Credit: Grace Marks, sketched in 1843. Retrieved from WikiMedia Commons. Sneha Mantri The facts are sparse. Grace Marks was born in Ireland around 1828, emigrated to Canada in 1840 with her family, and by 1843, aged barely fifteen, was sentenced to death for the murder of her employer Thomas Kinnear. Her story was sensationalized in…
Tag: Literature
Cyborgs Pt. 2: Cellular Agencies in Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea
Kathryn Cai Reviews of Chang-rae Lee’s 2014 novel On Such a Full Sea note its “bureaucratic aesthetic,”[1] its unsatisfactory narrative trajectory in which nothing seems to build, and Fan as an opaque, “monochromatic,”[2] and ultimately unsatisfactory heroine lacking in interiority,[3] particularly compared to the “adventure” heroines, such as Katniss Everdeen, that populate conventional heroic and dystopic…
Bad Readers or Bad Sci-Fi?
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Aki Hoshide. Retrieved from NASA. Anna Fenton-Hathaway 1. A recent lunch conversation skittered around awhile before landing, not atypically these days, on how we should all be preparing for the AI apocalypse.
Lecture recap: “James Hogg and Illness Narratives in a Scottish Context”
With Megan Coyer, Arden Hegele, and Cristobal Silva The fall semester’s Explorations in Medical Humanities series capped with a lecture from Dr. Megan Coyer (Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow) on the subject of illness narratives and James Hogg’s 1823 novel, The Three Perils of Woman; or, Love, Erasing, and Jealousy, with…
Breaking Through Trauma with Creative Writing and Bibliotherapy
What benefits might be found in writing about experiences of trauma? Alternatively, what might be the effect of reading about somebody else’s experiences? In my October and November posts, I explored aspects of the medical and rehabilitative object-human relationships in Harry Parker’s novel Anatomy of a Soldier. Although a work of fiction, Parker’s novel is semi-autobiographical….
Apocalypse, Cyborgs, and Gender (Pt. 1)
Kathryn Cai As a recent New York Times article notes, apocalyptic narratives—in the form of natural disasters and conflict with North Korea, for instance—and survivalist responses to it are on the rise in popular US discourses.[1] This tongue-in-cheek article notes that survivalism is gaining traction in young, affluent culture, “where the bombproof bunker has replaced…
Twin Studies
Back in September, I found myself in a small community just outside of Ithaca, NY, in the company of several colleagues from Cornell. We were there to participate in community’s annual “Fun Run.” I use the term “fun” here with some reservations, defining it provisionally and according to terminology that was current when I ran…
Hypochondria and the Struggle for Control
Sneha Mantri One of the best-known literary depictions of hypochondria is Molière’s medical play, Le Malade imaginaire, which is occupied with the struggle for power between Argan, the titular “invalid,” and those who surround him. One reading of Argan focuses on his victimhood, arguing that the character believes so completely in his own illness that…
The Reproductive Sublime in Anthropocenic Literature, Part II: Theorizing a Reproductive Sublime
Livia Arndal Woods Edmund Burke’s 1757 A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful defines the sublime as “whatever is in any sort terrible…[and] productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (34). The particular strength of this emotion is the result of the sublime’s…
Francis Bacon’s New Science of Life-Prolongation
Aaron L. Greenberg Is a long life actually a better experience than a short one? Unlike his seventeenth-century contemporaries, who assumed that life gets qualitatively worse the longer it lasts, Francis Bacon proposed in The History Naturall And Experimentall, of Life and Death, Or of the Prolongation of Life (Latin 1623; English 1638) that longer…