Life, Re-Scaled : The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance / Liliane Campos, Pierre-Louis Patoine.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Campos, Liliane, author.

Patoine, Pierre-Louis, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Performing arts.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (420 pages)

Other Title:

Life, Re-Scaled

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, England : Open Book Publishers, 2022.

Summary:

"This edited volume explores new engagements with the life sciences in contemporary fiction, poetry, comics and performance. The gathered case studies investigate how recent creative work reframes the human within microscopic or macroscopic scales, from cellular biology to systems ecology, and engages with the ethical, philosophical, and political issues raised by the twenty-first century's shifting views of life. The collection thus examines literature and performance as spaces that shape our contemporary biological imagination. Comprised of thirteen chapters by an international group of academics, Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance engages with four main areas of biological study: 'Invisible scales: cells, microbes and mycelium', 'Neuro-medical imaging and diagnosis', 'Pandemic imaginaries', and 'Ecological scales'. The authors examine these concepts in emerging forms such as plant theatre, climate change art, ecofiction and pandemic fiction, including the work of Jeff Vandermeer, Jon McGregor, Jeff Lemire, and Extinction Rebellion's Red Rebel Brigade performances. This valuable resource moves beyond the biological paradigms that were central to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to outline the specificity of a contemporary imagination. Life, Re-Scaled is crucial reading for academics, scholars, and authors alike, as it proposes an unprecedented overview of the relationship between literature, performance and the life sciences in the twenty-first century."--Publisher's website.

Contents:

Intro

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

1. Introduction

Imagination, Science and Power

Questions of Scale

Aesthetic Trends

Chapter Presentation

Works Cited

I. Invisible Scales: Cells, Microbes and Mycelium

2. Human Environmental Aesthetics: The Molecular Sublime and the Molecular Grotesque

The Molecular Sublime

Imagining Microbes: From the Molecular Sublime to the Molecular Grotesque

Molecular Landscapes: New Ways of Reading the Anthropocene

Conclusion: The Big Moment of the Very Small

Works Cited 3. Still Life and Vital Matter in Gillian Clarke's Poetry

The Poetry of Stone

Playing with Scale

Images of Metamorphosis and Development

Sounding the Flesh

Science in the Landscape

4. Mycoaesthetics: Weird Fungi and Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation

Weird Ecology, Weird Fiction

Wood Wide Web as Ecological Genome

The Fungal Kingdom

II. Neuro-Medical Imaging and Diagnosis

5. To Be or Not to Be a Patient: Challenging Biomedical Categories in Joshua Ferris's The Unnamed

Challenging Medical Knowledge and Classifications Challenging Neurological Reduction

Challenging Social and Literary Categories

6. Neurocomics and Neuroimaging: David B.'s Epileptic and Matteo Farinella and Hana Roš's Neurocomic

The Tools of Comics

The Tools of Neuroimaging

A Person Surrounds This Brain

III. Pandemic Imaginaries

7. The Fiction of the Empty Pandemic City: Race and Diaspora in Ling Ma's Severance

8. Dead Gods and Geontopower: An Ecocritical Reading of Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth

Works Cited 9. Depopulating the Novel: Post-Catastrophe Fiction, Scale, and the Population Unconscious

The Population Unconscious

Cosy Catastrophe

Population between Science and Speculation in Science Fiction

Survival at Scale in Post-Catastrophe Science Fiction

Utopian and Realist Fictions

Conclusion: Downscaling Survival

IV. Ecological Scales

10. The Everyday Pluriverse: Ecosystem Modelling in Reservoir 13

Introduction: The Rural Mesocosm

Noticing Nonhuman Narratives

Visualising Coexistence, Part I Modelling Interspecies Assemblages Visualising Coexistence, Part II

Conclusion: Scale and Stoicism in the Everyday Anthropocene

11. The Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies of Climate Change Comics

Making the Global Threat Personal

Anthropomorphic Figures

Biography and Autobiography Scientific Distance Versus Intimate Experience

12. Displacing the Human: Representing Ecological Crisis on Stage

'It's Actually Not About Us': The Paradox of Human-Centric Ecological Drama

Shifting the Boundaries: The Spatial, the Temporal, and the Sensory.

Notes:

Description based on: online resource; title from PDF information screen (Worldcat, viewed March 29, 2023).

ISBN:

1-80064-750-6