ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Individual ◽  
And Control ◽  
Afterlife Of Slavery

The overwhelming scale of climate change demands new ways of bridging national, cultural, and taxonomic differences. However, ecocritical frameworks that emphasise non-human agency in an attempt to make human individuals empathise with other people, other species, and the earth are haunted by the tenacious spectre of nineteenth-century classical liberalism’s characterization of personhood through specious, fragile dichotomies that can largely fall under the general rubric of agency versus determinism. The putatively opposed terms of these binaries are malleable, and control of their designation is a key element of control societies. Contemporary scholarship has identified several ways subjects bleed into objects, but, even though the ‘individual’ should theoretically collapse under its own ontological pressure in our current biopolitical age, neoliberalism largely holds onto classical liberalism’s central dogma of a person as an agential individual. I analyse the novel Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro and its critical analyses to show how the plight to recognise agency is a prison of analysis that upholds an ideal of the individual as the bastion of personhood. As seen through the afterlife of slavery post-emancipation, those in power can discursively recognise the humanity in people formerly designated 'things' while still perpetuating systematic exploitation and dehumanisation. The metric of ‘agency’ as a unit of hope is an epistemic barrier to effective political rhetoric regarding climate change and species thinking.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Matthew Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Future Study ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
The World ◽  
Individual Contributions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Narrative Thread ◽  
The Relationship

This introduction considers the ‘environmental turn’ taken in the humanities, and particularly in historical study, suggesting ways in which these developments might animate the future study of nineteenth-century Ireland. Question of agency and the relationship between human and non-human nature are addressed. Also considered is how current environmental concerns, and climate change in particular, should lead us to think anew about the past, rendering familiar subjects unfamiliar. Particular attention is paid to how Ireland’s past might be located within larger global processes, attracting the interest of scholars from throughout the world. It then introduces the individual contributions in the volume, tracing a narrative thread through them in order to demonstrate how a change in optic can significantly change how we think about Ireland’s recent past.

Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities

PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert D. Hutter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Critical Model ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Critical Methods ◽  
The French Revolution

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.

Characterization of Multipoint Diffraction Strain Sensor (MISS)

2006 ◽  
Vol 326-328 ◽  
pp. 87-90
Author(s):  
S. Iqbal ◽  
Anand Krishna Asundi
Keyword(s):  
High Frequency ◽  
Strain Sensor ◽  
Ccd Camera ◽  
Industrial Applications ◽  
Body Tilt ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Multiple Points ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Micro Lens Array

A Multipoint Diffraction Strain Sensor (MISS) with the novel feature of simultaneous strain measurement at multiple points is characterized. Unlike conventional interferometry based systems, this patented sensor uses principles of diffraction to directly measure strain at large number of points. In this sensor, a high-frequency diffraction grating is illuminated by two symmetric laser beams and the diffracted beams are sampled on a CCD camera via a micro-lens array into an array of dots. The shift of the individual dots is sensed and strains or rigid body tilt are calculated directly. This novel technique is expected to be very valuable in numerous industrial applications.

scholarly journals Characterization of the individual glucose uptake systems ofLactococcus lactis: mannose-PTS, cellobiose-PTS and the novel GlcU permease

2009 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 795-806 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rute Castro ◽  
Ana R. Neves ◽  
Luís L. Fonseca ◽  
Wietske A. Pool ◽  
Jan Kok ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Glucose Uptake ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Individual

scholarly journals Between Social Utopia and Totalitarian Reality: “Children of Milky Way” by Dokiia Humenna

2019 ◽  
pp. 73-89
Author(s):  
Vadym Vasylenko
Keyword(s):  
Milky Way ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Life Strategies ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
And Control ◽  
Social Utopia

The paper considers the novel “Children of Milky Way” by Dokiia Humenna in the context of the postwar Ukrainian diaspora’s literary process. The focus is on the issues of relations between fiction and documentary writing, the individual and collective experiences. The literary Kyiv, being one of the central images in Dokiia Humenna’s novel, appears not only as a page from individual or national histories, a sample of the Kyiv text in the Ukrainian diaspora’s prose, but also as a generalization based on such texts and made due to various forms of intertextuality, which absorb the history and atmosphere of the Kyiv 1920s. The problem of interrelations between the writer and government, art, politic, and ideology is one of the most essential in the novel: Dokia Humenna reveals various aspects of the writer’s life and work in conditions of the totalitarian state and culture – from suicide to madness, from resistance to adaptation and collaboration. A future person and society in “Children of Milky Way” are represented in a commune. The histories of the two characters-antipodes Taras Saragola and Seraphym Carmalita are connected to its progress and decline; in the world of totalitarian repressions and control they choose different life strategies and roles. The memory about Soviet terror and repressions, as well as the Holodomor-genocide, “killing the Ukrainian peasantry as a foundation of the nation and destructing intellectuals as a brain of the nation” is important in the novel. The history of collectivization is related to the traumatic memory of the serfdom times, which affects  the second and third generations and deepens the trauma caused by disintegration of a family, destruction of the patriarchal peasant world. This process was accompanied by desacralization of the Father’s figure as a personification of power, by infantilization of masculinity. The writer associates totalitarian reality with the metaphor of Night, which acquires different ambiguous meanings in the Ukrainian anti-totalitarian discourse.

scholarly journals From Christian spirituality to eco-friendliness

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-38
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Orok Duke
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Christian Spirituality ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Individual

