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urn:uuid:a3cc91bc-258f-4d24-bc12-45f662cbe22f 03 15 9781800647527 00 EB E101 10 01 01 Life, Re-Scaled The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance 1 B01 Liliane Campos Liliane Campos is a Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and a research fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. Her research explores ways in which contemporary novelists, poets, and performers engage with the images and discourse of biology. She is the author of <italic>The Dialogue of Art and Science in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia</italic> (2011) and <italic>Sciences en scène dans le théâtre britannique contemporain</italic> (2012). She has co-edited special issues of <italic>Epistémocritique</italic>, <italic>Alternatives théâtrales</italic>, and <italic>Sillages Critiques</italic>, the collective volume <italic>Lectures de Tom Stoppard: Arcadia</italic> (2011), and conference proceedings, <italic>Living Matter / Literary Forms (20th-21st centuries)</italic> on www.fabula.org. Her essays on contemporary fiction have appeared in <italic>Textual Practice</italic>, <italic>Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines</italic> and <italic>Modern Fiction Studies</italic>. 2 B01 Pierre-Louis Patoine Pierre-Louis Patoine is Assistant Professor of American Literature at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, co-director of the Science/Literature research group (litorg.hypotheses.org) and co-editor of the journal <italic>Epistemocritique</italic>. He has published a monograph on the role of the empathic, physiological body in the experience of reading (2015), co-edited collections on David Foster Wallace (2017) and Ursula K. Le Guin (2021), and articles exploring biosemiotic, ecocritical and neuroaesthetic approaches to immersion and altered states of consciousness, virality, planetary life, postmodern speciation and anthropocenic acceleration in the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, William S. Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, Kim S. Robinson and Frank Herbert. 01 eng 00 418 03 12 DS 23 life sciences 10 LIT000000 23 Literature 04 PN55 12 DSK 23 fiction 10 SCI020000 23 Science 12 FA 23 poetry 10 SCI008000 10 ART060000 23 comics 12 DSB 23 performance 12 PS 23 ethics 12 RNT 12 AFKP 23 philosophy 23 politics 23 biological imagination 01 06 03 00 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. 04 00 Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors List of Illustrations 1. Introduction Liliane Campos and Pierre-Louis Patoine Imagination, Science and Power Questions of Scale Aesthetic Trends Chapter Presentation Works Cited 2. Human Environmental Aesthetics: The Molecular Sublime and the Molecular Grotesque Paul Hamann-Rose 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 Sophie Laniel-Musitelli The Poetry of Stone Playing with Scale Images of Metamorphosis and Development Sounding the Flesh Science in the Landscape Works Cited 4. Mycoaesthetics: Weird Fungi and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation Derek Woods Weird Ecology, Weird Fiction Wood Wide Web as Ecological Genome The Fungal Kingdom Works Cited 5. To Be or Not to Be a Patient: Challenging Biomedical Categories in Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed Pascale Antolin Challenging Medical Knowledge and Classifications Challenging Neurological Reduction Challenging Social and Literary Categories Works Cited 6. Neurocomics and Neuroimaging: David B.’s Epileptic and Matteo Farinella and Hana Roš’s Neurocomic Jason Tougaw The Tools of Comics The Tools of Neuroimaging A Person Surrounds This Brain Works Cited 7. The Fiction of the Empty Pandemic City: Race and Diaspora in Ling Ma’s Severance Rishi Goyal Works Cited 8. Dead Gods and Geontopower: An Ecocritical Reading of Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth Kristin M. Ferebee Works Cited 9. Depopulating the Novel: Post-Catastrophe Fiction, Scale, and the Population Unconscious Pieter Vermeulen 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 Works Cited 10. The Everyday Pluriverse: Ecosystem Modelling in Reservoir 13 Ben De Bruyn 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 Works Cited 11. The Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies of Climate Change Comics Susan M. Squier Making the Global Threat Personal Anthropomorphic Figures Biography and Autobiography Scientific Distance Versus Intimate Experience Works Cited 12. Displacing the Human: Representing Ecological Crisis on Stage Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr and Hannah Simpson ‘It’s Actually Not About Us’: The Paradox of Human-Centric Ecological Drama Shifting the Boundaries: The Spatial, the Temporal, and the Sensory ‘Fragments, Shards, Whispers’: Imagining the Impossible Other Conclusion Works Cited 13. Staging Larger Scales and Deep Entanglements: The Choice of Immersion in Four Ecological Performances Eliane Beaufils Intermingling Life Forms and Scales Forms of Displacement by Immersion Reading Signs The Place of the Spectator A Diplomatic Theatre Works Cited Index Open Book Publishers 01 Open Book Publishers 04 01 20221011 02 WORLD 06 15 9781800647497 06 15 9781800647503 06 15 9781800647510 06 15 9781800647558 06 15 9781800647541 06 15 9781800647527 06 15 9781800647534 WORLD 09 Open Book Publishers 20 02 5.99 GBP WORLD