Harrison Dietzman (George Fox University)
hdie@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This panel invites papers that examine any aspect of literary treatments of the human body in relationship to technology—especially medical and industrial technologies—past and present. In particular, the panel is interested in literary interrogations of the ways that technology mediates the subject of the body into the public-political and manages populations of subjects/bodies.

The question of bodies, subjects, management, and mediation loom large in critical theory. Martin Heidegger defined technology as “a human activity” that always “threatens to slip from human control.” Michel Foucault wrote that “biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political.” More recently, in her book Immediacy (2023), media theorist Anna Kornbluh investigates what she names the late-capitalist “paradox of immediacy” that “crush[es] mediation” into “this logic of getting down to business.” Thus technology presents itself as both a personal and a political problem that simultaneously interpolates ideological subjects and manages biological bodies.

These statements foreground the following questions: What are the relationships and intersections between technology and capitalism? And how can literature address the problem of the ways that technology mediates bodies and subjectivities into the public-political? What horizons of human agency and freedom can literature help to explore and articulate?

Papers from any literary area or historical era that focalize on these or related questions of bodies, subjectivity, and biopolitics are welcome.