Charlee M . Bezilla | University of Maryland, College Park (original) (raw)
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Papers by Charlee M . Bezilla
Eighteenth-century fiction, Sep 30, 2023
Experiments in genetic engineering have raised environmental, medical, and ethical questions conc... more Experiments in genetic engineering have raised environmental, medical, and ethical questions concerning the manipulation of biological processes. Does modifying an organism in this way change its nature? What do increasingly complex relations between human and machine, organism and technology, mean for human identity and our relations with non-human lifeforms? These questions rest on uneasy but persistent dichotomies of nature and culture, of the humanities and the sciences, and on notions of modernity and progress central to ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Conceptions of humans as distinct from nature—what anthropologist Philippe Descola names the "nature/culture" divide—are deeply imprinted in the Western psyche and reflected in disciplinary divisions separating the humanities and the sciences, what Bruno Latour calls the "Internal Great Divide."These questions about hybrid beings, manipulating nature, and the nature/culture divide were particularly pertinent in eighteenth-century French literature and natural history, a period coinciding with the nascence of biological science wherein many thinkers locate the beginnings of the "Anthropocene," an epoch in which human activity has markedly affected earth systems. Drawing on methods from literary studies and ecocriticism, I examine how literary texts engage debates on the mutability of species, the nature of man, and anxieties about governing populations that remain relevant today. Through the lens of Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne's 1781 novel La Découverte australe par un homme-volant, I engage close readings of the novel alongside natural historical texts to consider the possibilities of "hybridity" as a tool for understanding literary production, the relationships between humans and nonhumans, and how the domains of fiction and science can come together. I find that these texts posit hybridity as a promising intervention, despite growing concerns about degeneration stemming from crossbreeding experiments. After analyzing the formal aspects o [...]
Computer Modelling and Simulation for Literary-Historical Research: VESPACE and Social Physics / Modélisation et simulation informatiques pour la recherche en histoire littéraire : VESPACE et la physique sociale
The four essays bundled in this article explore intersections of literary research and digital si... more The four essays bundled in this article explore intersections of literary research and digital simulation for emerging scholars who participated in our week-long experimental workshop on social physics coding for the VESPACE game. Louise Moulin opens this discussion, drawing on her previous digital work to explore and critique the ways in which literature becomes data, a fundamental interpretive moment that has both technical and epistemological ramifications. This essay is followed by Chiara Azzaretti, who recounts how her apprehension about a first contact with DH turned to fascination with the ways in which digital outputs can enrich scholarly discussions by furnishing a responsive and interactive context for the close reading skills taught in literature PhD programs. Julien Le Goff then details how his work using the Anecdotes dramatiques collection in a coding context revealed the full extent of the challenge of reconciling these brief, sociologically acute stories with a progr...
The Romance Sphere, 2018
In this paper I analyze a corpus of works, primarily verse, published during and in the aftermath... more In this paper I analyze a corpus of works, primarily verse, published during and in the aftermath of the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). This “corpus” displays a markedly corporeal, bodily aspect: its authors conceive of the violent factional conflicts of the Wars of Religion as “intestinal,” a disease like a plague tearing apart the civic and political “body” of France from within. The “troubles” were often described as a poison or venom infecting the flesh and blood of France and its citizens or as a monstrous form, like wolves, attacking them. Writers from both the Catholic and Protestant factions frequently utilized this corporeal rhetoric, including Pierre de Ronsard in his Discours des misères de ce temps (1562), Agrippa d’Aubigné in his long epic poem Les Tragiques (1616), and the authors of numerous contemporary polemical pamphlets like the anonymous Discours contre les Huguenots, auquel est contenue et déclaré la source de leur damnable religion (1573). Unlike their predecessor Rabelais, who accorded a primary place to the body and all its functions in his grotesque satires, for these authors the body is always diseased and dying. By studying the place of the body and discourses of disease in literary texts surrounding the Wars of Religion in conjunction with early modern theories about the physical body and the body politic, this paper will analyze the images of plague and disease so prevalent during this turbulent period and what they can tell us about contemporary understandings of the Wars of Religion.
