Autopoiesis Between Literature and Science: Maturana, Varela, Cervantes

Slater, Avery

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_16

The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science 2020

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_16

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Autopoiesis Between Literature and Science: Maturana, Varela, Cervantes

Avery Slater

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2023

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Cited by 2 publications

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Reflexivity’s Ontological Turn: From Cybernetics to Autopoiesis in “The Circular Ruins” and The People of Paper

Martinson

2023

American Literature

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While postmodern metafiction (or reflexive fiction) is commonly positioned outside the scope of the Ontological Turn due to metafiction’s association with postmodernism’s insistence on “world as text,” this article argues that metafiction’s proximity to scientific theories of reflexivity engenders a shift toward what the article calls body as text, a shift that is synchronous with reflexivity’s evolution from cybernetics to biological autopoiesis. To trace metafiction’s aesthetic evolution from world as text to body as text, the article examines Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Circular Ruins” (1940) alongside early-order cybernetic theories of reflexivity before examining Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper (2005) alongside later theories of biological autopoiesis. While both narratives demonstrate an interest in the world-building powers of the text, the article argues that Plascencia’s novel demonstrates reflexivity’s autopoietic ability to examine the interstitial relationship between material embodiment and nonhuman agencies. By moving away from Borgesian self-regulation toward self-assembly, The People of Paper gradually sheds the epistemological preoccupations of its world-as-text aesthetic in favor a more ontological body-as-text aesthetic, thereby opening up the possibility of interpreting Plascencia’s novel as an aestheticization not of the construction of reality but of the construction of the body itself. In marking a distinction between world-as-text metafiction and body-as-text metafiction, the latter emerges as a uniquely useful heuristic in the Ontological Turn for modeling molecular embodiment and nonhuman agency.

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Reflexivity’s Ontological Turn: From Cybernetics to Autopoiesis in “The Circular Ruins” and The People of Paper

Martinson

2023

American Literature

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Narracje o tworzeniu, czyli „ciemność i magia”

Popiel

2023

Konteksty Kultury

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Narratives on Creating, or “Darkness and Magic” The presence of autothematic narratives in the three basic models of culture – literary, audiovisual and digital – is a crucial factor influencing the diversity and dynamic evolution of the story on creating. The notion of autopoiesis introduced by the neurobiologists and sociologists widens the spectrum of research on creative process in literary texts, and more broadly in texts of culture. In the connection with these two functional aspects of autopoiesis: in the traditions of different medias and multiple research directions analysing the creative process, the author presents three models of modernist novel on creating. The interpretation of Testament by Witold Gombrowicz allows us to indicate, firstly, the process of narrative identity of writer constituting itself; secondly, the metaphor of theatre’s backstage providing autopoiesis with a performative dimension; and thirdly, the poetic rules of storytelling about creation, which build up its epiphanic aura.

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Autopoiesis Between Literature and Science: Maturana, Varela, Cervantes

Cited by 2 publications

References 57 publications

Reflexivity’s Ontological Turn: From Cybernetics to Autopoiesis in “The Circular Ruins” and The People of Paper

Reflexivity’s Ontological Turn: From Cybernetics to Autopoiesis in “The Circular Ruins” and The People of Paper

Narracje o tworzeniu, czyli „ciemność i magia”

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