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"Paralysis Fiction."
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The properties of water
When her older sister Marni is paralyzed jumping off the cliffs into the lake near their house, twelve-year-old Lace feels responsible for the accident and struggles to find a way to help heal her family.
Book
The Impact of China on Cybersecurity: Fiction and Friction
Exaggerated fears about the paralysis of digital infrastructure and the loss of competitive advantage contribute to a spiral of mistrust in U.S.-China relations. In every category of putative Chinese cyber threat, there are also considerable Chinese vulnerabilities and Western advantages. China has inadvertently degraded the economic efficiency of its networks and exposed them to foreign infiltration by prioritizing political information control over technical cyber defense. Although China also actively infiltrates foreign targets, its ability to absorb stolen data is questionable, especially at the most competitive end of the value chain, where the United States dominates. Similarly, China's military cyber capacity cannot live up to its aggressive doctrinal aspirations, even as its efforts to guide national information technology development create vulnerabilities that more experienced U.S. cyber operators can attack. Outmatched by the West, China is resorting to a strategy of international institutional reform, but it benefits too much from multistakeholder governance to pose a credible alternative. A cyber version of the stability-instability paradox constrains the intensity of cyber interaction in the U.S.-China relationship—and in international relations more broadly—even as lesser irritants continue to proliferate.
Journal Article
Lizzie!
A bright, curious girl in a wheelchair who enjoys visiting a petting zoo in her Florida town uncovers a mystery surrounding a shack full of screeching monkeys.
Book
David Goodis’s Noir Fiction: The American Dream’s Paralysis
In its depiction of marginalized characters trapped within inner-city slums, David Goodis’s postwar fiction of the late 1940s through the 1950s constitutes a noir critique of the American Dream’s paralysis. The defining elements of that paradigm—romantic fulfillment, family cohesion, upward mobility, suburban escape, egalitarian success, material prosperity—are systematically shown to be beyond attainment by the underprivileged and, thus, a mechanism of social victimization. At the same time, despite his oeuvre’s unremitting bleakness, Goodis valorizes his protagonists’ capacity for endurance amid their alienation and disenfranchisement. During the fraught era of Cold War anxiety masked by mainstream conformism, this author’s down-and-outers recognize the truth that “There’s no success like failure, / And … failure’s no success at all.” His pulp novels significantly extend late-modernist themes of fragmentation, entropy, and despair.
Journal Article
The Potentiality of Paralysis in Joyce’s “Counterparts”
The scrivener presents a curious case—writing the law and bringing it into existence via the material reproduction of legal instruments. Our most famous literary example is Melville’s Bartleby, forever immortalized by his listless refusal: “I’d prefer not to.” Yet near on fifty years after Melville, Joyce conceived another scrivener, neglected by comparison: Farrington from the Dubliners story, “Counterparts.” Though critics have noted how Farrington is shot through with the “hemiplegia or paralysis” Joyce claimed lay in the soul of Dublin, few have considered paralysis as a concept containing the opposite—a catatonic moment of potential, rendered aesthetic by Joyce’s story. Drawing on Agamben’s conception of potentiality, this paper takes Joyce’s scrivener beyond the realist critique of the ennui of the imperial subject to explore how Farrington reveals a double potential: the potential of the paralyzed colonial subject; and the potential of thinking with contemporary critical theory to see paralysis not as an end, foreclosure, or stasis, but an aesthetic rendering of contingency.
Journal Article
The Death of a Disease
In 1988, the World Health Organization launched a campaign for the global eradication of polio. Today, this goal is closer than ever. Fewer than 1,300 people were paralyzed from the disease in 2004, down from approximately 350,000 in 1988.
In The Death of a Disease, science writers Bernard Seytre and Mary Shaffer tell the dramatic story of this crippling virus that has evoked terror among parents and struck down healthy children for centuries. Beginning in ancient Egypt, the narrative explores the earliest stages of research, describes the wayward paths taken by a long line of scientists-each of whom made a vital contribution to understanding this enigmatic virus-and traces the development of the Salk and Sabin vaccines. The book also tracks the contemporary polio story, detailing the remaining obstacles as well as the medical, governmental, and international health efforts that are currently being focused on developing countries such as India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Niger.
