CIERPIENIE I ŚWIADOMOŚĆ: PRZESTRZEŃ DLA INNYCH W POWIEŚCIACH STEPH CHA

The novels of Steph Cha posit two key characteristics for openness toward others: bitterness and recognition. The thesis of this paper is that both characteristics must be present together in order for openness to occur. Cha’s Juniper Song detective series (2013-15), as well as her stand-alone novel Your House Will Pay (2019), foreground the role that bitterness and recognition play in an openness of Korean-Americans to other American people of color. Following the work of Jacques Rancière and Axel Honneth, bitterness is seen as a characteristic that keeps recognition from falling into the oppressive traps of one group only recognizing the pre-established modes of identity of another. Cha’s novels insist on moments of bitterness within scenes of recognition, thus showing how both characteristics, together, form an essential way for a positive openness to another to be possible. Other Korean-American authors discussed include Cathy Park Hong, Caroline Kim, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.Powieści Steph Cha umiejscawiają dwa główne założenia otwartości na innych: cierpienie i świadomość. Artykuł ten przyjmuje, że oba te założenia muszą współistnieć by zaistniała otwartość. Stworzona przez Cha seria detektywistyczna z Juniper Song (2013-2015), a także jej samodzielna powieść Your House Will Pay (2019) uwypuklają rolę, jaką cierpienie i świadomość odgrywają w otwartości Amerykanów o koreańskich korzeniach na pozostałych Amerykanów o pochodzeniu mieszanym i o innych kolorach skóry. Zgodnie z pracami Jacquesa Rancière i Axla Honnetha, cierpienie jest postrzegane jako cecha charakterystyczna, powstrzymująca świadomość od przekształcenia się w opresyjne pułapki jednej grupy, uznając jedynie wcześniej ustalone sposoby tożsamości Innego. Powieści Cha skupiają się na chwilach ukazujących rozgoryczenie wśród scen uświadamiania, pokazując tym samym jak obie te cechy wspólnie kształtują podstawowe podejście do pozytywnej otwartości na drugiego człowieka. Inni omawiani autorzy koreańsko-amerykańscy to Cathy Park Hong, Caroline Kim i Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Financial Algorithms in Post-2008 Literature: Kim Stanley Robinson and Hari Kunzru

One reason no alternative is seen to capitalism is because of financial algorithms. They are ubiquitous, created in the past, and have a performative effect on the future, meaning that traders make the market conform to the model (Donald MacKenzie, Elena Esposito). However, some fictional algorithms appearing in literature after the 2007–2008 financial crisis reconfigure these characteristics into strategies for change. Rather than being determined by past states or indices, the algorithms found in novels by Kim Stanley Robinson and Hari Kunzru are based on extreme volatility. Because these algorithms are founded on a fluid past, they can create a fluid future, providing alternatives to the pervasiveness of what Mark Fisher develops as capitalist realism. One way they do this is by engaging with the list as a way to mirror life rather than narrative

Things that Go Nowhere: Scale, City and the List in Richard Price’s Lush Life

Richard Price’s 2008 crime novel Lush Life develops a narrative strategy for mediating between large-scale problems and local narratives. Police officers and suspects must come to terms with both New York City’s huge scale and the opacity of the suspects’ faulty narratives in order to solve a murder. Referencing Jean-François Lyotard, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, and The Invisible Committee, among others, the author develops the narrative strategy of a list (a collection of items devoid of syntactic connections) as a mediating agent. Price uses the list to penetrate the large scale of the city and the lies told by suspects. In Lush Life the list traces connections between the individual and supra- -individual, suggesting a way to effect change on a large scale in the age of globalization

