The Bechdel Test and the Social Form of Character Networks

This essay describes the popular Bechdel Test—a measure of women’s dialogue in films—in terms of social network analysis within fictional narrative. It argues that this form of vernacular criticism arrives at a productive convergence with contemporary academic critical methodologies in surface and postcritical reading practices, on the one hand, and digital humanities, on the other. The data-oriented character of the Bechdel Test, which a text rigidly passes or fails, stands in sharp contrast to identification- or recognition-based evaluations of a text’s feminist orientation, particularly because the former does not prescribe the content, but merely the social form, of women’s agency. This essay connects the Bechdel Test and a lineage of feminist and early queer theory to current work on social network analysis within literary texts, and it argues that the Bechdel Test offers the beginnings of a measured approach to understanding agency within actor networks

"Simply by Reacting?": The Sociology of Race and Invisible Man's Automata

This essay considers Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) from the standpoint of its influential depiction of African Americans as automata. Through Ellison's other writings, including his review of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944) and his unpublished drafts of Invisible Man, the essay links the political concerns of the novel with Ellison's and others' resistance to a midcentury ideology of scientism. This scientism, which characterizes both the sociological construction of the so-called “Negro problem” and Ellison's representation of a scientifically oriented Communist Party, takes on its literary expression through Ellison's satirical use of the automaton. The novel repeatedly stages the ethical and ontological dilemma in which viewers are momentarily uncertain whether they are looking at a person or an automaton, which the essay links with Ellison's numerous discussions of African American political views as “reactions” rather than actions in their own right. For Ellison, Myrdal and the novel's Communist Brotherhood share a perspective limited by a “scientific” distance from, and instrumental treatment of, African Americans. This link, the essay argues, recasts the novel's anti-Communism as primarily a resistance to scientism at the same time that it foregrounds a new set of historical contexts through which to see one of the novel's main series of motifs

“Stutter-Stop Flash-Bulb Strange”: GMOs and the Aesthetics of Scale in Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl

This article raises questions about the aesthetics of scale as they appear relative to genetically modified organisms in science fiction and especially in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009). Bacigalupi makes the unusual choice of representing GMOs largely through science fictional tropes of automatism rather than the grotesque. Because of this choice, The Windup Girl inventively enables readers to relate to the very small spatial scales and the long temporal scales at which the genome and its effects are most visible. The article suggests that science fiction has particular flexibility with the aesthetics of scale, particularly where technoscientific phenomena have profound consequences that take place at nonhuman scales

The Cult and the World System: The Topoi of David Mitchell's Global Novels

This article describes how the novelist David Mitchell employs the “topos of the cult,” a set of conventions that describe a mental state of unfreedom, in the novels Ghostwritten (1999) and Cloud Atlas (2004). This figuration of an unfree form of society—characterized by a group's specialized language, closed social spaces, and charismatic leadership—has its origins in antitotalitarian political science, fiction, sociology, and psychology. Mitchell and Haruki Murakami (discussed briefly) both question how this Cold War legacy has shaped our understandings of individual agency, and both novelists employ the conventions in characters who understand the world as a simple, single totality. For both writers, the cult serves to draw a contrast with the novels' own self-consciously complex cognitive maps of the contemporary world system