This paper will explore how certain canine fictions of lab science negotiate what are perhaps the most irreconcilable disciplinary poles characterizing the so-called two-culture divide: animal rights philosophies and laboratory science practices. Among the many remakes and revisions of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, recent texts cast dogs not just as scientific creations but also as members of scientific teams. Together these very different stories about Frankenstein's dogs do more than simply reflect a split between active or passive, actual or fictional narratives of scientific subjects. Addressing anxieties about compromising scientific "objectivity" by granting varying degrees of social agency to animals, they also present a range of models for conceptualizing animals in laboratory life. Examinations of these narrative patterns raise broader questions about how animal studies offers a means of critically engaging with animal science and rights philosophies.

Susan McHugh (University of New England)

An Obsession with Boundaries: Animal Studies in its Own Right

This paper will examine some of the current limitations of animal studies and suggest ways in which the subject might be seen as a disciplinary area in its own right with quite particular forms of theorising that do not relate to those derived from traditions in the humanities geared to explaining human questions. Whilst there are some exceptions to this picture, there has been to date far too much focus on the human as the centre of gravity of animal studies; a bias towards textual sources and textual readings of the animal; a lack of interest in cultural and social differences in attitudes and practices towards animals both within the same society and across societies globally; and a lack of a sense of urgency in attending to the problems facing human-animal relations. Recent postmodern and posthuman analyses, interesting as they are, have represented a step backwards in animal studies failing to grasp the practical and institutional frameworks of human-animal relations of what is a very dark history as well as continuing, albeit unintentionally, to fetishise the human. There is a need to move the animal to centre stage in animal studies and develop theories out of the overall framework of human-animal relations rather than use those developed for a different purpose, which is that of a specifically text based Western theoretical tradition.

Jonathan Burt (Animal Studies Group, UK)

This Is the Trunk . . . and This Is the Tale: Elephants, Science, and the Humanities

Building on the panel's overall interest in disciplinary and interdisciplinary discussions of animals, this paper examines the conundrum faced by a cultural historian attempting 1) to make sense out of scientific accounts of elephants, and 2) to translate the definitive vernacular of "science" into something that would make sense to both other historians and a more general audience.

Nigel Rothfels (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)

Session 1B: Pharmakos, Double-binds, Singularities

Panel Chair: Michael A. Fortun (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)

Doublebinds and Other Moving Objects in the Anthropology of Technoscience.

This paper discusses various "objects" – doublebinds, experimental systems, promises, faultlines – that anthropologists have used to situate technoscience historically, and to elicit technoscientists' own historical sensibilities. Doublebinds, for example, as conceived by Gregory Bateson, confront people with multiple obligations that cannot all be fulfilled; they cannot be "solved" through reference to existing explanatory narratives. Doublebinds are failures of language and meaning. They also spur creativity, forcing people to "dream up" new ways of understanding and engaging the world. Experimental systems, as written about by Hans Jorg Rheinberger, are what scientists work with to produce new knowledge. Such systems must be capable of "differential reproduction," allowing shifts and displacements in the investigative process that produce something different from what was known before. Like double binds, experimental systems require oscillation between what is known and what is not known; they require choices that cannot be made through reference to existing explanatory narratives.

Kim Fortun (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)

A Social Science Fiction of Pharmakons and Fevers: Malaria, the colonial laboratory and the post-colonial new human.

This paper explores malaria research and eradication campaigns through both social science and science fiction. Malaria is a classic actor-network in that it is caused by a parasite transmitted by a vector to humans and thrives in a range of milieux. It is more a relation than a thing and thus very difficult to eradicate as many aspects of the disease and its cure remain poorly understood. Because of this I deploy social science fiction as a laboratory to explore malaria as a disease, a transmittor, and human attempts to confront it as a pharmakon, both cure and poison. I draw on my own fieldwork on research and public health in Latin America and a science fiction novel, "The Calcutta Chromosome: A novel of fevers, delirium and discovery," written by the social scientist Amitav Ghosh. I put social sf in play with critical studies of technology, medicine, and empire, to explore Europe's colonies as laboratories of modernity with both work (labor) and slippage (labi). My paper will follow Ghosh in linking malaria with colonial tropes (ways of knowing) and troops (the militarized aspects of colonial and post-colonial science) to imagine a new human arising from the interconnections and counterscience devised in such laboratories.

Diane M. Nelson (Duke University)

Pursuing Singularity in the Sciences: Experimental Moments in Biological Nitrogen Fixation Research.

This paper stages a conversation between historians of the life sciences and biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) researchers, inhabitants of the plant, microbial and symbiosis sciences. These scientists describe their encounters with the biological, technological, social, ethical and semiotic worlds they inhabit, and the historian listens for articulations of experimental moments amid handy generalizations of objectivity and method, and scientists' reconstructions of the rational processes of discovery. Experimental moments are moments of singularity, irreducible events in the sciences, generators of surprise. Isabelle Stengers has characterized the singularity of the science practiced by Barbara McClintock as "the search for ways through which the world can force us to abandon the ideas we have about it" (1997). In studying the sciences, how might science studies scholars likewise engage with their subjects in the writing of their history? Can conversations with scientists eliciting rich descriptions of scientists' practices, encounters and habitations force us to abandon the general ideas we have about scientists and the sciences?

Jeanette Simmonds (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)

Session 1C: Textual Play: Women's Work in Literary Hypermedia Worldwide

Panel Chair: Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink (Electronic Literature Organization)

Panelist: Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink (Electronic Literature Organization)

Panelist: Laurie Taylor (University of Florida)

Panelist: Stephanie Strickland (Columbia College Chicago)

Session 1D: The Lens of Science: Tensions in 19th Century Representation of Nature in Painting, the Agricultural Treatise, and Natural Theology

Panel Chair: Benjamin R. Cohen (Virginia Tech)

Dabbling with Davy: The Opaque Lens of Chemistry in American Agricultural Writing

Agricultural treatises are peripheral to the nature writing genre, even though the dominant form of environmental interaction in both northern and southern nineteenth-century America was agricultural. In the early Republic, before agricultural chemistry became the credible contributor it would later be, those texts also provide examples of how, using the lens of chemistry, Americans understood and described the nature they cultivated. In this paper, I refer to three regional texts aimed at improving agricultural practice--by Edmund Ruffin (Virginia), John Lorain (Pennsylvania), and Daniel Adams (New England)--as a way to explore how chemistry fit between the authors and their subjects. Humphry Davy's (1813) Elements of Agricultural Chemistry was the main resource for almost all treatises on the relation of chemistry to agriculture. Thus, in this paper I discuss how the authors refuted, appropriated, or tempered Davy's work as they wrote about the cultivated land around them.

Benjamin R. Cohen (Virginia Tech)

Martin Johnson Heade's Hummingbirds: in the tropics & between the poles, mediating science and art

Martin Johnson Heade (American, 1819-1904) painted over 100 paintings of hummingbirds: beautiful, detailed, and difficult-to-categorize combinations of landscape, natural history, and still life. In London in 1864, he planned to complete a monograph on hummingbirds, which remained unrealized. But these hummingbird paintings led to a flock of hummingbird pictures, images that combine the descriptive with the suggestive. The images and Heade's writings about hummingbirds reveal the distinctly nineteenth-century tension between making his work harder -- by making it more accurate and scientifically rigorous; and making it more poetic -- by designating the hummingbird's fairy-like nature through the artist's magic of illusion. Working in the midst of the battle between Darwin and Agassiz, he painted his own battle between scientific illustration and fairy magic. Juxtaposing Heade's paintings with images from his contemporaries in British and American natural history, I investigate the ways Heade's peculiar paintings reveal more than birds and flowers, but reveal the extras anxiously.

