Prosthetic Grand Synthesis

<i>The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life</i>. Peter Boxall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xi+411.

Reviewed by: The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life by Peter Boxall Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life. By Peter Boxall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2020. xi+ 411 pp. £29.99. ISBN 978-1-108-83648-7. Mimesis meets prosthesis meets the novel genre. The natural self encounters the artificial or automated self. The organic comes up against the mechanic. The expansive and the contractive drives oppose one another. These are some of the sets of forces that run through and operate in Peter Boxall's most recent book—a fine achievement that recasts the history of prose fiction from the perspective of the relationship [End Page 119] between the living and the non-living, the human and the natural, the natural and the artificial. From Thomas More's Utopia to the twenty-first century, Boxall covers a long history (that of the novel in particular) in order to answer questions that underlie the whole book but are ultimately spelt out in the last chapter: how do we picture the world and 'what amalgam of abstract idea and thrown being, of fact and imagination, of blind circumstance and structured forethought, constitutes the experience of enworlding' (p. 319)? While the former has always been the concern of the novel genre—the novel has invariably endeavoured to picture the world (real or imaginary)—the latter reveals Boxall's specific approach. His contribution is to re-evaluate the novel from a philosophical and political standpoint that takes into account the forms that connect the mind with the world. In a move very much in accordance with the genre's pliability, he believes that the present requires us to reread the novel so as to discover in it 'a new set of aesthetic and political possibilities' (p. 21). It is thus that he retraces the novel back to its origins and explores the dialectic between reality and imagination with the novel as mediator between mind and matter, life and death. Boxall suggests that imagination is a prosthetic device and that the novel itself, throughout its history, has also been a prosthetic device—an extension of the self, its task having been to transform inanimate into living material. In different works, the non-living is brought to life, erasing the distinction between the living and the dead, the real and the artificial—for example, hand, glasses, puppet, radio, wig, whalebone leg as tropes, or tools that enhance interior life and are attached to it. The prosthetic condition, therefore, brings together interiority and material extension and finds different means of expression in a wealth of novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jane Austen, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Don Delillo, to reach a certain climax in the discussion of Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood. Through a careful choice of novels and writers, Boxall makes a strong case for the way prosthetic materials have been mobilized to deal in the relation between thought and world. Engaging just in passing with canonical theorists such as Georg Lukacs, Ian Watt, or Mikhail Bakhtin, this study privileges an original take on the novel and on how the prosthetic imagination has amalgamated idea and material throughout novelistic history. Its five parts provide a strict chronological account of the body and the way it establishes new connections with its prosthetic extensions. Boxall's timeline has a target and a culmination in his last chapter, the most interesting and challenging of all, in my view. As Chapter 9 presents a round-up of the discussion carried out throughout the book, it also makes a projection into the future by imagining what prosthetic worlds could or would look like in the twenty-first century. It is an intellectual and imaginative exercise as well as a serious and brave attempt to think of our own contemporary times and the future of this literary form that has been with us for centuries now. Even though artificial life has been a feature of the genre since its beginnings, it seems to be more than ever a contemporary phenomenon, posing new challenges to the...

