Nuclear Family A Tragicomic Novel In Letters

Nuclear Family A Tragicomic Novel In Letters – Casey Wayne Patterson (00:06) Welcome, and thanks for joining us for our third season of the Cafe, the Center for Study podcast. In this episode, our host, Margaret Cohen, joins Peter Boxall, Professor of English at the University of Sussex, to celebrate his book The Prosthetic Imagination: a History of the as Artificial Life, published in 2020 with Cambridge University Press. happened Responding to Peter’s book, we are joined next by Ian Duncan, Florence Greene Bigsby Chair in English at the University of California, Berkeley, and Nancy Ruttenberg, the William Robertson Co. Professor of American Literature at Stanford University. This episode is edited from a live recording of our Virtual Books at the Center event on Friday, October 29, 2021. We’ve had the privilege of featuring some truly amazing scholarships at the Center, which we’re thrilled to share with you. Thank you for listening to another of our warm and informal exchanges, as we scholars have a friendly conversation. Margaret Cohen (01:14) Well then, I think we should start, this is our first event of the season for 21/22 books in the centre. We are hoping to return in person, by winter quarter, if the optimistic vision for our future prevails. I’m going to start because there’s a lot to talk about. So today, the format is as follows. I am going to introduce the speakers. And then Professor Boxall draws on some comments on Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Clara and the Son” to frame his argument in The Prosthetic Imagination. After that Ian Duncan will speak and then Professor Ruttenberg, and then we should leave about 45 minutes for conversation, first among ourselves, and then open to all those gathered with us today. So let me start by introducing my guests. I’m delighted to have Peter Boxall with us to discuss prosthetic imagination. Professor Boxall teaches English at the University of Sussex. And his research has focused on the relationship between aesthetics and politics in modernist and contemporary writing. And also studies its long history. He has an extensive publication list and his current book deals with the 20th century and the decline of the West. And its title is Fiction of the West. So welcome, Professor Boxall. Peter Boxall (02:35) Yes, thanks for that introduction, Margaret. And, and thanks to Margaret, and Inn and Nancy for the invitation. It is an honor to be here at the centre, I am very grateful to all of you. And thank you for managing this event so smoothly, it’s amazing how quickly we learned how to do it. As Margaret says, today I’m going to discuss Prosthetic Imagination for a little while on Kazuo Ishiguro. I am also going to share my screen. I finished Prosthetic Imagination a while ago, as these things go, and since I finished Prosthetic Imagination, I’ve been working on a book called Fictions of the West, which I think is kind of According to The Prosthetic Imagination follows. Logic and I thought, I thought that instead of talking about prosthetic imagination or introducing it, I thought I could offer a kind of reading, a quick reading of Ishiguro, his latest “Clara and the Sun,” because I think it might be in order to mobilize some ideas driven by prosthetic imagination. And in my mind, at least, to set those ideas in motion in a way that allows me to point to the bridge between prosthetic fantasy and a fiction of the West. And I’m going to think about Ishiguro’s 2021 early on––it just came out a few months ago––and I’m going to think about it as a prism, in a way, through which Ishiguro’s long-term has to read To tune in to the conversation with the form and the conversation that Ishiguro is having with the kind of conversation that I try and have in The Prosthetic Imagination. And I’m thinking of a particular moment that comes about three-quarters of the way through the text in a scene in which the protagonist and first-person narrator make a critical discovery about the nature of artistic representation. Clara explores how art works, relating to different forms of artificial life. Various forms of artificial life with which Ishiguro is centrally concerned. I don’t know how many people have read this yet, so I’ll try and explain to you how it works. Clara, the main character, is an automaton whose sole purpose in life is to act as a “fake friend” or what’s called an AF for her owner, a teenage girl named Josie. Clara is the most obvious fake person in this. But as anyone who has read this will know, he is concerned with a broader environment that is generally artificial. Manufactured, simulacrum, hardly really there. A very kind absent place. Kids in this world, Josie being one of them, need AFs because , this weirdly bent, North American suburb (we don’t know exactly where it is, but it’s somewhere in North America) this place. is very absent. And so technically mediated, so artificial, for want of a better word, that there are few places left where young people can meet each other and thus make what we might consider “real” friends. In this world children do not go to school, but are educated at home on their mobile devices. I think Ishiguro wrote this before most of our kids were homeschooled on mobile devices. And their education and their social life are empty, detached, a small replica of what we can think of as a common line. And the children themselves are engineered, artificially enhanced, created in a laboratory. Wealthy families––highly attuned to class differences––wealthy families subject their children to a form of genetic engineering, called “lifting,” that allows extended students to learn these oddly spaced lessons. Enables more easily. them on their mobile devices by their avatar professors, here called “oblongs”. Genetically modified children learn from simulacrum teachers in artificial educational environments, and it is up to a group of artificial friends like Clara to alleviate the loneliness and isolation that social engineering creates. (06:56) So these biomedical adaptations to the artificial environment of children like Josie come, we soon learn, at a great cost. Being raised not only makes these children feel awkward and out of focus, but it is also biologically medically dangerous. Josie had an older sister named Sal, who died, we understand, of the procedure, and Josie herself was seriously and possibly ill, as a side effect of the lifting procedure. Josie is so weak that she is more or less at home. But despite this illness, she makes regular trips when she recovers to a nearby town, where she visits the studio of a local artist named Mr. Capaldi, for whom we are told There is a portrait. There is something fishy about both this portrait and the portraitist, we suspect. Something fishy, ​​vaguely connected to Joe’s illness and his artificiality. Josie’s boyfriend Rick, who is the only unraised child we meet, is deeply suspicious. “This guy,” says Rick, “this artist guy, whatever you say about him, he looks good, scary. He seems to do it all,” Rick says, as he takes the photos up close. has been This piece of you, that piece of you. Is that really what actors do?” Josie’s housekeeper Melanie, a tough-talking migrant worker of unknown ethnicity, also expresses her distrust of Mr. Capaldi, and perhaps more pointedly, Mr. Capaldi, she says, “A creep is a bait dog. Clara is confused by Melanie’s sarcastic replies, “But housekeeper, doesn’t Mr. Capaldi just want to paint a picture of Josie?” And Melania only intensifies her animosity. “Fuck the painted portrait. AF you look closer, Mr. Son-bich, or something bad happens Miss Josie.” So it is when Clara and Josie and Josie’s parents visit Mr. Capaldi in his studio, that moment I am here is interested, that I am offering as a prism, that this moment comes. has been Clara’s mother and Josie tell Mr. Capaldi when they visit him at the studio that they want to see the portrait he has made of her. “It’s kind of scary,” says Josie, “but I’d like to take a look.” You can hear the language type. It is very flat.