Betsy Towns (UNC-CH Art Department)

William Paley, Gilbert White, and the New Awareness of Local and Exotic Nature in England

Alan Rauch (University of North Carolina at Charlotte)

Session 1E: The Rhetoric of Virtual Embodiment, Intelligent Assistants, and Virtual Humans

Chair: Sheryl Brahnam (Southwest Missouri State University)

The virtual text is watching you: Facing the virtual face interface

Title: The virtual text is watching you: Facing the virtual face interface Author: Sheryl Brahnam (MFA art and PhD computer science) Email: shb757f@smsu.edu Abstract: This paper considers the text as a missing face. The analysis begins with Socrates' complaint that writing is inferior to speech because it cannot see and adapt its message to the reader. It explores the post-Renaissance obsession with face reading and the modern obsession with rewriting the human face. The essay ends with electronic text. Businesses now track readers, building individual profiles that are used to assemble personalized pages. Socrates' objection that writing is unable to perceive the reader no longer holds: the virtual text is watching you. And it is watching you with virtual eyes. There is a growing interest in face interfaces that are capable of perceiving and talking. Not only are these virtual faces learning to read the user's face, but they are also learning to write their own faces--to map rhetorical forms to the character of their interlocutors in ways Socrates could not have imagined.

Sheryl Brahnam (Southwest Missouri State University)

Designing Women the Old-Fashioned Way: The Gendered Rhetoric of Animated Interface Design

As animated and intelligent software agents become increasingly popular user interfaces on the web, we need to attend critically to the values that inform their design. Put simply, agents that are designed to seem "humanlike" are inscribed with cultural values about what it means to talk, act, and look human. Moreover, given that users treats computers as social actors, it is important that critics pay attention to the ways in which virtual agents are sustained through a set of design ideologies and styles of interaction. First, this paper will address the history of the female automaton, and how that history is mirrored in today's virtual agents. Then, this paper will build on that history to explore the gendered rhetoric of intelligent interfaces in news media discourse. Web agents are too often figured by designers as young women in stereotypical roles (e.g. secretary, sex object, etc.), and are supported in the news media by a discourse that celebrates technological innovation as an end in itself. As a result, stereotypes are reinforced; the technologist's perspective is treated as normative while the perspectives of potential users and critics are minimized. But more importantly, technology comes to serve an ideology in which women are feminized, treated as objects. The idea of women as automatons to be programmed and controlled is made literal through the construction of tools that are figured as young women eager to lend a hand.

Sheryl Brahnam (Southwest Missouri State University)
Sean Zdenek (Texas Tech University)

Session 1F: Sciences of the Virtual: Deleuze and Beyond

Chair: Arkady Plotnitsky (Purdue University)

Intuitionism as Minor Mathematics

Through numerous examples, Gilles Deleuze stakes out a minor mathematics, a political mathematics in which problems take priority over solutions, the local matters more than the universal, and the fate of the mathematics is tied to the activity of the mathematician. The twentieth-century school of mathematics, intuitionism, is the paradigm of minor mathematics. A study of the history of the intuitionist definition of number demonstrates its close alliance with Deleuzian ideas and shows a minor mathematics at work. Moreover, this history of intuitionism suggests lessons about intellectual history more generally, isolating the moment where the secure traditions of a discipline fracture to forge new techniques and concepts. This general claim about history is tested in another domain: the generation of meaning in sound.

Aden Evens (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

The Working of the Virtual: Between Modern Physics and Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy

This essay will explore the conjunction(s) between Gilles Deleuze concept (including in Deleuze and Guattari's special sense of philosophical concept) of the virtual, from his earlier works to "What Is Philosophy?" and modern mathematics and physics, including some of it most advanced developments, such as chaos theory and, most especially, quantum field theory. While the essay will offer a comprehensive discussion of the relationships between the workings of the virtual in Deleuze and modern mathematics and science, the core argument of the essay will address the relationships between the idea of virtual particle formation, introduced by Paul Dirac as part of his discovery of antimatter, arguably the most radical idea of the 20th-century physics (going even beyond quantum mechanics) and Deleuze and Guattari's equally radical concept of chaos in "What is Philosophy?". Deleuze and Guattari argue there that philosophy and mathematics and science are different ways to keep at bay chaos, which they see as, a or even the, "enemy of thought." While supporting this argument, the essay will also argue that modern mathematics and science and specifically the idea(s) of virtual there are also philosophical and, I shall argue, indeed Deleuzean, and mathematics and science use this Deleuzean strength of their concepts to fight the chaos of thinking.

Arkady Plotnitsky (Purdue University)

The Fictions of Science and the Physics of Lev Landau - Quasi-Particles, Broken Symmetry and Quantum Field Theory in Condensed Matter

While Quantum Field theory is usually thought of in the context of elementary particles and high energy physics, some of the most widely used field theory concepts were born in the work of Lev Landau and other Soviet physicists working on superfluidity, superconductivity and other problems in mid-20th c condensed matter physics. Landau developed the notions of quasi-particle and broken symmetry as what are sometimes referred to (not in a laudatory tone) as "quasi-phenomenological" theories. Through these examples I explore the introduction of "ficta" in physics such as quasi-particles (on the model of "Musica Ficta") and the parameters controlling their development. I place the use of the devices in the context of the discovery and development of new physical subject matters and argue for the special nature of such an enterprise.

David Reed

Session 2

Thu, Oct 14, 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

Session 2A: Darwin's The Descent and Animal Studies

Panel Chair: Lee Sterrenburg (Indiana University, Bloomington)

Ethical Animals in _The Descent of Man_

As part of his naturalistic account of the origins of morality in The Descent of Man, Darwin suggests that intelligent social animals will tend to produce individuals who are capable of sacrificing their lives for the good of their fellows. As evidence, he cites anecdotes such as that of the older baboon who returns to rescue a young baboon from a circle of angry dogs. Recent work has lent support to Darwin's argument, and suggested mechanisms by which proto-moral self-sacrificing behavior might be favored by natural selection. (I make use of de Waal's Good Natured here.) When, in his conclusion, Darwin asserts that he would as soon be descended from such a heroic baboon as from savage humans who commit torture and infanticide, he invokes the arguments of Enlightenment conjectural histories; but he inverts most of those narratives by arguing for a stronger connection between civilized humans and ethical apes than between modern Europeans and non-European savages. Still, there remains a continuity between Darwin and the conjectural historians, for they both place savages beneath the other humans or animals with whom they are compared.

Frank Palmeri (University of Miami)

Evolutionary Groundings for Animal Studies: Hume's and Darwin's Critiques of the Fixed and Preserved Enlightenment Animal

Travel narratives, natural histories, and speculative histories of the Enlightenment often used rhetoric about the "preservation" of the species and the self in order to argue that species are machine-like or have fixed morphologies, instincts, or behaviors. At the same time, Enlightenment writers produced numerous empirical exceptions to their own rules about fixity. They found changing instincts and behaviors among many kinds of mobile organisms, including birds and mammals. David Hume exploited that contradiction in his DIALOGUES CONCERNING NATURAL RELIGION of 1779. Charles Darwin in THE DESCENT OF MAN AND SELECTION IN RELATION TO SEX turned the received languages of "preservation" into a language about changing proclivities in animal mate choice, animal aesthetics, shifting instincts, and animal impacts on the surroundings. We should start our own animal studies of the present time with details of Darwinian evolution and not with continued pro-forma attacks on a fixed Enlightenment animal—a being that existed only as a figment of philosophy.

Lee Sterrenburg (Indiana University, Bloomington)

Becoming Darwinian: Narrating the Body in Darwin's Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex

As current critical theory looks to "the animal" in order to "subvert the subject" or "deterritorialize" Oedipal linguistic systems, the need to reconsider Charles Darwin's nineteenth century deconstruction of 'man' as subject, author, and independent creation becomes increasingly significant. In this paper, I would like to consider Darwin's work, particularly in relation to narrations of non-static bodies, in the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex as a model of linguistic play that has prior to twentieth century science or theory already called into question the efficacy of classification systems and narrative style. While part of my concern in this paper will be with actual bodies (both in Darwin's text and in its illustrations), I will also consider the tensions within Darwin's theory as he negotiates his own ability to read and write natural bodies outside of traditional literary trends.