BOXALL, PETER. The Value of the Novel. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 156 pp. $17.99 paperback. Peter Boxall's invigorating new book aims to articulate anew the work the novel does in a world marked by the pressure points of virtual reality and environmental calamity. He begins by charting historical transformations in the definition and assessment of cultural value that have determined the novel's worth. The prevailing attitude toward the humanities in the early twentieth century as the preeminent source of moral value, he demonstrates, gave way to the late twentieth-century insistence, fueled by the proliferation of literary theory, on the freedom of the critical imagination from ideological prescription (1). Boxall locates competing forces of valuation in our contemporary moment: the ethical turn in literary studies, the governmental injunction on the humanities to account for themselves in a market-driven world, and the Internet, a forum in which criticism has become a public, devalued activity. This evolving historical account motivates Boxall's study, which, in its focus on the novel's enduring centrality, resembles recent wide-ranging works that consider narrative alongside theories of affect, cognitive mind, and ethics. The flexible concept of value, however, allows Boxall to transcend specific theoretical commitments and craft an impassioned manifesto for the ethical, philosophical, and political necessity of the novel. The book is divided into two sections: Art and Matter. Part I looks at the concept of voice within the novel and the history of realism, and part II looks at the novel's engagement with the material world in its representation of bodies in space, in time, and as operated on by law. This organization allows Boxall to range widely and expertly in his methodology and historical focus. Driving the complex argument is his claim that conventional literary historical delineations mask the relatively stable genealogy of the novel, or its distinctive oscillation between existence and non-existence. To combat this critical tendency. Boxall traces continuities among early versions of fiction, realism, modernism, and postmodernism. In examining the novel's voice, for example, Boxall turns to Dickens and Beckett, two writers who represent the height of realism's popularity and mastery, and the endpoint of its viability in late modernism, respectively. David Copperfield demonstrates the instability and fictionality of the voice or presence (33). while Beckett's trilogy and other prose works, far from fully evacuative, assert the primacy of the voice to subjectivity. Despite these efforts to erode historical boundaries, Boxall is careful to engage with the cultural specificity of the novels he reads, such as Defoe's construction of modern individualism in the face of capitalism and imperialism, and More's dissatisfaction with the political corruption of sixteenth-century Europe in Utopia. And yet a major element of his argument consists in showing that the novel engages, as no other form can, with the specific problems of discourse and matter that shape our world today, namely the information age and the ecological crisis. Through fascinating readings of formal experiments with temporality in Wells, Proust, and Woolf, Boxall shows the novel's political and ethical responses to momentous changes in our understanding of space and time, predominantly as they took place at the turn of the twentieth century. …

The depiction of the body has never been merely a composition of an image, but it always carried with it a series of meanings and connections. Two or three-dimensional, in painting or in cinema or in virtual worlds, moving or static, the body has always been the place where the material world meets the conceptual world and other ‘virtual’ realities, and where physicality meets the subject’s ideas, fears, hopes and desires. The aim of this essay is to examine the construction of the avatar body as the ‘new monstrous’ of the digital age, to read the avatar performance in the context of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque and it raises the question as to what it is to feel at ‘home’ within digitisation. The digital age is marked by a series of juxtapositions: on the one hand we augment the human body through electronic devices in order to respond to hybrid environments and, on the other hand, we create digital spaces in which we interact via our representatives – our avatars. These theoretical displacements from physical to virtual and from body to mind – theoretical because during both the construction of the avatar and the experience of cyberspace there is always a physical body attached to the subject – call us to rethink issues of matter and corporeality, and to question the body’s place in the world anew. If, within the emergence of new technologies, ‘we are all cyborgs’ (Haraway, 1991a: 150), then the human body becomes a technobiological object, a hybrid construction of wo/man and machine, and a powerful promising image of new subjectivity. Against a static and coherent understanding of the body but also a pre-given and fixed world, cyborgs open up into prosthetic extensions and digital connections, as well as to multiple digital and physical profiles that project realities and future imaginaries. They do so in order to create hybrid assemblages of organisms and machines and to establish links with others and with their environment. These contemporary monsters, as swarms of machines and connections and similarly to the monsters of the past, challenge the ‘natural’ to suggest new, as Haraway puts it, ‘possible worlds’ (1991b: 22). Extending this line of study, this essay examines the construction of the avatar body as the ‘new monstrous’ of the digital age and attempts a reading of avatar performance in the context of Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. By arguing that the body is radically dispersed within the context of digitisation, it raises the question as to what it is to feel at ‘home’.

