Fair Matter

TechnoZombies Decipher Humanity?

By Katherine D. Harris

After our interesting infographic session on A Clockwork Orange, students in TechnoLiterature began to grapple with issues of biotechnology in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve. On our first day of discussion, six students provided the class with information about Carter, the dissemination of this novel, its characters, and the biotechnology that demands suspension of disbelief, as with most of Carter's novels. Though no digital reader version of the novel exists, students accessed the Amazon and Barnes & Noble reviews to investigate the public reception of this novel, and they noted that quite a few of the write-ups suggested baffled and baffling responses. The novel is just weird: Mother, the somewhat fascist matriarch, castrates a misogynistic womanizer only to re-create him (Evelyn) as a woman (Eve), complete with functioning reproductive system. This new woman still retains masculine qualities demonstrated by falling in love with the epitome of woman, Tristessa, who turns out to be a transvestite. This means that Eve desires the performance of femininity – essentially, a man who performs womanhood and femininity to highlight over-determined beauty. Only then does Eve realize that she holds power in this new body and new existence as woman. She holds the power of love.

The part that these TechnoLiterature students have a problem with is the insemination of Eve with her own sperm. Realistically, could Eve ever understand “woman?” Did she need to be subjugated as a woman to completely comprehend the realities of the powerless woman's body in a patriarchal construct? Students argued vehemently about performance of gender, but ultimately agreed that the young men in the room could not really understand or read Evelyn as a woman.

All of this discussion sparked conversations about the essence of humanity. Is it Descartes cognitive function, “I think, therefore I am?” Or, is it hope and despair, construction of a belief system, the creative function? I asked students to write a blog post about The Passion of New Eve that focused on issues of gender – a post like most of the other posts that they have been writing all semester. As first and second year students, for the most part, they struggle to articulate their ideas in complex, sophisticated writing. But, I think this is my fault. When we moved into discussions about Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that is the basis for Blade Runner, students jumped into action to have an incredibly heated discussion about humanity and artificial intelligence. Much of the debate centered around feelings/emotions vs. the performance of feelings/emotions. This, of course, brought us to the popularization of serial killers, zombies, vampires, and other-worldly beasts. We returned to the question “What makes us human?”

Scholarship and Mortality

By Erick Kelemen

One of the most important lessons of graduate school was that I’ll never be able to read everything I think I ought to read. I’ll never be able to look everything up, never be able to follow out all the footnotes I think I ought to follow. Part of me still doesn’t want to believe it. To admit it is not just to admit to my insufficiency as a scholar, after all; it is to admit to my mortality.

But where did the thought that I could read it all even come from? It’s one of the enduring fantasies of academia: the definitive, the complete, the exhaustive scholarship. I had certainly bought into the fantasy by the time I first encountered the name Étienne Gilson, whose mention in a context unfamiliar to me sent my inner library geek into a tizzy: Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Eco’s fictional translator narrates his efforts to locate a book by following out a note about it, and claims that he “consulted illustrious medievalists such as the dear and unforgettable Étienne Gilson” to no avail. Eco’s murder-mystery derives much conflict from this very idea: that the investigator is always insufficient because he is human and mortal; that knowledge is always partial at best. In doing so, though, Eco positions the reader on the side of the questing detective, William, who delights in what our advisors taught us to call shelf-reading, not what librarians do (for which there is now an augmented reality app!), but looking not only at the book that we came for, but also at the books shelved near it, on the theory that exploring neighbors on a carefully ordered shelf of books will lead us to things we didn’t know we were looking for. 

Notes and Daggers: On Descartes, Translation, and Conflict

By Beth McCoy

I have a favorite footnote. It's found in the 1980 Hackett edition of René Descartes' Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences.

By the time the note rolls around, Descartes has expressed his dissatisfaction with components of his education, including fables and poetry. (Apparently, his dissatisfaction does not extend to the extended metaphors characteristic of literature; the philosopher applies those liberally). He has traveled and thus discovered that people in other places do things in ways different than those he was taught, and, contrary to his upbringing, these differently doing folks do just fine.

Such a realization does not turn the certainty-seeking Descartes into a relativist. It does, however, send him during a German winter into a warm room where he begins slowly to peel away the layers of knowledge that have accrued to him. Eventually, this peeling yields the famous cogito: I think, therefore I am.

Donald Cress's Hackett translation sets the scene for Descartes' de-layering in this way: "the onset of winter held me up in quarters where, finding no conversation with which to be diverted and, fortunately, having no other no worries or passions which troubled me, I remained for a whole day by myself in a small stove-heated room,³ where I had complete leisure for communing with my thoughts."

Old Fashioned Visualizations of A Clockwork Orange

By Katherine D. Harris

Being a Digital Humanist has indelibly altered my thought process. I work in book history and print culture – with all of those textual apparatuses and paratextual elements that allow readerly consumption in a comforting and familiar linear form. But, I no longer think about reading from left to right, or even crafting arguments in a linear progression. Neither do my students. They often visualize their readings as maps of information, or “infographics.” In the spirit of Dr. Paul Fyfe's article, “Digital Pedagogy Unplugged,”  I asked non-English majors (mostly freshmen and sophomores) to map the three phases of Alex in Anthony Burgess' dystopic novel, A Clockwork Orange. Instead of using a highlighter to visualize variant ideas on the printed page, we spent the class session mapping and visualizing the three representations of Alex, as Alex 1.0, Alex 2.0, and Alex 3.0, based on the three volumes that comprise this twentieth-century bildungsroman.

“Some for to sle, and some to wounde and kerve:” The Many Forms of Cupid

By Erick Kelemen

My favorite passage Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls” concerns Cupid. Cupid’s presence is entirely predictable in a poem about Valentine’s Day. But for most first-time readers, the Cupid in this poem is entirely unfamiliar.

Modern Cupid is usually a putto—not a cherub, though that’s what everybody calls them—a winged, roly-poly boy with a tiny bow and arrow. You see them everywhere, and though they are sometimes depicted as impish, they hardly seem sexy or dangerous.

But modern Cupid is nothing like premodern Cupid, who was always depicted as young, but usually not that young—certainly old enough for sex and marriage.