Life, Re-Scaled , livre ebook

LIFE, RE-SCALED

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





© 2022 Liliane Campos and Pierre-Louis Patoine. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapter’s authors.
This book was published with the support of the Institut Universitaire de France, the Sorbonne Nouvelle University, and the PRISMES – EA 4398 research laboratory.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text for non-commercial purposes of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
Liliane Campos and Pierre-Louis Patoine (eds), Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0303
Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses
All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web
Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0303#resources
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ISBN Paperback: 9781800647497
ISBN Hardback: 9781800647503
ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781800647510
ISBN Digital ebook (EPUB): 9781800647527
ISBN Digital ebook (AZW3): 9781800647534
ISBN XML: 9781800647541
ISBN HTML: 9781800647558
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0303
Cover: ‘Life Along the Nile’, image by Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center (2014), https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/life-along-nile. Public domain. Cover design by Katy Saunders.

Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Notes on Contributors xi
1. Introduction 1
Liliane Campos and Pierre-Louis Patoine
Imagination, Science and Power 5
Questions of Scale 14
Aesthetic Trends 19
Chapter Presentation 23
Works Cited 33
I. Invisible Scales: Cells, Microbes and Mycelium 39
2. Human Environmental Aesthetics: The Molecular Sublime and the Molecular Grotesque 41
Paul Hamann-Rose
The Molecular Sublime 45
Imagining Microbes: From the Molecular Sublime to the Molecular Grotesque 54
Molecular Landscapes: New Ways of Reading the Anthropocene 60
Conclusion: The Big Moment of the Very Small 65
Works Cited 66
3. Still Life and Vital Matter in Gillian Clarke’s Poetry 69
Sophie Laniel-Musitelli
The Poetry of Stone 71
Playing with Scale 76
Images of Metamorphosis and Development 80
Sounding the Flesh 85
Science in the Landscape 87
Works Cited 91
4. Mycoaesthetics: Weird Fungi and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation 93
Derek Woods
Weird Ecology, Weird Fiction 98
Wood Wide Web as Ecological Genome 103
The Fungal Kingdom 108
Works Cited 116
II. Neuro-Medical Imaging and Diagnosis 121
5. To Be or Not to Be a Patient: Challenging Biomedical Categories in Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed 123
Pascale Antolin
Challenging Medical Knowledge and Classifications 127
Challenging Neurological Reduction 132
Challenging Social and Literary Categories 135
Works Cited 143
6. Neurocomics and Neuroimaging: David B.’s Epileptic and Matteo Farinella and Hana Roš’s Neurocomic 147
Jason Tougaw
The Tools of Comics 153
The Tools of Neuroimaging 158
A Person Surrounds This Brain 164
Works Cited 179
III. Pandemic Imaginaries 181
7. The Fiction of the Empty Pandemic City: Race and Diaspora in Ling Ma’s Severance 183
Rishi Goyal
Works Cited 201
8. Dead Gods and Geontopower: An Ecocritical Reading of Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth 203
Kristin M. Ferebee
Works Cited 226
9. Depopulating the Novel: Post-Catastrophe Fiction, Scale, and the Population Unconscious 229
Pieter Vermeulen
The Population Unconscious 229
Cosy Catastrophe 234
Population between Science and Speculation in Science Fiction 238
Survival at Scale in Post-Catastrophe Science Fiction 242
Utopian and Realist Fictions 245
Conclusion: Downscaling Survival 249
Works Cited 256
IV. Ecological Scales 259
10. The Everyday Pluriverse: Ecosystem Modelling in Reservoir 13 261
Ben De Bruyn
Introduction: The Rural Mesocosm 261
Noticing Nonhuman Narratives 268
Visualising Coexistence, Part I 274
Modelling Interspecies Assemblages 280
Visualising Coexistence, Part II 287
Conclusion: Scale and Stoicism in the Everyday Anthropocene 291
Works Cited 295
11. The Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies of Climate Change Comics 299
Susan M. Squier
Making the Global Threat Personal 300
Anthropomorphic Figures 304
Biography and Autobiography 308
Scientific Distance Versus Intimate Experience 312
Works Cited 321
12. Displacing the Human: Representing Ecological Crisis on Stage 323
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr and Hannah Simpson
‘It’s Actually Not About Us’: The Paradox of Human-Centric Ecological Drama 326
Shifting the Boundaries: The Spatial, the Temporal, and the Sensory 332
‘Fragments, Shards, Whispers’: Imagining the Impossible Other 342
Conclusion 347
Works Cited 349
13. Staging Larger Scales and Deep Entanglements: The Choice of Immersion in Four Ecological Performances 353
Eliane Beaufils
Intermingling Life Forms and Scales 355
Forms of Displacement by Immersion 363
Reading Signs 369
The Place of the Spectator 371
A Diplomatic Theatre 374
Works Cited 376
List of Illustrations 379
Index 385

Acknowledgements
The work presented in this book was carried out with the support of the Institut Universitaire de France and the PRISMES laboratory at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. We would like to thank all our contributors for their dedication and enthusiasm over the three years we spent on this project, making this book a truly collaborative work. We are also grateful to the other researchers who contributed to our preparatory workshops and made them so wonderfully stimulating: Frédérique Aït-Touati, Eric Bapteste, Sarah Bouttier, Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Josie Gill, Catherine Larose, Marc Porée, Dan Rebellato, Kerry-Jane Wallart, Apolline Weibel and Marion Clanet.
We would also like to thank Yale University Press, who were kind enough to allow us to publish an adapted version of Jason Tougaw’s chapter, ‘Neurocomics and Neuroimaging’. And our warmest thanks go to the editorial team at Open Book Publishers, for their constant support and excellent work on this project.

Notes on Contributors
Pascale Antolin is Professor of American Literature at Bordeaux Montaigne University, and head of the research group CLIMAS. A specialist of American modernism and naturalism, she has published books and articles on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Frank Norris and Stephen Crane. For several years now, she has focused her research on the representation of illness in literature and published numerous articles on the subject in French, European and American journals. Recently, she has developed a special interest in the neuronovel, and published several articles, a special issue of EJAS , and a Wiley encyclopedia entry on brain fiction.
Eliane Beaufils is Habilitated Assistant Professor in Theatre Studies at the University Paris 8 and Vice-Head of the Doctoral School of Arts EDESTA. She studied German literature and civilization at Sorbonne University, as well as politics and sociology at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. Her research fields comprise European contemporary theatre and performance, mainly in relation to violence, war, poetry, resonance, and the meaning and means of criticality today. Her most recent publications are with Eva Holling, Being With in Contemporary Performing Arts (2018), with Alix de Morant, Scènes en partage. L’Être-ensemble dans les arts performatifs (2018) and Toucher par la pensée. Théâtralités critiques et résonances poétiques (2021). In 2018 Eliane began a pluriannual research project on ‘Theatre with regard to Climate Future’.
Ben De Bruyn teaches English Literature at UCLouvain, Belgium. He is the author of The Novel and the Multispecies Soundscape (2020) and Wolfgang Iser: A Companion (2012) as well as the co-editor of Planetary Memory in Contemporary American Fiction (with Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson, 2018) and Literature Now: Key Terms and Methods for Literary History (with Sascha Bru and Michel Delville, 2016). He is currently working on a new monograph provisionally entitled Beyond Cli-Fi .
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 The Dialogue of Art and Science in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (2011) and Sciences en scène dans le théâtre britannique contemporain (2012). She has co-edited special issues of Epistémocritique , Alternatives théâtrales , and Sillages Critiques , the collective volume