williams

Michael Wutz reviews Bruce Clarke’s Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science

Dora Marsden was not a madwoman in the attic. When she and her female compatriots climbed down from the attic of the Southport Empire theater on 3 December 1909 to disrupt a public appearance by Winston Churchill, she did so as a freewoman agitating for universal suffrage and gender equality. Soon she was to edit a short-lived journal by the same name, the Freewoman, to be renamed and reconceived as the New Freewoman and, eventually, the Egoist - three journals that were to have a formative impact on the literary and artistic configuration of modernism. Bruce Clarke retraces Marsden’s wide-ranging but hitherto largely unacknowledged influence on her modernist contemporaries and, in the spirit of revisionary literary and cultural criticism, seeks to correct “a tradition of misinformation” (4) that has led to a monolithic and largely masculinist construction of modern literature.

Matthew Fuller on The Cyborg Handbook.

The Cyborg Handbook tells the story of how one particular model, or one cluster of models grouped under the term cyborg (cybernetic organism), has come to occupy a key place as a meaning-making apparatus that either actually or rhetorically involves such disparate areas as: the invention of new emotions; self-directed evolution; combat and medical augmentation; the prediction, monitoring, and control of body movement; farming; automatism; remote or prosthetic operations; reproductive technology. Culling material from a wide variety of academic sources, The Cyborg Handbook follows the lead of Donna Haraway, who adds an image-rich foreword to the book, in putting cyborgs on the map of cultural criticism.