Jill Hochman (Indiana University, Bloomington)

Session 2B: Constructing Cultural Meanings of Genetics

Panel Chair: David Kirby (Duke University)

So Real It's Scary: The Impact of Jurassic Park on Biotechnology and Genetic Research

Jurassic Park is a striking example of how a fictional entity with the veneer of scientific reality can create fear and distrust. Jurassic Park has certainly inspired academic discourse about the cultural impact of genetic engineering and genetic research. What has yet to be addressed is how Jurassic Park, whether its message was valid or not, has had a major impact on genetic research and the field of biotechnology by influencing public attitudes towards these research areas. In this paper, I will demonstrate the ways in which Jurassic Park has affected both the academic and corporate research communities. I argue that the film's veneer of "reality," coupled with public statements from filmmakers and scientists proclaiming "scientific authenticity," has significantly contributed to the scientific community's anxiety about the film and resulted in a significant impact on real scientific research.

David Kirby (Duke University)

If everything is transformed then what is extinction? Transformation and Transgress in Julia Leigh's The Hunter

Extinction, much like the genes that are supposedly lost when a species disappears, is more conceptual than categorical. Rather than an absolute state, extinction is subject to the transformative tendencies of natural science in its speculative mode. The scientific and popular reaction to the recent success in extracting usable DNA from Tasmanian tiger specimens in the Australian Museum—whether or not it can help clone the animal "back to life"—demonstrates the symbolic value of such research. Experimental Tassie tiger DNA has taken on its own esteemed existence, referencing the island's unique indigenous life, the colonization that has threatened it, and the conservation efforts meant to hedge against further extinction. Part molecule, part ghost, the striped marsupial carnivore known as the thylacine has become, in its lively extinction, Tasmania's national mascot. In this way, the thylacine of the imagination compels a reexamination of such categories as death, uniqueness, postcolonialism, and national identity. I undertake this reexamination in an analysis of Australian author Julia Leigh's acclaimed first novel, The Hunter, identifying ways that this bioprospecting narrative both revises and reinscribes these categories.

Stephanie S. Turner (University of Houston-Downtown)

Sacrifice, Resident Evil, and the Economics of Genomics

In this presentation, I interrogate the role of sacrifice in two "texts": on the one hand, the 1990 case of Moore v. The Regents of the University of California and on the other, the recent Hollywood sci-fi horror film Resident Evil (2002). In the Moore court case, California Supreme Court justices argued that the only way to prevent a "sacrifice . . . of . . . innocent parties" was to deny plantiff John Moore property rights to a genetically altered cell line created from his diseased spleen. The court justified its claims by describing an "informational ecology" that connected the public with university research centers and corporations. By interrogating the role of "sacrifice" in a world in which genetic research has been completely commodified, Resident Evil explores--and to a limited extent, critiques--the assumptions about information, innovation, and time that underwrote both the Moore decision and the Bayh-Dole legislation that provided the logic of the Court's decision.

Robert Mitchell (Duke University)

Culturing the Pleebland: The Idea of the "Public" In Genetic Art and Fiction

In what follows, I want to take aim at some of the implied premises in Lander's statement -- first, that there is a coherent "public" available to receive and interpret images of and metaphors about genomic research; second, that such images circulate freely and equally, constituting in their multiplicity a form of "struggle" over the meaning of the genome, and third, that this "struggle," mediated by the "public," eventually plays a role in the ways in which scientists themselves see their object of study and pursue their research. While I do not deny a link between cultural representation and social and scientific practice, I want to shift our attention from a strict close reading of the cultural imagining of the genome to one that pays more sustained attention to the context of these imaginings, their conditions of production and means of circulation. Are the actual publics for works of genetic art and literature congruent with the publics imagined by their creators? How do the creators position themselves in relation to the public they construct? Do they hope that their work will change the nature of the public's relationship with genetic research? Finally, does there lurk in many of these texts, a disdain for the masses that exists in tension with the idea that the "public" needs to be saved and enlightened?

Lisa Lynch (Catholic University)

Session 2C: Novelist Ruth Ozeki reads: Manifesting Agricultural Studies

Panel Chair: Susan Squier (The Pennsylvania State University)

Manifesting AgriCultural Studies

Ruth Ozeki

A Manifesto for Agricultural Studies

Susan Squier (The Pennsylvania State University)

No Title

Priscilla Wald (Duke University)

Session 2D: Communicating Alien Materialities

Panel Chair: Robert Markley (University of Illinois)

Methane on Mars: Message and Materiality, 2004

This paper examines scientific responses to the confirmation by three independent teams in March 2004 that methane exists in the Martian atmosphere at concentrations of ten or eleven parts per billion. In the thin Martian atmosphere, methane molecules break down in less than three hundred years; therefore, the existence of the gas indicates an active source that must be replenishing this trace amount of methane. On earth, methane almost invariably is a marker of biological processes, although it also can be produced by geothermal activity. Even if methane on Mars can be traced to a volcanic or hydrothermal source, the existence of such activity beneath the planet's surface increases significantly the odds that methagens (bacteria that produce methane as a byproduct) currently exist on Mars: terrestrial thermal vents and hot springs teem with exotic forms of these extremophile microorganisms. Atmospheric methane on Mars, in effect, exists both as a material trace of as yet undetermined processes and as a sign within a complex semiotics of scientific representation. This paper draws on the work of Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and Niklas Luhmann to investigate the ways in which ambiguous scientific data produces complex, often competing, and invariably incomplete efforts to describe both historical narratives of causation and larger environmental systems.

Robert Markley (University of Illinois)

Making It Stick: Mud, Mortar, and Other Technologies of Empire

This paper contributes to the extended critique of the Enlightenment (as concept and historical phenomena) developed by feminists, by scholars of slavery and empire, and by materialist critics of varying persuasions, all of whom have pointed to the many forms of systematic exploitation and exclusion developed by the agents of European Enlightenment thought and practice. "Technologies of Empire" focuses primarily on India and the crucial ways in which technology, scientific practice, and epistemology informed European Enlightenment values and socio-political norms: the production of ice, the practice of inoculation (small pox), or the idea of 0 and its influence on mathematics. The first half of this paper focuses on substances--mud, mortar, surgical glue—excavating the history of their representation in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century India, in English encounters with these substances, and how they function as enduring cultural metaphors. The second half addresses technological implications of the relation between substance, sublimation, and the scientific sublime in Pope's Windsor-Forest. I conclude with a short discussion of "laptop colonialism" which links the complex historical relations between machinery and epistemological mastery and the shift in those relations that now understand manufacture as sullying labor. Mud, mortar, and glue structure the edifices of western identity and Asian alterity, cementing the material and the sublime, but such structures always are threatening to crumble.

Rajani Sudan (Southern Methodist University)

Extra-Terrestrial Encounter: Observation and Communication in Narrative and Systems

Social systems theory focuses on observation, but also makes a distinction between observation and operation: observation is one among many kinds of operations systems perform. Meanwhile, narrative theory has refined a distinction between narration per se and focalization, understood as the realm of perceptual perspectives organized, in Mieke Bal's narratological scheme, at the level of the story enacted by the text. Emerging in separate disciplinary realms, these two discourses of distinction—the operation/observation distinction, and the narration/focalization distinction—can be productively aligned. Narrative frames can be examined for significant messages about the interplay of psychic and social systemic operations and observations. This talk will explore that alignment through two mainstream science fiction narratives from the later 20^th century, recounting allegories of encounter between human and alien societies, Childhood's End and Contact.

Bruce Clarke (Texas Tech University)

Session 2E: Authors and Artifacts

Chair: Robert Fanning (West Virginia University)

Easier-Travel.com: Active immunization for your inner tourist

Easier-Travel.com We travel for pleasure and we travel for business. Our hunger for the authentic is boundless. Easier-Travel is a robotic messenger system with a dynamic database that mimics online travel services. Appropriating the technique and rhetoric of the travel industry, Easier-Travel brings tourism to its logical conclusion: the null trip. Travel proper is replaced by satellite events reminiscent of travel: messages, confirmations, welcome notes, warnings, advisories, rules and regulations, and finally, borrowed memories. Easier-Travel is active immunization for the inner tourist lurking in us all. As opposed to booking trips, visitors to Easier-Travel book the anticipation and fabrication of memory. This alternate travel reality is bound by the ritual of travel preparation, expectation and reenactment through the imagination of what might have been. Easier-Travel organizes a trip as travel agents do, with efficiency. Visitors choose a destination, date, and travel preferences. The Easier-Travel messaging agent notifies them of their booking, confirms flight details and issues travel advisories. Usually, everything goes according to plan. But travel always carries the potential of the unexpected and extraordinary. A few days after the trip that never happened is over, the Easier-Travel messaging agent sends its customers images from the destination they could have visited. These documents of the supposed trip are a trajectory for the imagination of the travel weary. Collected over decades by seasoned travelers, this database constitutes a repository of travel destinations and tourist traps. Tourism, organized travel, is an expression of collective longing for the other place where vain hopes, false promises and missed opportunities have a new chance of becoming real. In a world that values efficiency over experience, tourism reduces travel to a zombie experience.

