Exploring Complexities
Teaching Dystopian Fiction in a Dystopia: Life Imitating Art, Imitating Life View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Deborah Shaul
When I first set up my 12th grade dystopian fiction class at La Jolla Country Day School, it simply seemed like an exciting way to transition from the rarefied science-fiction course I had been teaching and create a class that would be appealing to a wider group of students. With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had to change both my methods for teaching and reconsider pandemic-themed literature. Now, I wonder when it will be time to include pandemic texts and if there a statute of limitations on COVID-19 triggers. From the start, I wanted the course to do more than talk about classic dystopias. I sought to create a forum where students could use texts to expand how they perceive the private angst of others and themselves. While this study began as an exploration of pandemic teaching and triggers, it ultimately became a starting point for working with students and teachers so that we are all better prepared to prepare for the harsh realities that emerge in class discussion. So many of the topics we address—from human rights violations to family dysfunction to questionable legal realities—all pose potential triggers. Reflection about how I teach dystopian realities in the midst of a pandemic has helped me and my colleagues to give more careful consideration to how we can prepare both students and teachers to be more compassionate in such conversations.
"Poetical Science": The Iconography of Ada Lovelace in Fiction View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Robin Hammerman, Anthony Pennino
Ada Lovelace's extension of Charles Babbage's work on the “Analytical Engine”, though thoroughly documented, has spawned a mythology all its own. Babbage's plans to build a machine that would perform complex numerical functions attracted the attention of mathematicians including Luigi Frederico Menabrea, whose paper was translated by Lovelace from the French to English and published in 1843. Her notes, numbering at around 20,000 words, was three times the length of Menabrea's paper. Lovelace's composition of Note G, along with her understanding of AI's potential applications and limitations, marks her status as the mother of computing and she has become an AI "cultural icon." The visibility of Ada Lovelace the Icon has grown along with efforts to increase enfranchisement of women and girls in STEM fields. As STEM fields grapple with questions of gender equality among their stakeholders, a critical examination of representations of Lovelace will contribute significantly to a number of disciplinary conversations. This paper spotlights her iconic legacy in fictional worlds. Emphases include representations of Lovelace in fiction from the novel The Difference Engine (1990) and the play Arcadia (1993) to the graphic novel Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (2015) and the television series Doctor Who. We witness repeatedly how the character is given full voice and agency. Lovelace compellingly leapt from historical obscurity to an iconic image for women in STEM fields, and that rapid evolution is as much credit to her groundbreaking work as to the women who wish to follow in her footsteps.
Gender, Knowledge, and Transformation in Medieval Gynecological Texts View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sarah Friedman
This paper examines representations of male vulnerability in three medieval gynecological texts. These texts and the knowledge they contain about the female body function as the outside forces that render men vulnerable in ways that are sometimes given a positive and other times a negative valence. I show how the narrative voice of the Latin text from the Trotula ensemble, Liber de sinthomatibus mulierum (LSM) (twelfth century), embodies a male perspective whose susceptibility to being emotionally affected by women’s suffering is presented positively. This male author represents his compassion in the face of women’s suffering as a driving force behind his endeavor of textual knowledge production and its dissemination. I then explain how two later vernacular gynecological texts, Knowing of a Woman’s Kind in Childing (1327-1399) and Sicknesses of Women 2 (fifteenth century) by contrast, present the ways that men’s proximity to knowledge about the female body renders them vulnerable to negative and ultimately sinful feelings about women. The prologues issue severe warnings to men regarding the importance of regulating their affective responses when learning about the types of physical ailments that women experience. In implying the male readers’ capacity to be emotionally affected by the knowledge presented to them, these tracts also imply the malleability of these readers’ perspectives in the face of new knowledge about women’s diseases. These tracts present information about the female body in ways that seek to facilitate a transformation in the male reader’s outlook on the nature of bodily illness, gender difference, and materiality.