For Cosmetic Change: Yongsoo Park\u27s Boy Genius

In Yongsoo Park\u27s 2002 novel Boy Genius, both meaning and change are located on the surface. Full of absurd imagery, the novel turns the horrors of assimilation into a challenge to the racism of color-blindness and depth. If, as Christopher Pinney argues, the stable identities of the "depth" are the product of colonial regimes, then the surface can become a "site of the refusal" of such oppressive certainties. Through what Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus call "surface reading," the "experiential force of the image\u27s visuality" (Rosalind Galt), which can also be found in Park\u27s novel, is foregrounded. What Park\u27s novel adds to the discussion is that if oppressive regimes are enacted on the surface of the body, then it is on the surface of the body that a counter-attack can be launched. In other words, the coordinates of assimilation are turned into a means to smuggle in the possibility for difference and change

The End of Ideology

The poetry in Cathy Park Hong's Empire Engine (2012) is separated into three timelines: the period of Westward Expansion in the United States, a contemporary story of fine art reproduction in China, and a futurist story of data workers in California. These three sections are united in their interrogation of the role of ideology in creating and sustaining an empire. I argue that the first timeline stages a representation of ideology in the traditional Althusserian sense, that the second timeline shows this representation as inadequate, and most importantly, that the final section suggests a new model for oppression. The key for the new model presented in the third timeline lies in the job the workers have: they work with data. The main argument is that the ruling class no longer maintains its power through the ownership of capital. Instead, as McKenzie Wark maintains in Capital is Dead (2019), this ruling class »owns and controls information« (Wark 5). The owning and controlling of information is no longer capitalism, »but something worse« (29). Following on Wark, I argue that this use and abuse of data changes ideology in a fundamental manner. Rather than having a world from which an individual can feel more or less estranged in an Althusserian sense, the new reign of data suggests that estrangement is the fundamental experience of the world. In other words, there is no world to feel estranged from, thus leading to ideology; rather, the feeling of estrangement is already the fundamental experience of our data-driven reality. While in Hong's book this new model is located in the future, the end of the essay argues that a similar state is brought about not only by our data-driven world, but also pandemics such as that caused by COVID-19, which are part of our time now

For Cosmetic Change: Yongsoo Park\u27s Boy Genius

In Yongsoo Park\u27s 2002 novel Boy Genius, both meaning and change are located on the surface. Full of absurd imagery, the novel turns the horrors of assimilation into a challenge to the racism of color-blindness and depth. If, as Christopher Pinney argues, the stable identities of the "depth" are the product of colonial regimes, then the surface can become a "site of the refusal" of such oppressive certainties. Through what Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus call "surface reading," the "experiential force of the image\u27s visuality" (Rosalind Galt), which can also be found in Park\u27s novel, is foregrounded. What Park\u27s novel adds to the discussion is that if oppressive regimes are enacted on the surface of the body, then it is on the surface of the body that a counter-attack can be launched. In other words, the coordinates of assimilation are turned into a means to smuggle in the possibility for difference and change

Vacuum Ecology: J.G. Ballard and Jeff VanderMeer

J.G. Ballard’s novel The Drought (1965) reimagines an ecological dystopia into a strategy for how to live through the catastrophe of the Anthropocene. We suggest the term “vacuum ecology” for a literary strategy which represents a way to live in our current ecological crisis. Ballard describes how a near-total emptiness of time and space is one way to respond to a global ecological catastrophe. Using Ballard’s novel as a guide, our concept of vacuum ecology is developed along with along with the work of Jason Moore, Roy Scranton and others. In The Drought, the concept of modulation is suggested as the mechanism for change. At the end of the essay, Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014), along with Catherine Malabou’s notion of destructive plasticity, is seen as challenging the idea of modulation with a strategy of intermingling. In short, both texts foreground the possibility of new kinds of change when concepts of time and space are questioned. This has consequences for the different beings we must become in order to live in the Anthropocene

Prognostic Factors Associated with Ocriplasmin Efficacy for the Treatment of Symptomatic Vitreomacular Adhesion and Full-thickness Macular Hole: Analysis from Four Studies

Purpose: To assess the effect of patient baseline characteristics on the efficacy of ocriplasmin treatment for symptomatic vitreomacular adhesion (VMA) with full-thickness macular hole (FTMH) from phase 3/4 studies. Methods: Patients with symptomatic VMA and FTMH at baseline and receiving ocriplasmin treatment 12