Project MUSE®: Configurations - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Configurations.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1993) through current issueLatest Articles: ConfigurationsTWOProject MUSE®Configurations1080-65201063-1801Latest articles in Configurations. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Art and Science of Species Revival: De-Extinction, Unboxed
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981314
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We begin our theoretical framing of the art and science of species revival with a meditation on a box. This box has four sides, a lid, and is made of corrugated cardboard that still bears the label of its previous contents: an ordinary ream of A4 printer paper. Despite its mundane materiality, this box contains a rare and valuable set of skeletal remains belonging to the last bucardo (also known as the Pyrenean ibex or Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica), a subspecies of mountain goat once endemic to the crisp mountain ranges of the Pyrenees straddling the borders of France and Spain. Scholar-artist team Adam Searle and Christian Mayer document their engagement with this box in a video essay on their collaborative research
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36/image/coversmallThe Art and Science of Species Revival: De-Extinction, Unboxed2026-01-24text/htmlen-USThe Art and Science of Species Revival: De-Extinction, Unboxed2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®1210402026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24Worlds Ready for Moa: The Pasts and Futures of De-Extinction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981315
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Moa are a group (Dinornithiformes) of flightless birds—the only ratites without even vestigial wings—which evolved in the unique evolutionary laboratory of Aotearoa New Zealand.1 On this isolated archipelago in the South Pacific, an estimated 245 bird species, including nine (at last count) species of moa, evolved to fill the trophic levels and ecological niches that are elsewhere shared with mammals. The two largest moa, the giant moas of the South and North Island, weighed up to five hundred pounds. Aotearoa New Zealand was the last large land mass to be settled by humans, beginning with the arrival of Polynesian star-navigators on their voyaging waka, probably in the early fourteenth century. Around a hundred
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36/image/coversmallWorlds Ready for Moa: The Pasts and Futures of De-Extinction2026-01-24text/htmlen-USWorlds Ready for Moa: The Pasts and Futures of De-Extinction2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®1308272026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24Prehistoric Routes and Oracular Invasives: Assisted Migration as a Revival and Divination Technology
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981316
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For an aspiring forecaster, there is little of use in a prophet’s oracular utterances about what the future has in store. This is precisely the point: to avoid looking at prophecy as if one was handling a form of prediction.This article does not attempt to revive the heavy footsteps of the mammoth, resonating down into the permafrost one ponderous movement at a time; nor the stiff loping of the thylacine, drumming across the Tasmanian soil; nor the heavy lurch of a flock of passenger pigeons falling upon a tree for the night, settling down in branches set swaying by their weight. The movement animated here is of a silent, slower, and more persistent kind, distributed across generations of seemingly static living
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36/image/coversmallPrehistoric Routes and Oracular Invasives: Assisted Migration as a Revival and Divination Technology2026-01-24text/htmlen-USPrehistoric Routes and Oracular Invasives: Assisted Migration as a Revival and Divination Technology2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®1193172026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24Stories of Arctic Crisis and Alaskan Mammoths: Neocolonial and Anticolonial Approaches to De-Extinction and Rewilding
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981317
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Founded in 2021 by geneticist George Church and entrepreneur Ben Lamm, Colossal Biosciences is a biotechnology and genetic engineering company that has embarked on a variety of de-extinction projects around the world.1 It is involved in efforts to resurrect and rewild the dodo in Mauritius, the thylacine in Tasmania, and the woolly mammoth in Alaska. Insofar as the latter is concerned, Colossal’s short-term goal is to produce the first mammoth calves (or cold-adapted elephants) by 2028. According to its website, its long-term goal is to release these genetically engineered proboscideans into various locations in Arctic Alaska and Canada, where they will help to re-create the mammoth steppe ecosystem—widespread
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36/image/coversmallStories of Arctic Crisis and Alaskan Mammoths: Neocolonial and Anticolonial Approaches to De-Extinction and Rewilding2026-01-24text/htmlen-USStories of Arctic Crisis and Alaskan Mammoths: Neocolonial and Anticolonial Approaches to De-Extinction and Rewilding2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®961782026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24De-Extinction, Transhumanism, and Postmortal Life
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981318
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A significant number of those involved in de-extinction science are also proponents of the science and philosophical principles behind transhumanism, defined according to the “Transhumanist Declaration” (2012) as accelerating the pursuit of “human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.”1 De-extinction is not just about reviving extinct animals or rewilding ecosystems with missing keystone species. The de-extinction science used in modifying the genome (most notably CRISPR-Cas9)2 and the development of assisted reproduction technologies also furnish the basis for a variety of transhumanist aims, including life longevity extension, cryogenic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36/image/coversmallDe-Extinction, Transhumanism, and Postmortal Life2026-01-24text/htmlen-USDe-Extinction, Transhumanism, and Postmortal Life2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®1016352026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24Extinction, Cut-Up: Species Revival and Literary Ecomodernism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981319
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A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images. Rimbaud images—real Rimbaud images—but new ones.The Biological Film, now showing on Earth, can and must be rewritten. It is a lousy movie to be withdrawn Now from the dimensional screen and sent back to Rewrite. If, indeed: In the Beginning was the Word, then, the next step is: Rub out the Word.In a 1966 interview published in the Paris Review, William S. Burroughs was asked about the implications of his cut-up method of writing, developed in collaboration with Brion Gysin, for fiction over the next twenty-five years. “In the first place,” Burroughs responds, “I think there’s going to be more and more merging of art and science. Scientists are
