Nearly every night of our lives, we undergo a startling metamorphosis.
Our brain profoundly alters its behavior and purpose, dimming our consciousness. For a while, we become almost entirely paralyzed. We can’t even shiver. Our eyes, however, periodically dart about behind closed lids as if seeing, and the tiny muscles in our middle ear, even in silence, move as though hearing. We are sexually stimulated, men and women both, repeatedly. We sometimes believe we can fly. We approach the frontiers of death. We sleep.
Earlier this week, the International Commission on Stratigraphy announced that the current stretch of geological time, the Holocene Epoch, would be split into three subdivisions.
This is particularly noteworthy to the human species, as we have been living in the Holocene for the last 12,000 years. After this announcement, we still live in that epoch, but we also live in the youngest of these new subdivisions: the Meghalayan Age.
[...]
For decades, this has been the kind of technical declaration that even most geologists could safely ignore.
But lately, the study of geological timescales has attracted far more public attention—and scholarly f-bombs. Stratigraphy, the effort to name and describe rock layers, has become the site of a proxy battle over climate change, environmental change, and how deeply the natural sciences should integrate with history and politics.
In his celebrated 2005 book-length essay, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, Franco Moretti drew attention to the relevance of diagrams and graphs for understanding the larger forces that shape literature. Such models, Moretti argued, can provide us with quantitatively supported insights into the emergence (and fall) of literary genres across vast expanses of time and space. Consider the rise of the novel — not just Ian Watt’s 18th-century British tradition but the narrative genre in late-18th-century Japan, in mid-19th-century Spain, or in mid-20th-century Nigeria. What might computer-generated models teach us about the historical behavior of a corpus so enormous and diverse that it exceeds the ability of a single reader to navigate it?
As it turns out, quite a lot. For the “rise of the novel” follows a pattern that is at once stunningly predictable and revelatory of the broader market forces shaping literary history. A rapid growth in the number of book publications produces a reorientation of the reading public toward contemporary titles, which in turn gives rise to a balkanization of literature into genre niches (detective novels, sporting novels, school stories, et cetera). That pattern, however, only becomes visible from the panoramic vantage point of computer-generated graphs. Hence the need for “distant reading” — and, with it, the return to structure and form as central preoccupations of literary criticism.
Last April, I attended Alexander Chee’s talk on reporting the self at Grub Street’s Muse and the Marketplace conference in Boston. In between discussing research methods, how to interview subjects, and ways to mine your old journals and emails for memoir-worthy information, he got to what seemed to me to be the heart of everything: “The thing that you remember is the thing that you live with.”
The thing that Emily Skrutskie really nails in Hullmetal Girls is all the nitty gritty of bodies being invaded by machines. So much care and thought has gone into every spliced muscle and metal port that it's easy to visualize the cyborg monsters these teens have become, and really feel the pain and dysmorphia that they experience. Readers are along for the ride, from the horror of not being in control of your own body to the joy of leaping with superhuman legs.