“For I had rather live, and simple be,/Then dangers run, some new strange Sight to see.” (Cavendish)

“Shall I rejoice, for my owne Death be glad?” (Cavendish)

“But here, Poore Oake, thous liv’st in Ignorance,/And never seek’st thy Knowledge to advance.” (Cavendish)

“Like most of us, I took it for a mortal, some kind of loose creature new to me. I was a bit startled for after a hundred and thirty-two years I thought I knew all the local fauna.” (Le Guin)

“As a mere seedling, as soon as I got my head above the weeds, I had learned the basic trick of going two directions at once.” (Le Guin)

"Order of Things" (Le Guin) since nature is law and uncommunicative.

“And because he died in the moment of false vision, because it can never change, I am caught in it, eternally.” (Le Guin)

“Therefore it is that we cannot conceive of any end or limit to the world; but always as a necessity it occurs to us that there is something beyond.” (Bacon)

“For every one has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolours the light of nature” (Bacon)

“Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research” (Bacon)

“And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding.” (Bacon)

“I am of a family of rigid principle and considerable self-respect.” (Le Guin)

“They seemed, indeed, not to see any more. They merely stared ahead.” (Le Guin)

“Their genes have been tampered with for centuries. Besides, they are herd creatures; no orchard tree can really form an opinion of its own.” (Le Guin)

“It will be a thing. A monster.” (Butler 247)

“The Image we have here exhibited in the first Figure, was…not round nor flat, but irregular and uneven” (Hooke)

“I took a large grey Drone-Fly, that had a large head, but a small and slender body in proportion to it, and cutting off its head, I fix’d it with the forepart or face upwards…” (Hooke)

“These being their eyes, it affords us a very pretty Speculation to contemplate their manner of vision” (Hooke)

“The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature.” (Pascal)

“The visible extent of the world visibly exceeds us; but as we exceed little things, we think ourselves more capable of knowing them.” (Pascal)

“we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite.” (Pascal)

“I see other persons around me of a like nature. I as them if they are better informed than I am. They tell me that they are not.” (Pascal)

“What will he do then, but perceive the appearance of the middle of things, in an eternal despair of knowing either their beginning or their end.” (Pascal)

Zooming and out by powers of ten. (Eames)

Making the imperceptible 'perceptible' in relation to atoms. (Eames)

“Both of lost happiness and lasting pain/Torments him” (Milton)

“To be created like to us, though less/In power and excellence, but favoured more/Of him who rules above” (Milton)

“The mind is its own place and in itself/Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” (Milton)

“Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,/And found no end, in wandering mazes lost…false philosophy” (Milton)

“The one seemed woman to the waist, and fair,/But ended foul in many a scaly fold” (Milton)

“No light, but rather darkness visible” (Milton)

“for nothing lovelier can be found/In Woman, than to study household good,/And good works in her Husband to promote.” (Milton)

“Was death invented?” (Milton)

“Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.” (Milton)

“Satan in the serpent; who revolting from God, and drawing to his side many legions of angels, was by the command of God driven out of heaven with all his crew into the great deep.” (Milton)

“Though of their names in heavenly records now/Be no memorial, blotted out and razed/By their rebellion, from the books of life.” (Milton)

“My life might have been passed in ease and luxury; but I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path.” (Shelley 9)

“He was not, as the other traveler seemed to be, a savage inhabitant of some undiscovered island, but a European.” (Shelley 14)

“The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover” (Shelley 20)

“I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.” (Shelley 28)

“I never beheld her so enchanting as at this time, when she was continually endeavoring to contribute to the happiness of others” (Shelley 26)

“My dreams were therefore undisturbed by reality” (Shelley 23)

“In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovering and wonder.” (Shelley 30)

“A new species would bless me as its creator and source” (Shelley 33)

“After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.” (Shelley 32)

“Illuminating the lake, making it appear like a vast sheet of fire” (Shelley 49)

“I could not sustain the horror of my situation…the judges, had already condemned my unhappy victim, I rushed out of the court in agony.” (Shelley 56)

“Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me” (Shelley 68)

“The light became more and more oppressive to me” (Shelley 70)

“I was at first unable to solve these questions; but perpetual attention, and time, explained to me many appearances which were at first enigmatic.” (Shelley 76)

