Caveman, genius, artist, entrepreneur: success and self-realization from literary naturalism to advice literature

This essay examines the dramatization of a new model of selfhood in U.S. naturalist fiction at the turn of the twentieth century and how it was taken up by advice literature during the interwar years. By tracing a lineage of the self through the characterological types of the caveman, genius, artist, and entrepreneur, the essay shows how the construction of the caveman as a more vital self than the bourgeois individual at the turn of the twentieth century morphed into a biologized notion of Romantic genius and further into configurations of artists and entrepreneurs as the century progressed. As the types shade into each other in naturalist fiction and advice literature, they represent a new model for successful working and living that fuses expressive and economic goals, and which anticipates contemporary constructions of work as a pursuit of creative self-expression and self-actualization

Cormac McCarthy and the Genre Turn in Contemporary Literary Fiction

The wholesale embrace of genre fiction by contemporary literary writers is currently reorganizing the literary field. This essay looks at the role that genre has played in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction since his turn to the Western with Blood Meridian (1985). It assesses his genre fiction vis-à-vis Mark McGurl’s influential study of the importance of creative writing programs for postwar US fiction in The Program Era (2009). In contrast to the modernist aesthetic institutionalized in program era fiction, I argue that the recent genre turn significantly changes the relationship of literary fiction to reality as well as to institutions. I suggest that the turn to genre should be considered the formal response to a crisis in reality, triggered by twenty-first-century reconceptualizations of the world and our place in it, which requires new ways of representing reality. By reading McCarthy’s The Road (2006) alongside Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011), I argue that the genre turn in contemporary literary fiction also marks a turn toward institutions, one that both rejects the anti-institutionality of the program era and a return to the modern disciplinary institution in favor of rethinking a value basis for future institutions

American literary naturalism and the cultural foundations of bureaucracy

This paper aims to examine the cultural foundations of the modern bureaucratic order around the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. In response to both the breakup of Victorian norms and the social crisis precipitated by the rapid expansion of free market industrial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century, American naturalist writers experimented with new ways to represent and make sense of the social and cultural turmoil of their times. Rejecting a normative order based on Victorian morality as unable to address the problems of economic inequality and exploitation, this paper will explore how their art promoted a vision of rational management that ultimately helped to reorientate their culture toward the dawning bureaucratic ethos of the Progressive Era

Intimate Exchanges: Work, Affect, and Exploitation in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth

The opposition between the world of work and the exchanges that constitute it, on the one hand, and that of intimacy and affect, on the other, has been a rich source of criticism on Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth ever since its publication in 1905. Through a close rereading of the novel in terms of emotional labor, this essay argues that the novel is less concerned with questioning the confluence of work and intimacy in the late nineteenth century than with the problems arising from attempts to separate them. By thematizing the problem of compensation for work that is meant to resemble leisure, The House of Mirth is read here as a story of the exploitation that results from refusing to recognize emotional labor as work. While calculation and intimacy are inextricably joined by economic necessity in the figure of Lily Bart, it is ultimately not the commodification of intimacy that destroys her, but the compulsive search for “the real Lily Bart” that her circle of friends engage in

Hybridization and its application in aquaculture

Inter‐specific hybrids are usually formed by mating two different species in the same genus. They have been produced to increase growth rate, improve production performance, transfer desirable traits, reduce unwanted reproduction, combine other valuable traits such as good flesh quality, disease resistance and increase environmental tolerances, better feed conversion, and increase harvesting rate in culture systems. Hybrids play a significant role in helping to increase aquaculture production of several species of freshwater and marine fishes – for example, hybrid catfish in Thailand, hybrid striped bass in the USA, hybrid tilapia in Israel, and hybrid characids in Venezuela. As the domestication of fish species increases, the possibilities to increase production through appropriate hybridization techniques are ongoing, with a view to produce new hybrid fishes, especially in culture systems where sterile fish may be preferred because of the concern that fish may escape into the open freshwater, marine and coastal environment. Intentional or accidental hybridization can lead to unexpected results in hybrid progeny, such as reduced viability and growth performances, loss of color pattern and flesh quality, and it also raises risks for maintenance of genetic integrity. Appropriate knowledge on the genetic constitution of the brood stock, proper brood stock management, and monitoring of the viability and fertility of the progeny of brood fishes, is thus very crucial before initiating hybridization experiments. In addition, some non‐generic factors, such as weather conditions, culture systems, seasons, and stresses associated with selecting, collecting, handling, breeding and rearing of brood stock and progeny, may influence hybridization success in a wide variety of freshwater and marine fin fishes to a greater extent

Technovitalism and the Longue Durée of the Posthuman Economy

This essay reframes debates on posthumanism in relation to a longer history of revolt against possessive individualism. I introduce the term “technovitalism” to denote a type of self that first emerged in opposition to industrial labor at the turn of the twentieth century, and which fuses a Romantic commitment to creative self-expression with technological rationality. Technovitalism represents a posthuman form of subjectivity avant la lettre that celebrates interdependence and vitalist becoming as the ground of being. At the same time, it promotes post-disciplinary forms of labor aimed at optimizing the productive resources of subjects in pursuit of self-actualization. Tracing a genealogy of the technovitalist self through cultural and economic history, the essay uses technovitalism as a lens through which to map the relationship between changing labor practices and the rise of a new subject, which closely resembles neovitalist accounts of the posthuman today

Cormac McCarthy and the Genre Turn in Contemporary Literary Fiction

The wholesale embrace of genre fiction by contemporary literary writers is currently reorganizing the literary field. This essay looks at the role that genre has played in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction since his turn to the Western with Blood Meridian (1985). It assesses his genre fiction vis-à-vis Mark McGurl’s influential study of the importance of creative writing programs for postwar US fiction in The Program Era (2009). In contrast to the modernist aesthetic institutionalized in program era fiction, I argue that the recent genre turn significantly changes the relationship of literary fiction to reality as well as to institutions. I suggest that the turn to genre should be considered the formal response to a crisis in reality, triggered by twenty-first-century reconceptualizations of the world and our place in it, which requires new ways of representing reality. By reading McCarthy’s The Road (2006) alongside Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011), I argue that the genre turn in contemporary literary fiction also marks a turn toward institutions, one that both rejects the anti-institutionality of the program era and a return to the modern disciplinary institution in favor of rethinking a value basis for future institutions