In this page, I will list my publications that have already been published or that have been accepted and are awaiting publication and I will not be including publications that are currently under review. Under review I have an article on ethics in an Atwood’s novel and and an article on Stoppard’s Arcadia .
Peer-reviewed Journal Articles
1) ‘Floods in contemporary biocentric graphic novels'. Ed. Astrid Bracke and Katie Ritson. Spec. issue of Green Letters: studies in ecocriticism 24 no. 1. (2020), 6-22. [7,195 words]
This essay examines representations of floods in contemporary graphic novels that follow 1960s and 1970s’ popular stories’ fascination with the end of days, when climate change awareness was starting to hit the popular consciousness. I demonstrate that Robert Hunter’s Map of Days (2013) and Richard McGuire’s Here (2014) are paradigmatic updates of climate disaster narratives by introducing ‘biocentric’ choruses of voices that survive floods, as well emphasising Gaia. Catastrophes are caused by non-anthropocentric agents and the narrative form is radically changed. In reflecting on contemporary graphic novels’ responses to floods, my chosen texts point not only towards new biocentric responses to climate change but also raise awareness of the unimportance of human life within this vast cosmic scale.
2) ‘Chaos and Borges: a map of infinite bifurcations’. Anuari de Filologia. Literatures contemporànies (Anu.Filol.Lit.Contemp.)
University of Barcelona Annual Journal on Contemporary Literature 7 (2017), 33-47. Available online.
The article proposes a methodology for the analysis of the logical structure of the time and plot in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941). It builds on the ways Borges transmutes mathematical aesthetics into language through the lens of chaos theory and its links with literature. It becomes apparent that “The Garden” is a metaphor for a mathematical concept of time and its infinite bifurcations. This analysis of the ‘orderly disordered’ narrative focuses on the three main properties of chaotic systems in “The Garden”. Secondly, temporal iteration and folding become the main structural devices employed by establishing analogies among fictional levels. In “The Garden”, Borges describes a novel by Ts’ui Pên whose plot bifurcates at every point in time, with all the possible worlds coexisting in some sort of ‘super-space’ and ‘super-time’ coalescing in a moment. Then, the analysis shows that the story is a deterministic system by means of the moment-bound nature of the events. Thirdly, “The Garden” is sensitive to initial conditions because small changes generate infinite bifurcations. A close reading through the recursive symmetries across narrative levels confirms the structural pattern and elicits the experience of time as being complex and dynamic.
Peer-reviewed Book Chapters
3) ‘Kathy Acker’s Voice in Blood and Guts in High School and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘desiring machines.’’ Love and the Politics of Intimacy, ed. Stanislava Dikova, Wendy McMahon and Jordan Savage. New York: Bloomsbury Inc, 2023.
Kathy Acker reads, explicitly references and uses a passage by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972) as an intertext in Blood and Guts in High School (1978). By reading the oedipalization of the family as apathology, Acker is interested in desire to escape the limits of the dominant discourse. In this chapter I examine the emancipatory power of Acker’s aesthetics in relation to politics and social life through Deleuze and Guattari’sdesiring-machines. I argue that Blood and Guts in High School represents the struggle to resist patriarchal control and the disruptive capacity of desire.
Peer-reviewed Book Reviews
4) Review of Steven Meyer (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science.
Gemma Curto. Notes and Queries 66 no. 4. (2019): 606-608
‘It is an inclusive and urgent gathering of work, which presents an innovative and transformative broadening of the field of Literature and Science in the twenty-first century’.
5) Review of Lisa Vox, Existential Threats: American Apocalyptic Believes in the Technological Era.
Gemma Curto. The British Journal for the History of Science 51 no. 2. (2018): 319-321
I argue that Vox’s discourse is unique by proposing that the Internet and participatory cultures are breaking down nation-state boundaries with regard to religious and scientific views. American dispensationalist views and technological and scientific discourses on apocalyptic catastrophes are brought together. Vox ensures that her claims are fully researched and documented.
6) Review of Ulrich Beck. The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change Is Transforming Our Concept of the World.
Gemma Curto. The British Society for Literature and Science (online). Available online.
The Metamorphosis of The World by Ulrich Beck offers an in-depth analysis of transformations, risks and inequalities of our contemporary world and how our current constellations of generations are united in decline. He offers a courageous view, in which transnational cooperation and the redistribution of ‘bads’ might be the way of avoiding the destruction of the planet.