Spirituality connotes praxis informed by religious or faith convictions. This can transform the individual and society at large. Christian spirituality is centered on how a person’s relationship with the God of Jesus Christ informs and directs one’s approach to existence and engagement with the world. The ecosystem concerns humanity and relationship with it is invariably influenced by faith or religious informed praxis. The reality of climate change is convincing many people that humankind’s common homeland needs to be treated with care and respect if created beings are to have a congenial habitat now and in the future. This article avers that Christian spirituality can contribute to eco-friendly behavior through re-formation of the behavior of people and emboldening their goodwill as regards the responsibility of all towards the care of the earth. Finally, this research proffers a three-fold model of eco-spirituality - scriptural, self-control, and sacramental approaches to the earth – as a contribution towards stemming the tide of ecological assaults on creation. Textual analysis is the method used in this research.

Faces of the Self

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-274
Author(s):  
Vanita Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Muslim Woman ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Face ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The Individual

AbstractThis paper traces the centrality of the human face in the construction of modern individuality. It argues that the face of individuality no less than that of typology, is mired in and born of historical and political conditions that are subsequently disavowed in order that the individual (and the face she bears) is rendered a product of nature, an instantiation of the universal. Attempting to denaturalize and defamiliarize the authority invested in the face, this paper maps out three interrelated arguments: that the human face is historically produced; that its history is closely tethered to the production of modern subjectivity, and that its status as a purveyor of meaning relies upon the reiteration of preexisting norms through which it can be “read.” And yet, while this paper turns to the nineteenth century to trace the novel privileging of the face as an extension of selfhood, interwoven through this history is the figure of the “effaced” Muslim woman and the Muslim terrorist type.

scholarly journals FUNKCIJA SELEKCIJE, KARAKTERIZACIJE I KONSTELACIJE LIKOVA U ROMANU VOLFGANGA HERNDORFA „ČIK“

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (49) ◽  
pp. 303-320
Author(s):  
Ivana Pajić ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Process ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Image ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Self Development ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Selection Of

The subject of the present work is Wolfgang Herrndorf’s award-winning youth novel Tsch- ick (i.e. “German Youth Literature Prize” (2011) and “Clemens Brentano Prize” (2012)). The novel, released in 2010, has sold more than two million copies to date and has been translated into more than 25 languages. In the novel, the story is told by Maik Klingenberg, a fourteen- year-old teenager who is left devastated by the surrounding circumstances and his outsider position before the summer holidays, but through his friendship with Tschick (during the summer holidays) experiences a solution and development process that changes his view of the world and his positioning to his environment and to himself in a positive way. The main focus of the work lies on the (explicit and implicit) character selection, characterization and constellation in the text. The methodological approach to textual analysis is based on insights from narratology, sociology and psychoanalysis. After a theoretical-introductory part, the text-analytical part begins with the selection of the staff of the fictitious world depicted in the novel and shows that the author’s novel gives a pluralistic-heterogeneous-inter- or transcul- tural social image of the German capital Berlin and its (wider) environment. In the following chapter of the work, the introductory characterization of the main character and the related figure constellations will be discussed in more detail. It is shown that Herrndorf uses these constellations to address the complex interrelation between the individual and various col- lective identities, such as those into which the subject is born (Maik’s parents), and those to whom the subject belongs based on the present circumstances of life (Maik’s teacher and the other students of the school). The focus of analysis of the following part lies on those figure constellations that have arisen as a result of Maik’s escape from the structures crushing him (Maik’s voluntary social interactions and friendly ties) and by which the author refers to the dynamic constitution of personal identity, of which the developmental process defies static defining and reveals the possibility of self-change and self-development. Based on the pre- viously given text analysis, the last part of the thesis gives a conclusion corresponding to the analysis results.

The Rise of the Sea and the Novel

differences ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Thangam Ravindranathan
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sea Levels ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Rising Sea Levels

This essay is a speculative reflection on literary fiction’s—and notably the contemporary French novel’s—ability to register the effects of climate change. The first half engages with Amitav Ghosh’s thinking on this question in his 2016 book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. The second examines Marguerite Duras’s Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950) as a novel about rising sea levels and discusses what it might mean to read this classic in these terms. The essay then considers which works today might be Duras’s successors and what such a refocusing of our sights on the material effects on the earth of fossil-fueled capitalism and empire implies for reading today.

scholarly journals Glacial Deaths, Geologic Extinction

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-300
Author(s):  
Jeremy J. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Biological Species ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Anthropogenic Forcing ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Original Argument ◽  
The Right

Abstract In 2019 several funerals were held for glaciers. If enough glaciers die, could they go extinct? Is there geologic extinction? Yes. This article develops three arguments to support this claim. The first revisits Georges Cuvier’s original argument for extinction and its reliance on geology, especially glaciers. Retracing connections to glaciers and the narrowing of extinction to biological species in the nineteenth century, the author argues that anthropogenic forcing on how the Earth system functions—the Anthropocene—warrants rethinking extinction geologically. The second argument examines the specificity of ice loss and multiple practices responding to this loss: from art exhibits at United Nations climate change meetings to anticolonial claims for the right to be cold. The third argument consolidates a theme built across the article regarding how Isabelle Stengers’s notion of ecologies of practices provides an approach to geologic extinction that recognizes both relational and nonrelational loss.

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