This article raises questions about the aesthetics of scale as they appear relative to genetically modified organisms in science fiction and especially in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009). Bacigalupi makes the unusual choice of representing GMOs largely through science fictional tropes of automatism rather than the grotesque. Because of t…[Read more]

This essay considers Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) from the standpoint of its influential depiction of African Americans as automata. Through Ellison’s other writings, including his review of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) and his unpublished drafts of Invisible Man, the essay links the political concerns of the novel with…[Read more]

Reading the representation of New York City in J.D. Robb’s/Nora Roberts’s sci-fi detective romance In Death series via Andrew Karmen’s critique of the 1990s’ New York crime wave/crash narrative pushed by Giuiliani and Bratton’s “broken windows” policing.

What will it take to undomesticate the world—to begin to loosen humanity’s tight grasp on the planet’s spaces, structures, resources, and populations? Marie Darrieussecq’s short story “My Mother Told Me Monsters Do Not Exist” describes the intrusion of an unidentifiable creature into a fastidious woman’s apartment home, a modest but powerful scen…[Read more]

Even as there has been a pronounced trend towards secularization in modern literature, a group of authors continues to be haunted by religious texts, histories, and rituals. George Eliot, James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, Orhan Pamuk, V.S. Naipaul

Editorial for the “Descentrar la modernidad/Decentering Modernity” issue of Nomenclatura: Aproximación a los estudios hispánicos, available at http://uknowledge.uky.edu/naeh/.

Contribution to a series of short academic essays on poetry. Discusses Michael Kandel’s translation of Stanisław Lem’s poem on “Love and Tensor Algebra”, which appears in The Cyberiad. Discusses Kandel’s choice abandon both form and content in order to remain true to the original. Ties this to the poem’s use of mathematical imagery to argue th…[Read more]