Marc Böhlen (SUNY Buffalo)
Shawn Rider (University at Buffalo, Dept of Media Study)
Matt Baldwin

The Pursuit of Happiness: Questions about agency for video games

The central concern of this paper is with the attribution/recognition of agency in non-human entities and potential consequences for understanding of human - non-human relations. The paper will attempt to raise questions relevent to this concern by examining the ways that some computer and video games represent agency within their narratives and in the activity of playing the games. To try to make the issues clearer, agency is viewed in relation to the kinds of happiness available in the game narratives and game play.

Robert Fanning (West Virginia University)

Session 2F: Encounters with Islam: Science, Mathematics, Writing

Chair: Erin Labbie (Bowling Green State University)

Seeing Wonder in Everything: Islamic Neoplatonism and the Illustration of Nature in Late Thirteenth-Century Iraq

The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existence by Zakariyya b. Muhammad al-Qazwini (d. 1283) is among the most often illustrated texts of pre-modern Islamic literature. Surviving manuscripts from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, include images of individual created wonders from the Angel Gabriel to the lemon to the evil-eyed sannaja beast. It is easy to dismiss these manuscripts as compilations of the weird and the wacky- the National Enquirers of their day. But Qazwini, a judge and professor of Islamic law, understood wonders as individual signs of a Neoplatonic creation, each separately pointing to God. This paper explores how Islamic Neoplatonism informs the illustration of wonders in the earliest of these manuscripts, and how the resulting images in turn reinforce a Neoplatonist understanding of creation.

Persis Berlekamp (University of Texas)

Drawing the Line, Dividing the Plane: Islamic Space and the Geometries of Ornament

Two twentieth century artists responded strongly to the example of Islamic art: M. C. Escher and Henri Matisse. Escher found a model for his geometric play of dividing and filling the two-dimensional plane. Matisse discovered in Islamic ceramics and textiles a richer sense of space than Renaissance perspective and its model of the perceiving subject. According to art historian Jacques Schneider, "The rule Islamic art obeys is the one contained in Verlaine's phrase, 'rien qui pèse, rien qui pose,' (nothing ponderous, nothing that poses)." It is a rule epitomizing the anti-perspectival and the nomadic. Perspective captures its objects in its grids and metrics, but the perceiving subject too is captured and pinned to a single point of view in a circumscribed space. For Matisse, the example of Islam, its play of unfolding, nomadic geometries of ornament, disrupts the tradition of perspective and opens the way to multiple spaces of perception.

Jim Swan (SUNY at Buffalo)

Desire and Science: Chaucer's Pseudo-Scientific, Quasi-Arabic Cosmology and Non-classical Thinking

The fields of literary studies and the "hard sciences" remain fairly separate in their endeavors, questions, and the modes in which they represent potential truths. A few select literary theorists are working today to question the notion of scientific thinking as it relates to literary study. For instance, in several of his texts including but hardly limited to The Knowable and the Unknowable, Complementarity, Arkady Plotnitsky reveals the potential for non-classical thinking within the fields of literature and the hard sciences. Similarly, Barbara Herrnstein Smith forwards notions of the anti-epistemological process of non-classical thinking in her recent work. What these two scholars do not overtly consider (and the theoretical foci that my paper will address) is the difference between the pre-modern and the modern or cross-cultural influences in their attempts to locate non-classical thinking within our "post-modern" moment. What are the roles of the mathematical and the incipience (or absence) of quantum physics as defined by Plotnitsky's reading of Bohr in Chaucer's pre-modern text? Centrally, how does Chaucer's translation of Messahalla's treatise render central Arabic cosmological understandings, and how does this transferral/translation of the text participate in or refuse Christianization? What does this then say about time and non-classical thinking for medieval studies and for contemporary theory?

Erin Labbie (Bowling Green State University)

Continental Breakfast

Fri, Oct 15, 7:45 am - 8:30 am

Session 3

Fri, Oct 15, 8:30 am - 10:00 am

Session 3A: Historicizing the Question of the Animal

Panel Chair: Michael Lundblad (University of Virginia)

The Octopus on Trial: Frank Norris and the Nature of the Beast in Progressive-Era America

Recent work on "the question of the animal" has brought greater visibility to the often arbitrary distinctions we continue to make between human and nonhuman animals. But these distinctions have histories, I argue, and the nature of "animality" has shifted in significant ways over the course of American history. This paper focuses on the Progressive Era as a key moment in which "the nature of the beast" is put on trial, in a sense, in literary representations of figurative animals such as "the Octopus" in Frank Norris's 1901 novel. Allegorical scenes such as the Railroad/Octopus slaughtering a herd of sheep representing "the People" evoke nineteenth-century debates about criminality and the logic of criminal punishment: can the nature of a corporation's or an animal's impulses constitute, for example, mitigating circumstances that reduce the degree of accountability for a violent act? These kinds of questions are enabled by the shifting discourses of both "humanity" and "animality" at this moment, particularly once the treatment of animal and/or working-class victims becomes a central concern of "progressive" reform movements in the name of all that is "humane." The juridical outcome of these animal "trials" represents the birth of biological determinism as we know it today.

Michael Lundblad (University of Virginia)

Animal Exhibitions & The Production of Natural History in Post-Revolutionary America

Prior to his death from yellow fever in 1798, Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smithprepared an essay "Concerning the Elk" for the new journal The Medical Repository. The impetus for this essay came from his attendance at the exhibition of four elks in New York City with his friends, all of whom were involved in the construction of national institutions in the wake of the Revolution. Arguing that "the accounts hitherto published by naturalists… are confused and unsatisfactory," Smith's work corrected the "mistakes" of European scientists and helped found an American natural history. This paper shows how Americans' encounters with animals at public exhibitions helped produce knowledge of and literature about natural history while prompting the reconceptualization of human and national identities. It also engages recent theoretical work on the "question of the animal," suggesting the challenges and benefits of historicizing the discourses of the animal for those working in the emerging field of "animal studies."

Brett Mizelle (History & American Studies, California State University Long Beach)

Killing the Panther: The Tropics of Endangerment in Linda Hogan's Power and Contemporary America

Despite the far-reaching impacts of the Endangered Species Act (1973) and the "discourse of endangerment" it ushered in, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the ways in which this discourse has altered human perceptions of nonhuman animals in areas as diverse as fiction and conservation biology. My paper begins to redress this gap by focusing on contemporary representations of one critically endangered species, the Florida panther, in texts ranging from license plates to Linda Hogan's distinguished 1998 novel Power. Power offers an unusually insightful critique of the Euro-American discourse of endangerment from the subject position of a young woman torn between scientific and indigenous epistemologies of "the animal" and governmental and tribal definitions of "endangerment." The novel demonstrates not just how tropes of endangerment migrate between seemingly separate fields of thought, but how ignorance of the workings of endangerment as a trope can produce serious environmental and cultural damage.

Bart Welling (English Dept., University of North Florida)

Session 3B: Visualizing the Body

Chair: Christy Russell (University of California Riverside)

The Character of the Virtual Patient

Physicians and surgeons who previously touched real bodies with their own flesh-and-blood hands, are turning increasingly to computer simulations, to virtual realities, in order to learn procedures and techniques. In contemporary medicine, the body is now created electronically in surgical simulations in order to allow physicians and surgeons a "body" on which to practice procedures. This latest version of the body, the virtual patient, is intriguing in that it both advances ideas of what constitutes a human body and simultaneously challenges their veracity. If the nineteenth century worked to ensure that the incomplete body did indeed retain a sense of self by creating a prosthesis to mimic corporeal wholeness, then our present-day technology seems intent on doing precisely the opposite in deliberately fragmenting the body and challenging our understanding of the body and the prosthetic. This presentation reads the virtual patient as a character in the fiction, perhaps drama is the better term, of contemporary medical practice, while at the same time exploring the ethical dimensions, the character, of how this technology is complicating our understanding of the human.