At a time when emerging diseases and the threat of bioterrorism are the focus of much media and public attention, this book tells the story of a crippling disease that is on the verge of disappearing. In the face of tremendous odds, the near-eradication of polio offers an inspiring story that is both encouraging and instructive to those at the center of the continued fight against communicable diseases.
eBook
Arresting Monstrosity: Polio, \Frankenstein\, and the Horror Film
Early Hollywood horror, and Boris Karloff's portrayal of Frankenstein's monster in particular, must be understood as cultural products of the age of polio. Polio survivors have drawn attention to kinetic similarities between their experiences and Karloff's gait, but horror and polio culture also share interests in experiments on simians, shadowy medical research, and ambiguously paralytic states. As well as locating the origins of some of horror's formal conventions, this essay draws attention to a dangerous gambit played by medical authorities in 1947, when, to energize the public in the fight against polio, they exploited those conventions for an educational horror film.
Journal Article
Identity, Place and Non-belonging in Jean Rhys’s Fiction
Place is considered as a distinguishable factor among Jean Rhys’s novels, most concretely represented by three countries: Dominica, England and France. In locating her outsider and outcast heroines in these places of interconnectedness, Rhys’s fiction responds to a time of crisis in the history of Empire. With a much stigmatized white West Indian creole identity, her heroines are unacceptably white in Dominica, and unacceptably “black” in Europe. In Voyage in the Dark, Anna is stranded in a modernist London that was at once racially heterogeneous, cosmopolitan and xenophobic. Her transgressive and mobile identities (racial, sexual, national), are forever making her stranger in the metropole. In Quartet and Good Morning, Midnight, both Marya and Sasha occupy the temporary and liminal spaces of the metropolis of Paris and try to buy themselves an illusion of a respectable identity. Rejected, unhoused, wandering in a state of limbo, their existence becomes mechanical and ghostly. It is this sense of having no identity and no place of belonging resulted from a very specific and traumatic colonial experience that best explains the pervasive tone of loss, melancholy, and paralysis of spirit underlying all of Rhys’s fiction.
Journal Article
James Joyce’s “An Encounter”: From the Perversion of an Escape to the Perversion of the Fatherhood
Ambiguity is an indispensable part of modern fiction that has always implied what is always merited as the ‘literariness’ and ‘sophistication’ of that fiction. In modern fiction, particularly in James Joyce’s Dubliners, ambiguity and indeterminacy transcend the textual difficulty and achieve a ‘mysterious’ level. That is to say, Joyce renders the frequent unfinished and elliptical sentences, as well as the absent words, phrases, paragraphs, and even characters more significant than all those present. In Dubliners, this unique concept of ambiguity and indeterminacy, that tends to be Joyce’s narrative signature, is called “gnomonic” – a term derived from Euclid’s gnomon. A gnomon is formed by removing a similar parallelogram from a corner of a larger parallelogram. Gnomons in Dubliners indicate not only the incompletion and failure, but also the dialectical cycle of presence and absence. Words prove mostly insufficient to convey meaning, and actions are subject to failure even before they start. But Joyce’s approach to gnomon is not a passively confirming one. Joyce skillfully benefits the mysterious condition that his gnomonics make for sustaining his creativity in order to overwhelm intellectually the distorting powers in his society. Therefore, if Joyce’s stories seem unsolvable and vague, it is not because of their merely textual difficulties. They present, instead, some gnomonic mysteries of varying degrees and depths. As a way to get readers to read Joyce thoughtfully, this study is going to shed light on this unique gnomonic nature of Joycean mysteries in “An Encounter”, one of the childhood stories in Dubliners.
Journal Article
Deleuze's Monstrous Beckett: Movement and Paralysis
This article takes its title from a 1973 letter in which Gilles Deleuze describes “the history of philosophy as a kind of buggery” that involves “getting onto the back of an author, and giving him a child, which would be his and which would at the same time be a monster.” My suggestion is that we keep this in mind when considering Deleuze's engagement with Beckett, particularly as Deleuze becomes increasingly important in Beckett territory. Deleuze's readings of Beckett neglect Beckett's early work — work that demonstrates a parodic engagement with the very idea of Deleuze-esque philosophies of movement and freedom. What Deleuze celebrates as the rhizomatic place where things pick up speed, Beckett describes as “an unsurveyed marsh of sloth.” I return to Beckett's More Pricks Than Kicks and Dream of Fair to Middling Women to sketch a line between thinking philosophically and the concretion of ideas and method into a philosophy.
Journal Article