POROUS SKINS: Life beyond Immunity

What does it mean to be human in a world that isboth viral and vulnerable? The current pandemic has made clear that we liveporous lives in a porous world of bacteria, microbes, viruses, organic bodies,and non-organic matter. Tracing the motif of human and posthuman skin in MargePiercy’s Science Fiction, this article argues that simply equating porositywith threats to life, and with such dangers only, is a dangerous misconception,albeit one which can offer a pragmatic last resort in a situation of pandemicemergency. Yet as the touch of the held-out hand is more and more sorelymissed, it might be time to open our horizons of imagination beyond thesimplistic notion that human life is in need of constant containment in skins,walls and borderlines, lest it spill out and expose its vulnerability. Skin isour most natural but also most ambivalent border which protects as much as itenmeshes us. It can open our horizons of imagination to ways of existence thatare not solely reliant on immunity and insulation. This article travels intoMarge Piercy’s dystopian future and back to a year 2020 in which the illusionof immunity has been shattered. It acknowledges the porosity of human skin as areminder that life is always a threat to itself, even whilst survival at thecost of life is just another form of death. Yet skin, so naturally ambivalent,offers a third way to seek a future-bound human life that might be sustainablein all its precariousness. Working within an ecocritical framework, thisarticle aims to re-assess the concept of immunity from a position of porosityand enmeshment in the natural world. 

The Oil-Flower Unfurling Its Petals The Phenomenological Aesthetics of Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island

The article analyses Tom McCarthy’s novel Satin Island as giving literary form to the aesthetics of materiality. Acknowledging the work’s function as philosophical cognition, the investigation utilises the concept of Einfühlung (empathy) as the ‘feeling-into’ of aesthetic experience, while concomitantly determining that ordinary empathy as fellow-feeling is lacking. Combining that ahuman aspect with Husserlian time constituting flow, underlying time consciousness, as another aspect of the ahuman, the thesis argues that the novel stages the mattering of matter and the patterning of patterns as surface phenomena that constitute the aesthetics of this particular fictional world. The aesthetics appears as a near-metaphysical phenomenon in manifesting an instantiation of Nietzsche’s concept of the human only being eternally justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. As such a phenomenon, the human amalgamates with matter and is dead. However, the world can be said to harbour ‘A LIFE’ in the sense of the Deleuzean concept of pure immanence. Moreover, as an avant-gardist artwork, the novel may provoke an ethical counter-reaction in the reader, inducing an ecocritically grounded ethics that would empathise with the planet earth as a manifestation of life itself.

‘There Was Modernism. Then There Was Digital:’ Kenneth Goldsmith and the Updating of Literature

The notion of literature as an obsolete form, out of sync with its own time, has been a familiar one ever since modern media displaced the literary from its previous centrality in culture. Expounding on poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s express ambitions of bringing literature up to date with contemporary media culture, this article engages the larger stakes of his work with a view to an ‘updated literature’ – a literature, as it is here considered, 'beyond textuality.' Informed by the theoretical perspectives of Friedrich Kittler and the broader field of media archeology, the article posits literature’s turn toward the generalized ‘informational milieu’ of contemporary network culture and its concomitant break with modernist notions of medium specificity. Although the provocations of both Goldsmith and Kittler have received much previous attention; in seeking here to bring them together in a committed way, this article also moves beyond the limits of their approaches to rethink the problem of literature’s dubious distinctness in our age of networks.

Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy

Review of Vijay Mishra's book Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy

Shaping the Lyric: Blank Space in the Poetry of Emily Berry and Ocean Vuong

Emily Berry and Ocean Vuong have each written about their fascination with the physical and linguistic arrangement of a poemon the page, and yet their poetry has typically been read as purely confessional, concerned primarily with emotion and the revelation of personal experience, rather than an attempt to interrogate the nature of language itself. This article examines Emily Berry’sStranger, Baby and Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds,analysing their use of blank space in these collections, and the way in which they use this space, in its physical, linguistic and metaphorical forms, to emphasise the constructed nature of their poems, to evoke a sense of absence, distance or detachment, presentingus with the emotional complexities of grief, abandonment and dislocation, whilst also demonstrating these emotional states to the reader. It will propose that this use of blank space creates, ineffect, a new form of lyric poetry, one which combines the experiential focus of the confessional lyric with the self-analysis of the Imagists and Language poets, so that Berry and Vuong interrogate the inevitable failure of their own poems, emphasising theimpossible gap between traumatic experience and its articulation through language.