Laura L. Behling (Gustavus Adolphus College)

Visualizing and Individualizing Risk during Pregnancy

"As a sacralized and fetishized image of endangered life," writes Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacey in Global Nature, Global Culture, "the foetus stands in for the whole of life itself and symbolizes the future" (36). This iconography is enabled by technologies of visualization that facilitate representations of the fetus as an entity separate from, even at odds with, its maternal environment. In this presentation I will examine how and to what extent the move towards foregrounding risk management techniques in pregnancy handbooks correlates with the widespread adoption of fetal imaging technologies (such as ultrasound) and with the proliferation of images (such as Lennart Nilsson's photographs) that represent the fetus as an autonomous, vulnerable being. I argue that the ultimate effect of this focus on maternal risk management is to make the individual mother--rather than political, corporate, biomedical (etc.) institutions--responsible for the future sustainability of human life.

Marika Seigel (Penn State University)

Visualizing the Invisible: Representations of Sperm in Science and Art

This project explores visual representations of sperm as they are transformed by scientific developments and social and historical changes. Because sperm is not visible to the naked eye, the ways art and culture visualize it are mediated by the technologies of scientific representation. Cultural understandings of sperm are transformed throughout history as science reveals sperm as a tiny man in a seed awaiting nourishment, a noble warrior fighting its way to fertilize the egg and finally as a mere housing for DNA. As these scientific representations circulate throughout culture, artists react and respond to give sperm representations new meaning. Artists visualize sperm as a symbol for a fragile postmodern masculinity, an evil icon representing HIV and as part of a dialogue about reproductive technologies.Representations of sperm reveal the power of science to shape the way we visualize the invisible and the necessity of art to critically reinterpret these images.

Carrie Eisert (Wesleyan University)

The Spectralization of the (M)Other: An Examination of the Female Gothic in Orlan's Monstrous "Corpus"

Although many critics view French "Carnal Artist" Orlan's work as a "monstrous body" (pun intended), I seek to examine the ways in which Orlan's abjection of herself can be subsumed by the empowering, patriarchally transgressive realm of the Female Gothic. I will specifically explore Orlan's bodyscape throughout her surgery, "Omnipresence (where she acquires the forehead of Mona Lisa)," in order to argue that the grotesque imagery-the collapse of Orlan's flesh and blood signify the site of a Gothic center and haunting presence of a patriarchally threatening, spectral mother that suggests not only the horror of castration, but also compels the female body into a subversive feminine power. Both the Female Gothic and Orlan's plastic surgeries represent the female body's very abjection as a binary collapsing, boundary destabilizing, body dematerializing and constructively rematerializing site of Luce Irigaray's notion of the empowering "feminine imaginary." Her body in flux represents her subversion of corporeal limitations, defiance of traditional restrictive gender and sexual identities, and presents a body that literally demonstrates a space where the "problematics of femininity" can be articulated, while simultaneously transcended.

Christy Russell (University of California Riverside)

Session 3C: Gaming Modes

Chair: J. James Bono (SUNY University at Buffalo)

System Failures: Uru: Ages Beyond Myst and the Computer-Game Wilderness

The last fifty years have brought radical changes to the global environment. Rachel Carson, Bill McKibben, and many others have sounded the alarm over pesticides, greenhouse gasses, and acid rain. More recently, the toxic residue of obsolete personal computers has becoming an increasing environmental threat. This threat affects humanity's physical existence and American cultural existence. Even as the physical wilderness becomes increasingly fragile, the idea of wilderness remains an integral part of American culture. The centrality of wilderness in American culture is reflected in the popularity of computer games featuring inviting, idyllic landscapes. Games such as Uru offer a diversion from environmental ills, but the significance of their popularity goes beyond escapism. Drawing on the work of Jean Baudrillard, this paper will explore the relationship between environmental degradation and representations of wilderness in computer games. It will also ask what the popularity of digital landscapes suggests for an American cultural identity inextricably bound to notions of wilderness.

Amy Clary (University of Louisiana at Lafayette)

Digital Digs, or: Lara Croft replaying Indiana Jones. Archaeological tropes and "colonial loops" in new media narrative

New media studies have theorized the end of narrative in the "culture of the database", but also its transformations into interactive and spatialized configurations. Lev Manovich links the digital aesthetics of "spatial wandering" to the "American mythology" that constructs the subject as an explorer. My paper pursues this link by investigating the largely unexplored post/colonial imaginary of digital narrative. Analyzing the Lara Croft games and films in comparison to pre-digital stories of heroic excavation, I focus on archaeological narratives. Throughout modernity, archaeology has functioned as both an integral part of the colonial dispositif and a site of its virtual deconstruction, where identity is constructed from buried fragments. How is the archaeological story transformed by new media culture? Do its spatial narratives interpellate hybrid and mobile subjectivities of "Empire" (Hardt/Negri)? Or are the digital replays of colonial tropes more adaequately described as new forms of imperialism?

Claudia Breger (Indiana University)

When the Reader Writes the Story: “unFiction,” Pervasive Gaming, and Reader Response

"unFiction," or "alternative reality gaming," creates a new type of narrative which capitalizes on the pervasive and immersive characteristics of modern communications technologies. This paper will examine an emergent genre that exists in a unique space: one that allows the writer (or design team) and readers to communicate in real-time, breaking down the barrier between the two. The impact of this recursive narrative on traditional notions of reader-response theory is compelling. Such cyber-mediated narratives rely on the reader less as a consumer and more as an integral part of the story telling. The serialized, puzzle oriented plotlines of "texts" such as those unpacked in this essay (Dreamworks SKG's The Beast and Project Mu's Metacortechs) provide an unprecedented venue for this type of analysis: one which merits specific study as an indicator of narrative forms to come.

J. James Bono (SUNY University at Buffalo)

Session 3D: Science and Nature Writing: Rhetoric, Ethics, Pedagogy

Panel Chair: Michael Bryson (Roosevelt University)

When Science and Story are Woven Together: Ecology, Native Wisdom, and Spiritual Insight in Robin Wall Kimmerer's Gathering Moss

When a literature course includes a book that teaches ecological principles, learning becomes an interdisciplinary collaboration. I will discuss my experience teaching Gathering Moss, a book in which bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer connects the study of moss to larger ecological issues. My students, many of whom view science as objective truth based on direct interaction with the natural world, were challenged by the literary critic's perception that science is embedded in the dominant values and ideology of western culture. Kimmerer's book questions the assumptions of empirical science, explores the role of traditional ecological knowledge passed down through the oral tradition of native peoples, and brought to our discussion a spiritual element rarely addressed in the science classroom. Kimmerer weaves the science of mosses with the stories of mosses and in doing so, fosters discussions about ethics, about humility and respect,about the rightful role of humans in the natural world.

Janine DeBaise (SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry)

E. O. Wilson's Ethical Dialogues: Ecology, Biodiversity, and the Art of Argument in The Future of Life

Edward O. Wilson's The Future of Life is simultaneously a highly literate tribute to the diversity and adaptability of life, a damning account of species extinction and habitat erosion due to human activity, and an impassioned and persuasive argument for a science-based approach to addressing these and other ecological problems. Wilson's rhetorically-rich explication of ecological principles also inspires critical analysis of environmental issues, scientific methodology, and the uses of literature. The argumentative superstructure of The Future of Life--built upon a series of ethical dialogues--gives the book its pedagogical power. These passages, along with Wilson's shifting narrative persona (from studious naturalist to impassioned firebrand), not only model many of the critical thinking skills necessary for a basic "scientific literacy"; they also force readers to grapple with subjective and objective elements of ecological/environmental discourse, and stress the fundamental role of ethics in an ecological worldview.

