Reading in the Postgenomic Age: Race, Discipline, and Bionarrativity in Contemporary North American Literature: New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative
Autor Lesley Larkinen Limba Engleză Paperback – 16 apr 2025
In Reading in the Postgenomic Age, Lesley Larkin analyzes how writers across literary genres have reckoned with the launch (in the early 1990s) and completion (in 2003) of the Human Genome Project and the ways it has fallen short of its promise to do away with spurious notions of race. Authors such as Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Ruth Ozeki, Rebecca Skloot, Gerald Vizenor, and others demonstrate that genomics is a premier terrain upon which race is being reinscribed and reimagined in both scientific and mainstream contexts. Through construction of alternate genealogies, invention of hybrids, and citation of the textual metaphors replete within genomic discourse, these writers have illuminated the ethical, cultural, social, and political ramifications of genomic research, attuning readers to postgenomic discourses of race and power. At the same time, Larkin contends that literature’s engagement with genomics goes beyond its initial critique to comment self-reflexively on the practices and value of literary studies. Ultimately, she argues that contemporary writers outline a new ethical matrix for reading race in the postgenomic era—and rethinks literary criticism within this new paradigm.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259436
ISBN-10: 081425943X
Pagini: 264
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative
ISBN-10: 081425943X
Pagini: 264
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative
Recenzii
“Larkin eschews simplistic definitions of utopia or apocalypse, instead recognizing how the humanities and sciences—like the neoliberal global capitalist cultures that produce them—are not always humane. Reading in the Postgenomic Age joins Josie Gill’s Biofictions as among the most valuable monographs on genetics and literatures so far this decade.” —Everett Hamner, author of Editing the Soul: Science and Fiction in the Genome Age
“Through perceptive and elegant close readings, Larkin proposes a self-reflexive reading practice that is inventive and attentive to ethical questions across disciplines. Pointing to the mistake scholars often make in thinking that the humanities exist to ‘make more ethical’ the ‘objective’ natural sciences, she demonstrates a more entangled relationship.” —Paula M. L. Moya author of The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary Criticism
Notă biografică
Lesley Larkin (she/her) is Professor of English at Northern Michigan University. She is the author of Race and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett and coeditor of The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 1980–2020.
Extras
Many scholars have described how textual metaphors have contributed to perceptions of the genome as an abstract code that directly scripts the expression of traits, thus shoring up a faith in genetic determinism aligned with “mechanistic ideals of language as transparent signification” and at odds with the complicated dynamics of gene-environment interaction and organismic development. The “gene fetishism” that continues to dominate popular discourse on genetics—the idea that genes are a fundamental biological truth that explains all manner of complex physical and social phenomena—has wide-reaching cultural and political implications, including the reinforcement of race and gender essentialism and the displacement of resources away from social and political solutions for social and political problems. By undermining genomics’ textual metaphors, postgenomic literature challenges genetic determinism, in part by revealing language and textuality to be wildly unstable figures for the authority of genes. As historian of science Lily Kay explains, “Since the idea of the Book of Life first came into being as universal and absolute writings, the polysemic aspect of its so-called writing undermines the possibility of its absolute reading.”
Furthermore, the matrix of shared metaphor linking literary studies and genomics also draws attention to ethical issues that straddle science and the humanities, biology and books. It’s not just metaphors that travel back and forth between these two fields; it’s also issues of privacy, appropriation, essentialism, discrimination, and exploitation. Making plain this ethical overlap, many postgenomic literary works challenge the perceived chasm dividing the sciences and the humanities; rather than approaching these disciplines as “opposites,” a formulation that tends to dismiss the humanities as a secondary field or overestimate its “humanizing” potential, these texts offer complicated representations of the relation between the sciences and the humanities and, in turn, of narrative and material worlds.
Reading in the Postgenomic Age: Race, Discipline, and Bionarrativity in Contemporary North American Literature explores a variety of North American, English-language literary works within a period that ranges from the early 1990s, when the Human Genome Project (HGP)—and other efforts to sequence a composite human genome—launched, through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, a “postgenomic age” that begins with the conclusion of the HGP and encompasses dramatic developments in genomic technologies and notable contradictions between (and within) popular and scientific understandings of the role of genes in our lives. During this period, a significant number of texts, across multiple genres, have addressed the life sciences and genomics, in particular, as thematic points of interest. Many such works illuminate the ramifications—ethical, cultural, social, political—of genomic research. However, a central contention of this book is that literature’s engagement of genomics exceeds this critical function, commenting self-reflexively on the practices and value of literary studies and offering critical perspectives on interdisciplinarity itself. The elements I have identified as key to postgenomic literature include: (1) adoption and destabilization of genomics’ textual metaphors, (2) illumination of ethical issues overlapping biology and literature, (3) complex treatment of the relationship between the sciences and the humanities, and (4) a materialist approach to literary studies that acknowledges the mutual embeddedness of story and the natural world.
Furthermore, the matrix of shared metaphor linking literary studies and genomics also draws attention to ethical issues that straddle science and the humanities, biology and books. It’s not just metaphors that travel back and forth between these two fields; it’s also issues of privacy, appropriation, essentialism, discrimination, and exploitation. Making plain this ethical overlap, many postgenomic literary works challenge the perceived chasm dividing the sciences and the humanities; rather than approaching these disciplines as “opposites,” a formulation that tends to dismiss the humanities as a secondary field or overestimate its “humanizing” potential, these texts offer complicated representations of the relation between the sciences and the humanities and, in turn, of narrative and material worlds.
Reading in the Postgenomic Age: Race, Discipline, and Bionarrativity in Contemporary North American Literature explores a variety of North American, English-language literary works within a period that ranges from the early 1990s, when the Human Genome Project (HGP)—and other efforts to sequence a composite human genome—launched, through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, a “postgenomic age” that begins with the conclusion of the HGP and encompasses dramatic developments in genomic technologies and notable contradictions between (and within) popular and scientific understandings of the role of genes in our lives. During this period, a significant number of texts, across multiple genres, have addressed the life sciences and genomics, in particular, as thematic points of interest. Many such works illuminate the ramifications—ethical, cultural, social, political—of genomic research. However, a central contention of this book is that literature’s engagement of genomics exceeds this critical function, commenting self-reflexively on the practices and value of literary studies and offering critical perspectives on interdisciplinarity itself. The elements I have identified as key to postgenomic literature include: (1) adoption and destabilization of genomics’ textual metaphors, (2) illumination of ethical issues overlapping biology and literature, (3) complex treatment of the relationship between the sciences and the humanities, and (4) a materialist approach to literary studies that acknowledges the mutual embeddedness of story and the natural world.
Cuprins
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Reading in the Postgenomic Age Part 1 Life Writing Chapter 1 To Split or to Lump: Parsing Textual Metaphors in Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene: An Intimate History Chapter 2 From HeLa Cells to Happiness Genes: Reading and Writing Life in Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Richard Powers’s Generosity: An Enhancement Part 2 Vampire Projects Chapter 3 Stories in the Blood and Bone: Therapeutic Bionarrative Signatures in Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus Chapter 4 Reading the Flesh and Fleshy Reading in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling Part 3 Usable Futures Chapter 5 Usable Futures and Trans-Corporeal Reading in Alina Troyano’s Chicas 2000 Chapter 6 The Humanities and the Inhumanities: Rereading Discipline and Species in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy Works Cited Index
Descriere
Examines how “postgenomic literature” from the turn of the millennium engages in genomic discourse, with particular attention paid to interdisciplinarity and the rearticulation of racial ideology.