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36/image/coversmallExtinction, Cut-Up: Species Revival and Literary Ecomodernism2026-01-24text/htmlen-USExtinction, Cut-Up: Species Revival and Literary Ecomodernism2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®1399282026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade by Jared D. Margulies (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981320
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How do succulent plants move people toward pro-environmental action? An unlikely answer arrives at the end of Lydia Millet’s novel Dinosaurs (2022), where the shy protagonist Gil accidentally leans into a jumping cholla, then suddenly finds himself in a surprise confrontation with his nemesis, the jerk who has been illegally shooting birds in their neighborhood. Plausibly boosted by an adrenaline response to cactus-induced agony, Gil himself becomes a “burning, talking bush” (223) threatening to expose the killer’s many dark secrets, and the bad guy backs down. While plant encounters rarely produce such dramatic results, in fiction as in fact, the positively prickly relations of humans and succulent species are
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36/image/coversmallThe Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade by Jared D. Margulies (review)2026-01-24text/htmlen-USThe Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade by Jared D. Margulies (review)2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®104812026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24Ecocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Human Extinction by Sarah E. McFarland (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981321
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In 2023, the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that “every increment of global warming will intensify multiple and concurrent hazards.”1 The future, then, might seem bleak and so at first glance might Sarah McFarland’s Ecocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Human Extinction. Indeed, the book opens with a discussion of environmental collapse and a criticism of much of the climate fiction canon for its “predilection for happy endings” (2). Instead, McFarland focuses on texts in which “the means to survive as a fully fleshed human being no longer exist” (7). Yet, as the final chapter makes clear, this embrace of human extinction is not dispiriting; rather what emerges is a call to find new
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36/image/coversmallEcocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Human Extinction by Sarah E. McFarland (review)2026-01-24text/htmlen-USEcocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Human Extinction by Sarah E. McFarland (review)2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®155102026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human–Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction by Susan McHugh (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981322
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Love in a Time of Slaughters confronts stories which relate the genocidal and ecological violences of settler colonialism in such a way as to avoid the pitfall of presenting Indigenous human and nonhuman animal groups simply as victims, and without shying away from the actual slaughter endemic to Eurowestern expansion. By “taking loss as a starting point rather than the usual end point” (2), Susan McHugh succeeds in demonstrating how the geographically diverse canon of narratives she focuses on open up possibilities for regeneration and resurgence, borne from “their honesty about the lethality of settler colonialism” (189) to the continuance of multispecies communities. The diversity of McHugh’s primary source
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36/image/coversmallLove in a Time of Slaughters: Human–Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction by Susan McHugh (review)2026-01-24text/htmlen-USLove in a Time of Slaughters: Human–Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction by Susan McHugh (review)2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®145682026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Co-Existence by Joshua Trey Barnett (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981323
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Joshua Trey Barnett’s clearly written book Mourning in the Anthropocene is an unusual contribution to a growing body of work on the impact of climate breakdown and biodiversity loss on human mental health, and in particular on the increasingly important concept of ecological grief. The title implies a focus on the mourning process, on ways of working through the type of grief that arises as a response to the incalculable losses spooling out from the current environmental emergencies. However, the book’s central concern is actually with how little mourning is going on in the Anthropocene, and, in the light of that, how it might be possible to foster a culture in which ecological grief is felt more deeply, by more
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36/image/coversmallMourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Co-Existence by Joshua Trey Barnett (review)2026-01-24text/htmlen-USMourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Co-Existence by Joshua Trey Barnett (review)2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®125372026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24Botany of Empire. Plants Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism by Banu Subramaniam (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981324
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From the very first pages of the book, Banu Subramaniam takes us by the hand and leads us on a transhistorical journey on and with plants. Getting straight to the heart of the form of the “disciplined” knowledge that was invented to codify, classify, dominate, move, or limit plants, she declares that botany, which arose in a specific context of colonial expansion—that of the great European power countries toward other continents—has, since its inception, been a construct of the colonial project. Therefore, Subramaniam suggests, its scientific contribution, notwithstanding its apparent neutrality (since it claims to be based on objective criteria), must be questioned. Indeed, as the author affirms: “Botany’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36/image/coversmallBotany of Empire. Plants Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism by Banu Subramaniam (review)2026-01-24text/htmlen-USBotany of Empire. Plants Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism by Banu Subramaniam (review)2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®125922026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24British Modernism and the Anthropocene: Experiments with Time by David Shackleton (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981325