Michael Bryson (Roosevelt University)

David Quammen's The Song of the Dodo and the Conversation between Nature, Science, and Society

David Quammen's The Song of the Dodo is characterized by a rhetorical engagement with some of the problems inherent in communicating a specialized science to a body of non-specialist readers. Acknowledging that the language of science can seem arcane and inaccessible to the uninitiated, Quammen in part engages the reader as translator and teacher, trying to overcome the xenophobia that he imagines a typical reader might experience in the face of scientific jargon and mathematics. Quammen's rhetoric is idiosyncratic, humorous, and personal and is clearly rooted in his novelistic background. Adopting the fictional devices of narrative, character development, and metaphor, Quammen demystifies and humanizes scientists as persons, and he grounds the science itself in specific places so that science and scientists maintain a less abstract, real-world relationship to the body of popular readers who must be made to understand the effect of worldwide ecosystem disintegration and decay.

Karl Zuelke (The College of Mount St. Joseph)

Session 3E: Posthuman Identities

Chair: Bernadette Wegenstein (The University at Buffalo)

Special Affects: Posthuman Ethics in the Matrix Trilogy

In terms of dialogue and narrative structure, the Matrix trilogy is often read as a humanist text, in which the human hero battles inhuman machines and wins through his human affects of love, hope, and choice. However, on the level of form (particularly special effects) we find a very different story. The machines that proliferate Agent Smiths ad infinitum for the trilogy's key scenes—the so-called "Burly Brawl" in Reloaded and the final duel in Revolutions—are also necessary for the hero's humanist victory. These scenes, and the aesthetics they manifest place what seems a human struggle for freedom in a posthuman/machinic space. This paper will describe a posthuman ethics, as suggested by the technologies of The Matrix: Reloaded, that is part and parcel of an aesthetic interaction between the organic and the machinic. This interaction, which leads to the augmentation of both spheres, is far from an abstract theory, but has, in The Matrix, already begun.

Benjamin J. Robertson (University at Buffalo)

Naked Spaces—Female Spectatorship in Jane Campion's In the Cut (2003) and Marina de Van's In My Skin (2002)

The purpose of my presentation for the 2004 SLS, "Naked Spaces—Female Spectatorship in Jane Campion's In the Cut (2003) and Marina de Van's In My Skin (2002)," is to explore the question of what nakedness can possibly mean in the age of internet-based communication, in an age, that is, when the skin can be bared, exposed via a medium that is paradoxically both utterly public while remaining strangely intimate. The thesis of the presentation is that what both films are grappling with is a transformation in the value of the skin, and specifically of the skin containing the female body, in an age when the power and position of viewership has been radically de-centered and pluralized as a result of internet technology and viewing practices. In different and yet compatible ways, these two films by women directors subtly shift the emphasis common to traditional cinematic perspectives on the female body, a shift alluded to in both titles: the "in" of either a "cut" or the "skin" represents, from a more traditional perspective, an impossible position. How, in other words, can one in-habit a cut, or the border designated by the skin? Both films, I will try to demonstrate, deploy a viewing technique that undermines the essential duality of inner and outer that all metaphors for the skin as border of the body have always required.

Bernadette Wegenstein (The University at Buffalo)

Session 3F: Portrayals of Science in Spanish Literature

Panel Chair: Cecelia J Cavanaugh SSJ (Chestnut Hill College)

Darwinism in Pio Baroja: El arbol de la ciencia

Baroja, having studied medicine before becoming a writer, was very familiar with ideas of Darwinism and decadence, both of which preoccupied him in his writing. In El arbol de la ciencia, we witness his belief in Social Darwinism coupled with a strange sort of nostalgia for another life and view of the world. I will be addressing this tension in the novel.

Rebecca Cherico (Villanova University)

The Image of the Scientist in Eduardo Mendoza's La ciudad de los prodigios

The paper deals with the relations between science, and scientists, and the socio-political events that reshaped Barcelona between the two Universal Expositions held there in 1888 and 1929. The subtext of the novel is the relation between scientific advances and socio-cultural "progress" as the city moves from a provincial 19th century town to a 20th century megalopolis, a transformation which mirrors a more general European movement into the 20th century. These changes are predicated on science and scientists, as demonstrated by Mendoza in his fascinating study of the relations between science and society in turn of the century Spain.

Jerry Hoeg (Penn State)

Francisco Quevedo's Hatred of the Medical Profession

During Francisco Quevedo's lifetime healthcare was essentially in the hands of three entities that somehow resembled the horsemen of the Apocalypse: the doctor, the barber, and the pharmacist. I will be using examples from Quevedo's Suenos y Discursos, that show the pharmacists as the "weapons suppliers" of the doctors. Instead of saving lives, these three professions were responsible for many deaths. Quevedo even mentions in Sueno del Juicio that it is mostly thanks to them that there was a judgment day. In Sueno de la Muerte, Quevedo writes that the pharmacists' shops are purgatories, that the pharmacists themselves are hell, and the doctors are devils since they only seek evil. Their goal is to make the evil become good and the good evil. As to the barbers, they assist the doctors in their evil enterprise. Satan himself collects the barbers' utensils and keeps them on his dresser. Whatever progress science had made by this time, as far as medicine went, whetver progress in saving lives or assuaging pain, is certainly not present in Quevedo's writings. Now the question is whether Quevedo had a personal vendetta against these men of science, or if this was the spirit of the times.

Beatriz Rivera-Barnes (Pennsylvania State University)

Scientific Lecture as Literary Performance: Pío del Río-Hortega´s "Arte y artificie de la ciencia histológica."

This paper compares the poetics delineated by Pío del Río Hortega in his essay "Arte y artificio de la ciencia histológica" and Federico Garcia Lorca's observations expressed in his lecture on the poet Gongora and in interviews and prologues to several of his plays. Del Río Hortega's essay, originally written as a lecture, is framed as a dramatic work by its author who was intensely aware of his audience and the effect of his work on that audience. Comparing del Río Hortega's perception of himself as histologist and "playwright" with Lorca's work reveals the emerging understanding of the scientist's role in society and his vocation-- not only to discover science, but also to "uncover" its secrets for a larger public.

Cecelia J Cavanaugh SSJ (Chestnut Hill College)

Anthropology and the Pre-Human Other in Spanish Literature

Spanish authors such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Azorín, Juan Luis Arsuaga, Antonio Pérez Henares, and Rosa Montero have written tales of prehistoric humans living in Iberia. Some of these cave people live in Pleistocene contexts; others secretly live in our modern world. In the stories set in the distant past, narrators establish focalizing characters who serve as anthropologists even though they themselves pertain to the groups they are studying. In the modern stories, the narrators use the discourse of anthropology to establish the otherness of both the prehistoric group and the modern humans to whom they are compared. In these sets of stories, anthropological discourse facilitates a social critique of contemporary Spanish culture, which finds itself both ultra-modern and prehistorically "other."

Dale Pratt

Session 3G: Pedagogies of Science

Chair: Leslie Graff (University at Buffalo)

19th-Century Science and the Anti-Picturesque in American Nature Poetry

The American obsession with picturesque nature is evident in the work of nineteenth-century poets and painters who depicted only the most beautiful and majestic aspects of the natural world. By the late twentieth-century, however, anti-picturesque nature had become increasingly fascinating to various poets writing about roadkill, decaying garbage, slugs, bacteria, and other seemingly unappealing subjects. This paper argues that this increased valorization of lowly and unattractive aspects of nature originated when literary figures such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman came under the influence of emerging scientific knowledge Their interest in science led them to a closer observation of nature and to an ecological sensibility that acknowledged the importance of repulsive creatures and disturbing natural processes. Their sometimes conflicted rejection of the traditional association between poetry and beauty represents an early shift towards aesthetic and environmental values that would become more widespread in the 20^th century.

Christopher Todd Anderson

The S[ci]ensational Novel: Victorian Intellectual Authority and Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel No Name relies heavily on Jeremiah Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues: Intended for the Instruction and Entertainment of Young People, an 1807 manual popularizing science through a dialogue of instruction and home experiments to be performed by women and children. Although these scientific dialogues were questioned by mid-nineteenth century, Collins employs this model of scientific knowledge to emphasize representation of science over the actual act of scientific inquiry to maintain intellectual authority in the composer of Socratic dialogues, i.e., authors, as opposed to scientists which are portrayed as merely repeating pedantic exercises. Collins knew he must demonstrate intellectual sophistication with the use of science, but he does so in a way that circumscribes science within the aesthetic arena of literary composition, limiting its claim to intellectual authority and maintaining the status of the author as cultural authority capable of inventing rather than rehearsing scripted activities.

