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Life, Re-Scaled. The Biological Imagination in 21st-Century Literature and Performance. Liliane Campos and Pierre-Louis Pantoine (eds.). Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022, 398 p.

Claire Cazajous-Augé
Bibliographical reference

Life, Re-Scaled. The Biological Imagination in 21st-Century Literature and Performance. Liliane Campos and Pierre-Louis Pantoine (eds.). Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, ISBN 978-1-80064-749-7, 398 p.

Editor's notes

Index nominum
Pascale Antolin, David B., Mikhail Bakhtin, Eliane Beaufils, Gillian Beer, Edmund Burke, Liliane Campos, Gillian Clarke, Charles Darwin, Ben de Bruyn, Adam Dickinson, Matteo Farinella, Kristin Ferebee, Joshua Ferris, Rishi Goyal, Paul Hamann-Rose, Imanuel Kant, Jeff Lemire, Ling Ma, Simon Mawer, Jon McGregor, Sophie Musitelli, Pierre-Louis Pantoine, Hana Roš, Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, Hannah Simpson, Susan M. Squier, Emily St. John Mandel, Susan Stewart, Jason Tougaw, Jeff VanderMeer, Pieter Vermeulen, Derek Woods

Full text

1Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has had a tremendous influence on artists all through the 19th and 20th centuries: it has encouraged writers, poets and playwrights to resort to new artistic forms in order to take into account the emerging fields of evolutionary biology and genetics. More recently, our biological imagination has been reinvigorated by the recent discoveries of DNA and mapping of genes. By challenging human exceptionalism, such discoveries have led artists to invent new devices to show the similarities between human and other life forms though human-made media. In Life, Re-Scaled. The Biological Imagination in 21st-Century Literature and Performance, Liliane Campos, Pierre-Louis Pantoine and thirteen international contributors question how biology, genetics, epidemiology, ecosystem modelling and other fields have influenced European and North American artists in the 21st century. Divided into four sections, the thirteen chapters explore the manners in which scientific knowledge may be integrated in fiction, poetry, graphic novels and performance. However, far from suggesting that artistic works merely illustrate and translate scientific theories so as to make them intelligible, the essays comprised in this book show that novels, poems, comics and theater contribute to shaping our perception of other-than-human life forms and phenomena, to developing our critical thought about those fields and to creating a “multifaceted biological imagination” (5).

2Taking its cue from Gillian Beer’s questions on the influence of Darwin’s work on 19th century artists, “What new tales are being unleased from scientific work now? And what new forms for storytelling?” (3), the volume asks what new scales have emerged in artistic works which include life sciences and physical sciences in their themes and structures. Indeed, all contributions examine the different scales at which we imagine life, from a microscopic to a macroscopic scale and from cellular biology to climatology. They also “experiment with aesthetics that connect disparate scales, including alternating focalizations, ‘pluriverse’ perspectives, ‘multiscale narration,’ utopian microcosms and ‘neo-sublime’ or grotesque aesthetics” (4). Thanks to the central notion of scale, this book aims to give a decentered viewpoint on our own bodies and on the rest of the living world.

3The first section, “Invisible Scales,” centers around microscopic scales and environmental issues. In “Human Environmental Aesthetics: The Molecular Sublime and the Molecular Grotesque” (chapter 2), Paul Hamann-Rose analyzes the sublime and grotesque aesthetics. Drawing upon Burke’s, Kant’s, Bakhtin’s and Stewart’s works, he proposes to rethink the definitions of such concepts and to see how they apply to invisible forms of life, such as molecules and microbes, in novels (Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf), popular science books and poetry (Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic). He argues that they all emphasize the interdependence of human and nonhuman bodies. In “Still Life and Vital Matter in Gillian Clarke’s Poetry” (chapter 3), Sophie Musitelli focuses on Gillian Clark’s poetry. She shows how the Welsh poet deals with geological and biological time and adapts her writing to the processes of transformation and sedimentation. Musitelli considers that the poet’s wish to show the vitality of the mineral world testifies to her environmental consciousness. In “Mycoaesthetics: Weird Fungi and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation” (chapter 4), Derek Woods investigates how fungi are represented in science communication and popular science and fiction. Woods coins the term “mycoaesthetics” to examine the combination of the symbolic dimension of fungi and the sense of estrangement they convey, and to illustrate how these nonhuman beings resist fixed categories and representation.

