Gertrude Stein's Lively Habits

This essay examines biological discourses alongside literary and philosophical discussions on the concept of habit from author Gertrude Stein. This was aimed at demonstrating the nonexclusivity of scientific models and using humanistic frameworks in recontextualing habit. Works of Stein were featured to highlight Charles Darwin's views on contemporary biological discourses and sociopolitical ones. The author placed emphasis on the continuum between biology and culture in Stein's writings, which oppose biological essentialism and social constructivism

Henry James’s Virtual Beast

This article draws some connections between Leo Bersani’s early work and his late book, Intimacies, tracking how he accounts for individuals who succeed in embracing a future more open to possibility. He extols literary characters such as the protagonist of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” who lives his life in a fantasy of anticipation. The piece criticizes Bersani for extolling a “pure,” unrealized form of desire over one that is more pragmatically oriented. James, it suggests, explores a form of “virtuality” or potential within situations that requires individuals to make distinct choices, rather than perpetually to suspend choice

Meaning Without Subject

Gertrude Stein’s novella ‘Melanctha’ (1909) inscribed within the canon of Anglo-American modernism the conceptual coordinates for the emergence of a posthumanist aesthetics. The potential of such a radical event can be more fully appreciated by considering Stein’s pioneering treatment of meaning in the novella alongside Niklas Luhmann’s account of meaning in his theory of social systems. The essay emphasises the details of Stein’s crucial contribution to the articulation of a discourse of posthumanism and relates this occurrence to the emergence of a mass-media system at the beginning of the twentieth century