Leslie Graff (University at Buffalo)

Session 4

Fri, Oct 15, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm

Session 4A: The Beast in the Garden in 18th Century France

Chair: Anita Guerrini (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Animal Fables at the Court of Versailles

Paula Lee (University of South Florida )

Describing and Picturing Animals in the Histoire naturelle

From the beginning, relations between text and image in the multi-volume Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749-67) were ambiguous, as shown by Alain-Marie Bassy and Elizabeth Liebman: Certain illustrations went well beyond and even against -the written text in their evocations of exotic backdrops, legends, and religious doctrine; others offered jokes and self-reference to the artistically sophisticated. While the purposes and parameters of verbal description were discussed by both co-authors Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon and Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, little trace remains of what they or the principal artist Jacques de Sève saw as the role of pictures in natural history. Here I will argue that text and image became more closely connected as the series wore on, partly because of a lack of photogenic specimens and partly because Daubenton came to exercise more control over illustrations, but that artists such as de Sève retained a margin for creative playfulness.

Jeff Loveland (University of Cincinnati)

The Animal Machine in the Garden: The Histoire des animaux project

The early chronicles of the Paris Academy of Sciences are filled with rhetoric about the mechanization of nature, and Descartes's name is frequently invoked. Yet the Cartesian "animal machine" and all it implied is curiously missing from the Academy's major project on the natural history of animals. This paper will look at the published works associated with this project, including Claude Perrault's Essai de physique, to determine the rhetoric and the reality of the "animal machine."

Anita Guerrini (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Session 4B: Visible Fantasies

Chair: Ann Millett (University of North Carolina)

Chair: Petra Kuppers (Bryant University)

Migraine Art: Different Ways of Seeing

My presentation will focus on art created by people experiencing migraines, and on some of the practices that surround the sharing of these images: self-help galleries, personal web-pages, competitions and sites by medical providers and pharmaceutical companies. My presentation will investigate how art is understood in this framework, and how these understandings impact traditional art practices. What is at stake in the medicalisation of artists, and how do contemporary lay artists intervene in discourses about their experiences? At the heart, my presentation explores different knowledge frameworks and practices. Invisible bodily experiences, in this case pain, become visible as art historical conventions, fantasies emerging out of medical discourse, and personal metaphors and sense impressions come together in the highly imaginistic practices of migraine art.

Petra Kuppers (Bryant University)

Eclipsing the Frame: Diane Arbus's Untitled photographs of the Developmentally Disabled

Diane Arbus's photographic series, Untitled (1970-71) features institutionalized individuals with developmental disabilities, often misidentified in Arbus scholarship as "retardees" or "mental health patients." Considered some of Arbus's most exploitative work, the photographs stage the paradox of disability as hyper-visible as cultural spectacle and simultaneously socially invisible and traffic in the paradoxes of "disabled" as a visible identity marker. Individuals with developmental disabilities raise unique issues of disability and representation, exemplified in Arbus's images. Her subjects' impairments are not always displayed on the body, and they are institutionally segregated and socially isolated from the public realm. This paper argues that the human subjects of Untitled defy mainstream social framing for developmental disabilities while the images surpass the frames of conventional visual representations of these subjects. I will formally and discursively compare Arbus's photographs to clinical, artistic, and freak show images (particularly examples from nineteenth century ethnographic displays of "wild" men and human/animal hybrids), all of which make spectacles of developmentally disabled bodies. I argue that examining Arbus's images within and against various visual contexts liberates her subjects from restrictive representational framing; I interpret the developmentally disabled subjects of Untitled as performative agents who enact a disappearance from the conventionally exploitative and diagnostic gaze.

Ann Millett (University of North Carolina)

Transparent Bodies and Invisible Ideology: Women Writers on Scientific Imaging Technologies

Women's health issues have become increasingly visible through new imaging technologies targeted at women. While the newly visible status of women's health issues promises women greater access to less invasive medical diagnosis and treatment, women's health issues are often stripped from their feminist historical and political bases, and imaging technologies raise questions as to who is best qualified to create and interpret scientific images of women's bodies. Fiction represents a space for contemporary feminist writers to engage in this ongoing discussion This paper focuses on Margaret Atwood's treatment of echocardiogram in "Bluebeard's Egg," Bobbie Ann Mason's exploration of mammography in "Third Monday," and Gish Jen's consideration of ultrasound in "Birthmates." Despite differences, each story employs scientific images as a metaphor for contemporary relationships and identity, and each story simultaneously exposes the importance of placing imaging technologies in individual, historical, and political contexts.

Angela Laflen (Purdue University)

From Voice to Song: Depression, Dialogue and Musical Form at the Workman Theatre Project

Since 1991, Toronto's Workman Theatre Project has created over twenty theatrical productions focused on mental health issues by combining the skills of professional theatre artists with its own members, artists who have received mental health services. In 2000, WTP produced Joy. A Musical. About Depression, its largest scale production to date. With a book written by Maja Ardal and lyrics by Joey Miller, the production was the culmination of a five-year dramaturgical process that involved company members, professional artists, mental health professionals and members of the public. Providing a primary focus for company performance training and dramaturgical effort from 1995-2000, this musical aimed to explore experiences, challenge stigma and highlight problems associated with depression and the use of anti-depressants. Artists involved in this process were committed to the idea of using musical form as a way of making the topic of depression more palatable to the public. This paper will consider how and why the company used musical form to achieve its aims. It will also reflect on the opportunities and problems posed by this strategy. Research for this paper is based on interviews, performance analysis, archival material, and critical press.

Kirsty Johnston (University of British Columbia)

Session 4C: Latour and the Limits of the Human

Panel Chair: Thomas Lamarre (McGill University)

Respondent: Hugh Crawford (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Distributing Agency

Latour is notoriously impatient with the intellectual bankruptcy of postmodern hermeneutics; the presumptive self-enclosure of the subjective, the earnest revelations and denunciations of "social constructionism," the historical disjunctions and bifurcated logic of critique, and the conflation of agency with human, or social being. In a recent meditation on the need for co-operation between research communities in these troubled times, Latour is more sanguine about these differences and reconsiders the question of "constructionism." But he notes two main obstacles - scientific fundamentalism and deconstruction - approaches whose "mutual ideal" is to reach "what has not been built at all by any human hand." This paper will ask why a notion of "constructionism" which doesn't aim to segregate natural truths from social interpretations requires the vigilant exclusion of any approaches, even those perceived to be politically odious and entirely mistaken. How is "the human" reconfigured in the distributed agency of this revision?

Vicki Kirby (The University of New South Wales)

Symmetry Breaking: NaturalSocial Forces and the Limits of Symmetry

Reiterating his welcoming gesture in “We Have Never Been Modern”, in his more recent work Latour continues to extend the possibility for citizenship in the collective to nohumans as well as humans. However, despite the important shift from an earlier liberal politics of inclusion to his recent embrace of a more radical form of democracy, including the ongoing contestation of who and what gets to be included in the collective, the nature of the proposed extension continues to raise questions of the limits of representation and of citizenship. What about those “humans” and “nonhumans” who won’t stand for such a founding gesture? This paper considers points of instability as well as stability, and exclusion as well as inclusion, in the naturalsocial force field of technoscience, suggesting a reconfiguring of “humans” and “nonhumans” in ways that are both more and less symmetrical than Latour’s liberal democratic sociality.

Karen Barad (Mount Holyoke College)

From Contact to Tact: Magic and the "All" of Science

In the context of his first studies of laboratory life in California, Latour highlights the necessity of looking at scientists in the same way that the anthropologist looks at non-Western communities or tribes. Or rather, the anthropologist of science is to look at scientists in the way in which anthropologist mistakenly looked at tribes. For Latour agrees with the critique of the old anthropology that takes issue with the epistemological division between the West and Rest. Yet, rather than dismantle this divide (the Western mistake), Latour tends to invert it—the scientist becomes primitive, and primitive scientific, in roughly equal measures. Thus he returns to scenarios of 'first contact' such as the Spaniards with Amerindians, but to explore how each side conducted its experiments — to introduce symmetry into analysis. This paper will look at how Latour's symmetry operates. Central to the success of symmetrical analysis is a transformation of anthropology into diplomacy, of contact into tact, and more recently for Latour, of the West in Europe. Crucial then is tact and magic — a sense that the human can touch without touching, that things interact across distances.