MONIKA SIEBERT University of Richmond Historical Realism and Imperialist Nostalgia in Terrence Malick’s The New World THE PROMOTIONAL MATERIALS FOR TERRENCE MALICK’S THENEWWORLD (2005) devote considerable time to detailing the extraordinary effort of the production crew to recreate Werowocomoco, the capital of the Powhatan’s paramount chiefdom, and Fort James, the first surviving English settlement in Virginia, in the period from 1607 to 1617. The hour-long documentary on “The Making of The New World.” accompanying the DVD release of the film, for example, chronicles the shared work of a research team of historians, archeologists, linguists, anthropologists, and members of Virginia tribes to represent as faithfully as possible Powhatan and English agriculture, architecture, language, and material culture. The viewers of the featurette learn that the filming takes place only ten miles from the original location of the settlement and that Werowocomoco and Fort James are reconstructed with exclusively local materials, such as heirloom Indian corn and tobacco plants for the gardens, thousands of shell beads for Powhatan’s mantle, and wild turkey feathers and deer racks provided by Robert Green, the chief of the Patawomeck tribe, to adorn Powhatan’s house. As Dr. William Kelso, director of archeology for the Association for the PreservationofVirginiaAntiquitiesandchiefarcheologistattheoriginal Jamestown settlement site, attests on camera, “the set is a time capsule; it fully captures the feeling of what it was like to live in Fort James.” Choreographers and martial arts experts teach actors the fundamentals of seventeenth-century body language and dialect trainers help Q’orianka Kilcher, the actress portraying Pocahontas, pronounce both Algonquian language and Algonquian-accented seventeenth-century English. The producers repeat frequently that the film’s director “likes the things real,” that they too are committed to “solid reality,” all the way down to filming without artificial lighting or computer generated special effects. And above all, that in a marked departure from the historical representations of American Indians on film, the crew is dedicated to depicting the Algonquian people of early Virginia, rather 140 Monika Siebert than generic Indians. Stephen R. Adkins and Robert Green, the chiefs of the Chickahominy and Patawomeck tribes, appear in the documentary, describing their initial wariness of yet another project reinventing their old world anew and cautiously expressing “high hopes” for the film’s potential to evoke among its viewers the long overdue recognition of the people who greeted the settlers of Jamestown. And yet, the filmmakers’ dedication to the faithful recreation of early seventeenth-century Tsenacomoco/Virginia1 and all its inhabitants, showcased in “The Making of The New World,” does not translate into an equally accurate account of the British colonial project in North America, let alone its long lasting effects, in the feature film itself. Instead, The New World offers yet another reprise of the largely fictionalized story of Jamestown settlement with its attendant romance of John Smith and Pocahontas.2 While the film includes episodes needed to offer a historically accurate account of the early colonization of Tsenacomoco—not least in depictions of the beginnings of the Virginia tobacco industry and consequent displacement of the Powhatan or in frequent juxtapositions between Captain Smith and Captain Newport’s lofty political ideals and the far baser actions of the colonists— ultimately, its emphasis falls elsewhere. Though it starts off as a historical drama, The New World transforms quickly into a romance. The film’s commitment to historical realism implied in the authenticity of the reconstructed material environment is, in the end, overshadowed by its unrelenting interest in a love story of a special kind: not a story of John Smith’s infatuation with Pocahontas, but of his falling for America as a new beginning, for America as an opportunity for idealist Englishmen, disgruntled by the enclosure movement, to construct a social utopia.3 The New World parts company with historical facts 1 Tsenacomoco is the name the Powhatan used to refer to their country. 2 The accounts, whether scholarly or fictional, of the alleged Smith-Pocahontas romance are legion. Along with the numerous debunkings of this romance, they could constitute a sizable literary tradition. We now even have books on the books about Smith and Pocahontas, studies attempting to account for the development of...

Pigs and Desire in Lillian Ng´s "Swallowing Clouds"

In The Prosthetic Imagination, leading critic Peter Boxall argues that we are now entering an artificial age, in which our given bodies enter into new conjunctions with our prosthetic extensions. This new age requires us to reimagine our relation to our bodies, and to our environments, and Boxall suggests that the novel as a form can guide us in this imaginative task. Across a dazzling range of prose fictions, from Thomas More's Utopia to Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Boxall shows how the novel has played a central role in forging the bodies in which we extend ourselves into the world. But if the novel has helped to give our world a human shape, it also contains forms of life that elude our existing human architectures: new amalgams of the living and the non-living that are the hidden province of the novel imagination. These latent conjunctions, Boxall argues, are preserved in the novel form, and offer us images of embodied being that can help us orient ourselves to our new prosthetic condition.

This chapter situates Milton's vehement anti-imperialism at the beginning of a poetic tradition, stretching as far as Shelley and beyond, which was global in sensibility and in which opposition to empire was a central form of imagination. It argues that the major poets of this era not only articulated a powerfully anti-imperial vision of the world, but also contended that artistic culture could not flourish under the political conditions of modern imperialism. This is partly a historical claim, and one which assumes that poetry in this period played an important role in the public contestation of Britain's changing place in the world; but it is also a literary claim about the continuing salience of the classical and early modern traditions which governed poetic forms of imagination right up to the Romantic age. The purpose is not simply to record a series of improvised poetic responses to the growth of the British Empire. Rather, it is to show how a poetry grounded since the Renaissance in universal habits of thought and expansive modes of territorial vision was transposed onto an evolving historical reality, and how this process of imaginative transposition took on a heightened sense of political urgency as the implications of Britain's imperial activities broke upon public consciousness.