Chemist Alexander Parke adapted a newly discovered chemical with the pungent odor of rotten eggs to the task of making gooey natural rubber into a material that could be molded and shaped into any ...one of a thousand products—tires, balls, infant pacifiers, gloves, etc.—in the expanding industrial and consumer markets. Blanc details this "rising industry" in exquisite detail, identifying a host of interlocking international concerns that manufactured viscose, the basis for rayon and other CS2 products, despite the growing attention of a handful of researchers and political organizations that saw in the production process an important threat to the health of workers. ...during the 1930s, with an economic depression and the rise of German Fascism, both the left and the right saw the products of CS2 as ripe symbols of broader labor and social struggles.
This article aims to discuss modernist literary patronage in order to comment on the myths of modernism in a twofold manner. Firstly, the form patrons take in the cultural imaginary of modernist ...writers directly influences the final versions of their works. Thinly veiled versions of patrons appear time and again in various modernist novels, contributing to the way patrons are perceived in real-life and academic discourse as well. By being reduced to lionhunters or two-dimensional characters in romans a clef, patrons are mythologised, which allows writers to navigate the difficult power dynamics and expectations of literary patronage more easily. Secondly, studying the way patrons are written and talked about allows us to critically engage another, bigger myth of modernism: that of the author and their creative dominance. By looking at Lady Ottoline Morrell, a modernist patron, and her beneficiaries, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley among others, this paper provides a novel perspective on modernist works and their conception.
The term ‘musicalization’ comes from Aldous Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point where it denotes the use of music-derived models in fiction. The oeuvre of Russian writer Daniil Kharms (1905–1942) ...provides telling examples of such an approach to constructing both prose and poetry, as in his works, the conventional features of art prose and art poetry are, as a rule, considerably reduced. Kharms’s pieces, typically, consist of discrete ‘incidents’, which can be compared to musical motifs or themes; their organization into finished works is often based upon principles that have their recognizable counterparts in art music of different epochs. Some of Kharms’s texts quoted and commented on in the article show affinities with compositional ideas by major twentieth-century composers such as Alban Berg, Witold Lutosławski, Morton Feldman, Gérard Grisey, and Sofia Gubaydulina.
A large body of research in the field of psychology currently points to a variety of therapeutic outcomes derived from psychedelically occasioned mystical experience. Moreover, additional research ...suggests that such benefits to mental and emotional well-being may depend directly upon the subjective mystical experience itself, rather than upon the substances that triggered it; for instance, research at Johns Hopkins indicates that higher scores on the MEQ30 or MEQ43 might be key predictors of larger therapeutic outcomes. However, the ‘elephant in the room’ often overlooked in psychological studies is this: What exactly is it about the content of the subjective experience that triggers such significant outcomes or, of deep interest philosophically speaking, what might the mystical experience be an experience of? Could it be that such experiences have a viable ontological referent instead of their being wholly subjective and if so, how might Aldous Huxley’s theory in this regard be weighed in light of current data? The essay includes close discussion of the debate regarding the nature of mystical experiences between Robin Carhart-Harris’ REBUS model (the experiences are wholly subjective, with no ontological referent) vs. Edward Kelly’s ROSTA model (contending an ontological referent need not contradict the science). The essay’s thesis is that Huxley’s viewpoint includes plausible and perhaps valuable insights that may help explain why and how that encounter has such profound therapeutic value.
John Raymond Smythies McGeoch, Paul D; Ramachandran, VS
BMJ (Online),
04/2019, Letnik:
365
Journal Article
Recenzirano
...a direct line can be drawn from those salad days to the counterculture, drug revolution, and psychonauts of the 1960s, and then on to the decades of psychedelic suppression during the anti-hippie ...movement. John spent more than a decade at the University of Edinburgh’s psychiatry department, first as a senior lecturer and then reader. John eventually “retired” from clinical practice to become a project scientist at the centre for brain and cognition, at the University of California, San Diego. Psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and psychedelic pioneer (b 1922; q Cambridge 1945; MSc, MD, FRCP Lond), died from heart failure on 28 January 2019
Aldous Huxley saw science--and its claims to be the catalyst for human progress--as a means to concentrate political power in the hands of a ruling minority. Corruption, despotism, and spiritual ...degradation were the logical consequences of a science-based culture, or so Huxley argued. In his 1947 book, Science, Liberty, and Peace, Huxley took aim at the post-war triumph of science.
In Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human , Maren Tova Linett posits literary fiction as uniquely valuable terrain for bioethical inquiry. By depicting phenomena like animality, ...disability, and aging in richly imagined worlds, she argues, literary narratives can promote more nuanced engagement with bioethical questions than do the sparse and decontextualized thought experiments commonly employed in philosophical bioethics. Linett reads several novels written across the long twentieth century as literary-philosophical laboratories for testing bioethical claims about the value of different kinds of lives, demonstrating the importance of literary ways of knowing for bioethics. In doing so, she also makes a compelling case for allying animal studies and disability studies, fields that have historically found themselves at odds but that together have much to say about how we can achieve justice for sentient lives of all kinds.
The Minóy Machine Nechvatal, Joseph
Arts (Basel),
06/2022, Letnik:
11, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The author provides a first-hand account, as a founding editor of Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine and contributing writer with Punctum Press, of his discovery of the early noise music of Minóy ...(pseudonym of the sound artist Stanley Keith Bowsza), and its significance within the history of Machine Art.
The conflict between humans and creatures considered non-humans is a major part of a particular trend in twenty-first-century dystopian novels written by women published in English. In these novels, ...storytelling is used to push on the boundaries of what being human means and therefore the ways humans live. The future in these dystopian scenarios is filled with spaces for resistance, community values and proposals for new ways of living. But to carve out these new worlds, a discussion on what is human and what is not precedes to show that any new form society may take needs to challenge the assumptions of our present day world. In the selected novels, that include Ursula Le Guin’s The Telling, Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam, when those initially considered non-humans tell stories, they are perceived as humans. However, instead of integrating the previous human culture and reproducing its practices, these new humans propose other forms of humanity with other social arrangements, beliefs, gender configurations, and culture. They point to how humanity is a plural and open concept, not a restrictive ideal, and on the ways we can envision possible futures once a more plural meaning of the word human prevails. Throughout the article I discuss briefly the traditional humanist view on humanity, how it appears on dystopian fiction and how it is challenged, the many ways these ideas are present in the corpus selected and how they are explored and blurred. Finally, I divide the selected novels into three groups according to how the meaning of storytelling in the text challenges the notion of human