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David Shackleton’s British Modernism and the Anthropocene: Experiments with Time is a rich study of British modernist aesthetic engagement with environmental concerns. The book raises many questions, including the following: How did literary modernism respond to the rapid environmental changes of the twentieth century? What do we gain by rereading canonical British modernist novels in the context of the Anthropocene and through an ecocritical lens? How do experimental modernist aesthetic forms succeed or fail in making visible crises occurring at the planetary scale? And how does ecocritical modernism transform our understanding of the climate crisis today? An expansive project, the book pulls together a wide array
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36/image/coversmallBritish Modernism and the Anthropocene: Experiments with Time by David Shackleton (review)2026-01-24text/htmlen-USBritish Modernism and the Anthropocene: Experiments with Time by David Shackleton (review)2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®141512026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene by Angenette Spalink (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981326
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Angenette Spalink’s Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene elegantly theorizes the biological, geographical, and cultural dynamics embedded within the materiality of dirt. Dirt, Spalink emphasizes, is not a singular organism but a plural ecosystem, a multispecies community teeming with life beyond human instrumentalization of it. Situated at the intersection of ecocriticism, performance studies, and dance studies, Spalink’s book expands the framework of choreography to include the sequenced movement of ecological materials in artistic productions and everyday life. Her exciting new transdisciplinary methodology of biogeocultography examines biological, geographical, and cultural
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36/image/coversmallChoreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene by Angenette Spalink (review)2026-01-24text/htmlen-USChoreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene by Angenette Spalink (review)2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®206762026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science by Renée Bergland (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981327
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Charles Darwin and Emily Dickinson were born twenty years apart on opposite sides of the Atlantic. They never met or corresponded. Dickinson makes no direct references to Darwin in her poetry, which Darwin most certainly never heard of, let alone read. Both achieved inimitable success, but in very different fields, fields that were increasingly being regarded as entirely distinct if not antithetical. Nevertheless, argues Renée Bergland in Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science, the naturalist and poet shared a profound—one might even say occult—kinship.To make this argument, which relies more on tracing parallels than on finding direct connections between the two, Bergland
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36/image/coversmallNatural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science by Renée Bergland (review)2026-01-24text/htmlen-USNatural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science by Renée Bergland (review)2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®120972026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literatures by Elizabeth Rodrigues (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981328
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Elizabeth Rodrigues’s Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literatures articulates a compelling argument about how emergent data collection practices in the early years of the twentieth century informed and infused literary aesthetics; how a group of authors writing at this time mobilized their commitments to exhaustive data collection and investments in life writing to challenge dominant trends in a variety of disciplinary and political frameworks; and how those same projects revealed (to both their authors and broader audiences) the limitations of data’s capacity to fully capture reality. The book’s introduction makes a convincing case for critical
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36/image/coversmallCollecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literatures by Elizabeth Rodrigues (review)2026-01-24text/htmlen-USCollecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literatures by Elizabeth Rodrigues (review)2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®146902026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24The Evolution of Gerald Durrell: Biography of an Author and Wildlife Conservationist by Mary Sanders Pollock (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981329
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As an enthusiastic viewer of the BBC/Masterpiece television series The Durrells in Corfu (2016–19), I enjoyed watching the Anglo-Indian family’s late 1930s adventures on the island and welcomed the opportunity to read The Evolution of Gerald Durrell, a useful work of scholarship for generalist and specialist readers. Mary Sanders Pollock weaves together key facts and thoughtful interpretive analysis, presenting a critical biography detailing the life experiences of Durrell and his family that focuses on his intellectual and activist development, while referencing elements of his more than thirty books (memoirs, fictions, travel narratives, and documentaries based on these) and noting the cultural impact of his
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36/image/coversmallThe Evolution of Gerald Durrell: Biography of an Author and Wildlife Conservationist by Mary Sanders Pollock (review)2026-01-24text/htmlen-USThe Evolution of Gerald Durrell: Biography of an Author and Wildlife Conservationist by Mary Sanders Pollock (review)2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®147112026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24British Literature and Technology, 1600–1830 ed. by Kristin M. Girten and Aaron R. Hanlon (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981330
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Francis Bacon proposed in Great Instauration (1620) that “the present discoveries in the arts and sciences” may be uncovered through “meditation, observation, and discussion” (336). As the editors Kristin M. Girten and Aaron R. Hanlon invoke it in their collection British Literature and Technology, 1600–1830, the term “mediation” helps to position literature within the history of technology, as printed writings serve as media through which to approach the material existence of things, and vice versa (2–3). The editors place emphasis on the embodied register of Bacon’s empirical method to suggest how technological innovations in the Age of Enlightenment resulted in the progression of humanity and human society—more
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/36/image/coversmallBritish Literature and Technology, 1600–1830 ed. by Kristin M. Girten and Aaron R. Hanlon (review)2026-01-24text/htmlen-USBritish Literature and Technology, 1600–1830 ed. by Kristin M. Girten and Aaron R. Hanlon (review)2026-01-242026TWOProject MUSE®156232026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-24