Thomas Lamarre (McGill University)

Session 4D: Other Futures, Other Pasts: New Studies of American Literature, Science, and Society in the American Age, 1944-2004

Panel Chair: Doug Davis (Gordon College)

Look Back in Wonder: Postmodernist Fabulation vs. The Bush Doctrine, 1944-2004,"

Doug Davis's paper analyzes the central role that fictional war storytelling played in the Bush administration's newly revamped National Security Strategy of preemptive warfighting and suggests how postmodernist ways of storytelling can help us understand national policies and technological systems of warmaking. Davis shows how popular and expert stories about nuclear terrorism work on the front lines of the war on terror as "strategic fictions" that give society epistemic access to threatening technological events that have never happened, but that nonetheless determine American global strategies such as the decision to invade Iraq. So how can one tell stories about nuclear and other kinds of mass terrorism now without reproducing the strategic-fictional logic of the war on terror? One possible answer, Davis suggests, may be to do what cold war authors such as Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon did in their novels about World War II's bombing campaigns, Slaughterhouse-Five and Gravity's Rainbow: represent the warring past in an estranging way that reflects critically upon the warring present, and ultimately turn tomorrow's targets into questing, countercultural investigators within the geopolitical technological systems of terror and war. Davis argues that we need the same kind of fabulist historical storytelling today—and more.

Doug Davis (Gordon College)

The Nuclear Frontier: Evolution and Progress in American Nuclear Apocalypse Narratives,

In his essay, Patrick Sharp explores the connections between narratives of evolution and progress as they have emerged since Charles Darwin's time. He begins by examining common sense interpretations of nuclear war narratives that connect the fear of nuclear war with the fear of civilization "devolving" in the aftermath of an attack. Sharp then suggests that such interpretations fail to consider the powerful influence of frontier imagery in many nuclear apocalypse narratives produced in the United States. While devolution was certainly at the center of these narratives, Sharp contends, it was met by a particular version of evolutionary narrative developed at the turn of the century by men like Theodore Roosevelt and Frederick Jackson Turner. These historians popularized the notion of the "less evolved" frontier as a Darwinist proving ground, where white Americans confronted the savagery of the wilderness on its own terms. This return to the struggle to survive on the frontier was seen as something that was reinvigorating for Americans; as such, the frontier became a space where Americans improved themselves, extending their dominion in the march of civilization. In this sense, the confrontation with the savage was not a moment of devolution, but rather an essential step in the march of American progress.

Patrick Sharp (California State University, Los Angeles)

Galactic Suburbia: Housewife Heroines, Lady Scientists, and the Lost History of Midcentury Women's Writing,

Lisa Yaszek shows how science fiction provided American women with a vital source of narratives about gender, science, and culture during the decades that preceded the revival of feminism in the 1960s and the advent of an overtly feminist science fiction in the 1970s. Yaszek begins her presentation by reviewing how midcentury women writers merged the conventions of science fiction with those of romance, melodrama, and domestic tragedy to produce unique literary depictions of the most pressing issues of their day, including nuclear war, civil rights, women's work, and new developments in science and technology. Yaszek illustrates her claims with two antiwar stories by Judith Merril, "That Only a Mother" (1948) and "Shadow on the Hearth" (1951). Merril imagines how this terrible future might be prevented by a radical new figure: one that Yaszek calls the mater scientifica or "scientific mother." Characterized by both a natural concern for others and a learned, rational skepticism toward authority, the mater scientifica attests to the possibility of resisting military logic and building new kinds of community based on caring labor and a shared commitment to the well being of future generations. Yaszek then concludes that although such stories may not be feminist ones per se, they anticipate the women's liberation movement by insisting that the personal is always already political.

Lisa Yaszek (Georgia Institute of Technology)

"What it Takes to Dazzle Us": The Role of Science in the Work of Alison Hawthorne Deming

In her 1998 essay, "Poetry and Science: A View from the Divide," for which she won the Bayer Award in Science Writing, Deming describes herself as an avid reader of Science News. She gleans from its articles anything "I might tuck into the nest of my imagination," although she understands that science and poetry differ in the way they use language. Yet they are both creative, each serving as a "means to study nature." She values science, but is not a scientist primarily because she believes that nature is better understood through the poet's subjectivity than by a strict adherence to science's objectivity. Filtering her work in part through Glen Love's recent call for nature writing to be more fully grounded in the sciences, my paper examines the nature of the "nest" Deming has built for herself, and how she applies its contents to both her prose and her poetry.

Richard Hunt (Delaware Valley College)

Session 4E: Narrating and the Network

Chair: Paul A. Youngman (The University of North Carolina at Charlotte)

The Mythic Vision in Narrative of Aboriginal Songlines and Electronic Literature of Network Systems

This presentation, organized as a performance-based dialogue between the two presenters, ruminates on the dynamic human activity of storytelling and contrasts the protean characteristics of emergent forms of narrative promulgated by electronic networks with the biological network system of the Australian Aboriginal songlines. In doing so, the presenters examine within the systematic correspondences between the two, non-material, energetic substance of complexity and consciousness––that is, the rich awareness of self and other that allows for an exploration of the mythic vision expressed as narratives in radically different contxts. In keeping with the storytelling tradition, the presenters perform their work. Embodied in it are the theories underlying both oral and electronic narratives, as well as specific examples of both. Revealed through this presentation is the idea that the inter-relationships between art, technology, and consciousness emphasized by a meta-narrative comprised of both these complex network structures offer opportunities for sequential as well as merged experience in the reality of consciousness. As they show, despite the potential for "telematic networking of text" (Ascott, 190), consciousness apparent in the narratives of electronic networks remain largely a solitary enterprise, focused more on the experiences on the individual and self rather than the purposeful, communal fellowship demonstrated in the songlines.

John Barber (University of Texas at Dallas)
Dene Grigar (Texas Woman's University)

On the Web as Narrative

A decade ago it seemed that hypertext and/or hypermedia were revolutionary: new kinds of documents in a new kind of technological medium in which the relationships between authors, readers and textswould change fundamentally. But this has not happened, or not happened in the way many of us thought it would. Hypertexts and hypermedia continue to be produced; though the poetics of this new kind of narrative are perhaps still being worked out, it is already clear that the revolution in narratology, if it happened at all, happened somewhere else. The nature and structure of the Internet, or the narratology of the video game, are better illustrations of the impact of hypermedia than the more limited attempts of those who would still be "authors," in the codex book sense of the word; on the internet or in a video game, there are authors but only one "metareader/author," the browser herself, which makes the attempts of those who would compose hypermedia novels look misplaced. Who (we are still wondering) is the author, and what is narrative if the book, the internet and the video game can happily co-exist?

Barton D. Thurber (University of San Diego)

The Realization of a Virtual Past in Günter Grass's Crabwalk

In his 1999 Nobel lecture, Günter Grass declares narration to be "a form of survival as well as a form of art." He sets out to demonstrate this declaration in his novel Crabwalk (2002). The twist for Grass, the author who writes exclusively on his Olivetti typewriter, is that he includes the Internet as a means of narrative in his most recent work. This paper analyzes Crabwalk as a look at various forms of media—the oral memories of a fictional character, two historical monographs, two films, and a website maintained by a young Neo-nazi—through which humans narrate the past, in this case the 1945 sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a German KdF ship, by a Russian U-boat. The last medium, the Internet, is the focus of this paper as it serves as the central means of narrative development, as well as the single media that inextricably intertwines Grass's "historical reality," the sinking of the Gustloff, with his "fictional reality," the murder of a "virtual" Jew by an apparently "virtual" Neo-nazi.

Paul A. Youngman (The University of North Carolina at Charlotte)

Session 4F: The Violence of Identity

Chair: Sarah Dauncey

Narrative Logic and the Fantasy of Posthuman Ekstasis in Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides's novel Middlesex investigates how Edward W