4Section 2, “Neuro-Medical Imaging and Diagnosis,” which dwells with a contemporary neurobiological imaginary, opens with Pascale Antolin’s analysis of Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed. In “To Be or Not to Be a Patient: Challenging Biomedical Categories in Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed” (chapter 6), Antolin identifies this narrative as a neuronovel. The fact that the main character’s condition is never diagnosed gives the novel a satirical dimension and a binary structure (health vs. illness, social inclusion vs. exclusion). In the following chapter, “Neurocomics and Neuroimaging in David B.’s Epileptic and Farinella and Roš’s Neurocomic,” Jason Tougaw digs into the specific manners in which graphic narratives may help us understand neurological phenomena, such as consciousness or subjectivity, that science fails to explain. He argues that combining textbook images with fantasy allows David B. to suggest that how the brain works resists representation.

5The third section is dedicated to pandemic imaginaries. In “The Fiction of the Empty Pandemic City: Race and Diaspora in Ling Ma’s Severance” (chapter 7), Rishi Goyal explores the fungal infection that kills millions of people and leaves New York almost empty in Ling Ma’s novel. The fact that this pandemic redistributes the racial and social cartography of this metropolis contributes to addressing the issue of urban design and that of the cohabitation between racial communities. Similarly, Jeff Lemire’s graphic novel, Sweet Tooth, imagines how a deadly plague provides an opportunity to denounce how the colonizers’ extractivist resource exploitation has led to the devitalization of North American soils. In “Dead Gods and Geontopower: An Ecocritical Reading of Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth” (chapter 8), Kristin Ferebee thus addresses the issues of geontopower, or settler ontology, and how Traditional Ecological Knowledge has been annihilated. In “Depopulating the Novel: Post-Catastrophe Fiction, Scale, and the Population Unconscious” (chapter 9), Pieter Vermeulen focuses on Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. In this post-catastrophe fiction, a flu has decimated the world’s population. By representing a bucolic post-apocalyptic world, the novel intertwines issues of overpopulation and the scarcity of resources.

6Section 4 examines how the macrocosmic scale of the numerous climate crises encourages artists to adopt a decentering approach in order to depict the consequences of geophysical phenomena on animal, vegetal and microbial life. In “The Everyday Pluriverse: Ecosystem Modelling in Reservoir 13” (chapter 10), Ben de Bruyn deals with Jon McGregor’s novel and accounts for McGregor’s strategy to show the different perspectives human and nonhuman species (plants and animals) have of a rural area through various narrative techniques and stylistic devices. Doing so, he tries to renew and to challenge our anthropocentric experience of everyday phenomena. In “The Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies of Climate Change Comics” (chapter 11), Susan M. Squier analyzes how comics manage to show the impact of climate change on often-forgotten species whose extinction process may be less visible than that of more familiar and visible species and to highlight the risks posed by viruses that are often unheard of. The last two chapters examine the specificities of theater and installations when it comes to exploring the consequences of climate change. In “Displacing the Human: Representing Ecological Crisis on Stage” (chapter 12), Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr and Hannah Simpson argue that theater has the ability to play with unique spatial, temporal and sensory dimensions in order to put other-than-human beings and phenomena on stage. Contemporary theater artists thus choose to depict miniature ecosystems or to mix scientific and mythical discourses, among other strategies, to draw attention to the sixth mass extinction. In the last chapter, “Staging Larger Scales and Deep Entanglements: The Choice of Immersion in Four Ecological Performances”, Eliane Beaufils studies how four immersive installations allow spectators to directly experience the different scalar interactions between human and nonhuman actors. She explains that such performances and practices lead to a necessary “geobiological” perspective.

7The thirteen stimulating essays gathered in Life, Re-Scaled. The Biological Imagination in 21st-Century Literature and Performance are a welcome addition to the question of the relations between science and the climate crisis and art. They provide an invigorating and thought-provoking perspective on the notion of contemporary biological imagination. This book will be of great interest to people who wish to explore the connections between life sciences and different artforms, particularly in the context of the Anthropocene.

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References

Electronic reference

Claire Cazajous-Augé, Life, Re-Scaled. The Biological Imagination in 21st-Century Literature and Performance. Liliane Campos and Pierre-Louis Pantoine (eds.). Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022, 398 p.”Caliban [Online], 71-72 | 2024, Online since 20 August 2024, connection on 12 November 2024. URL: http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/caliban/13276; DOI: https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.4000/12dmw

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About the author

Claire Cazajous-Augé

Université Toulouse II – Jean Jaurès

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