Eighteenth-century fiction, Sep 30, 2023
Experiments in genetic engineering have raised environmental, medical, and ethical questions conc... more Experiments in genetic engineering have raised environmental, medical, and ethical questions concerning the manipulation of biological processes. Does modifying an organism in this way change its nature? What do increasingly complex relations between human and machine, organism and technology, mean for human identity and our relations with non-human lifeforms? These questions rest on uneasy but persistent dichotomies of nature and culture, of the humanities and the sciences, and on notions of modernity and progress central to ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Conceptions of humans as distinct from nature—what anthropologist Philippe Descola names the "nature/culture" divide—are deeply imprinted in the Western psyche and reflected in disciplinary divisions separating the humanities and the sciences, what Bruno Latour calls the "Internal Great Divide."These questions about hybrid beings, manipulating nature, and the nature/culture divide were particularly pertinent in eighteenth-century French literature and natural history, a period coinciding with the nascence of biological science wherein many thinkers locate the beginnings of the "Anthropocene," an epoch in which human activity has markedly affected earth systems. Drawing on methods from literary studies and ecocriticism, I examine how literary texts engage debates on the mutability of species, the nature of man, and anxieties about governing populations that remain relevant today. Through the lens of Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne's 1781 novel La Découverte australe par un homme-volant, I engage close readings of the novel alongside natural historical texts to consider the possibilities of "hybridity" as a tool for understanding literary production, the relationships between humans and nonhumans, and how the domains of fiction and science can come together. I find that these texts posit hybridity as a promising intervention, despite growing concerns about degeneration stemming from crossbreeding experiments. After analyzing the formal aspects o [...]
Computer Modelling and Simulation for Literary-Historical Research: VESPACE and Social Physics / Modélisation et simulation informatiques pour la recherche en histoire littéraire : VESPACE et la physique sociale
The four essays bundled in this article explore intersections of literary research and digital si... more The four essays bundled in this article explore intersections of literary research and digital simulation for emerging scholars who participated in our week-long experimental workshop on social physics coding for the VESPACE game. Louise Moulin opens this discussion, drawing on her previous digital work to explore and critique the ways in which literature becomes data, a fundamental interpretive moment that has both technical and epistemological ramifications. This essay is followed by Chiara Azzaretti, who recounts how her apprehension about a first contact with DH turned to fascination with the ways in which digital outputs can enrich scholarly discussions by furnishing a responsive and interactive context for the close reading skills taught in literature PhD programs. Julien Le Goff then details how his work using the Anecdotes dramatiques collection in a coding context revealed the full extent of the challenge of reconciling these brief, sociologically acute stories with a progr...
The Romance Sphere, 2018
In this paper I analyze a corpus of works, primarily verse, published during and in the aftermath... more In this paper I analyze a corpus of works, primarily verse, published during and in the aftermath of the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). This “corpus” displays a markedly corporeal, bodily aspect: its authors conceive of the violent factional conflicts of the Wars of Religion as “intestinal,” a disease like a plague tearing apart the civic and political “body” of France from within. The “troubles” were often described as a poison or venom infecting the flesh and blood of France and its citizens or as a monstrous form, like wolves, attacking them. Writers from both the Catholic and Protestant factions frequently utilized this corporeal rhetoric, including Pierre de Ronsard in his Discours des misères de ce temps (1562), Agrippa d’Aubigné in his long epic poem Les Tragiques (1616), and the authors of numerous contemporary polemical pamphlets like the anonymous Discours contre les Huguenots, auquel est contenue et déclaré la source de leur damnable religion (1573). Unlike their predecessor Rabelais, who accorded a primary place to the body and all its functions in his grotesque satires, for these authors the body is always diseased and dying. By studying the place of the body and discourses of disease in literary texts surrounding the Wars of Religion in conjunction with early modern theories about the physical body and the body politic, this paper will analyze the images of plague and disease so prevalent during this turbulent period and what they can tell us about contemporary understandings of the Wars of Religion.