“endeavoring to discover the motives which influenced their actions” (Shelley 76)

“I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers–their grace, beauty, and delicate complexions: but how was I terrified, when I viewed myself in a transparent pool!” (Shelley 78)

"What was I?" (Shelley 84)

“You are my creator, but I am your master;--obey!” (Shelley 120)

"Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room" (Shelley 26)

“Instead of repeating this existing language, I am interested in finding other ways of describing sexual violence that speaks to what exceeds or is missed by the formal definitions: the things better captured by flexible and everyday language such as fuzzy, messy, and icky.” (Graybill 10)

“So too do texts crack open when they are made to talk to other texts.” (Graybill 25)

“paranoid reading. As an ‘anticipatory’ form, such readings are constantly ‘looking forward to and preparing for bad news.’” (Graybill 22)

“It is tempting to suggest that Offred is indeed wrong. Perhaps her mind is muddled by trauma. Perhaps she is experiencing cognitive dissonance.” (Graybill 9)

“It is only recently that critics have begun to see Victor Frankenstein’s disgust at the sight of his creation as a study of postpartum depression, as a representation of maternal rejection of a newborn infant, and to relate the entire novel to Mary Shelley’s mixed feelings about motherhood.” (Johnson 6)

“Monstrousness is so incompatible with femininity that Frankenstein cannot even complete the female companion that his creature so eagerly awaits.” (Graybill 7)

“Frankenstein combines a monstrous answer to two of the most fundamental questions one can ask: where do babies come from? and where do stories come from?” (Johnson 7)

“The reader of Frankenstein, too, would be well advised to look beyond the monster’s physical deformity, both for his fearsome power and for his beauty.” (Johnson 5-6)

“But when they saw a boy like mine, they had no love to spare.” (LaValle)

“When I first arrived at the lab, the director promised I could follow my curiosity with an unlimited budget. Invent what I liked.” (LaValle)

“The purpose of most humans, since the dawn of time, has been one thing only. Cheap labor.” (LaValle)

“But you’re also something entirely…new. Even the monster, in the end, is only human. You are actually a new life-form.” (LaValle)

“Must be nice to be a father. Mothers are weighed on a broken scale.” (LaValle)

“The Destroyer. And I will welcome the title. If kept you safe, I would destroy them all.” (LaValle)

“Who benefits from your ignorance?” (LaValle)

“Think about why you aren’t taught such things in school.” (LaValle)

“I don’t owe this country a damn thing except the same hate it’s always given me.” (LaValle)

“I really never imagined she’d be used against me.” (LaValle)

The scene at the border, Black Lives Matter, and issues of climate change to name a few. (LaValle)

All caps text as yelling. (Ligon)

Black text vs. white paper as distinction between bodies. Smudging as a medium for distorting perceptions and destroying the façade of those distinctions. (Ligon)

“This parallel between Frankenstein and the most famous slave revolt in U.S. history provides an important point of origin for the cultural history of the figure of a black Frankenstein monster in American culture.” (Young 19)

“The monster does not initially think of himself as monstrous; he must be taught to do so by others. In Shelley’s account, monstrosity is socially as well as literally constructed, and this social construction is laid bare for the reader’s condemnation.” (Young 22)

“The novel is not so much a conservative fantasy as a radical caution to those in power against creating the conditions that will result in rebellion against them.” (Young 22)

“ As a destructive, vengeful figure, the Frankenstein monster incarnates white fears about black power.” (Young 27)

“Most important, the thematic doubling between Victor and the monster was diminished, with both Victor and the monster flattened into stock characters: Victor became the tragic overreacher, while the monster, dumbed-down and literally mute, was a violent brute.” (Young 31)

“The transsexual body is in an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction.” (Stryker)

“Just as the words ‘dyke,’ ‘fag,’ ‘queer,’ ‘slut,’ and ‘whore’ have been reclaimed, respectively, by lesbians and gay men, by anti-assimiliationist sexual minorities, by women who pursue erotic pleasure, and by sex industry workers, words like ‘creature,’ ‘monster,’ and ‘unnatural’ need to be reclaimed by the transgendered. By embracing and accepting them, even piling one on top of another, we may dispel their ability to harm us.” (Stryker)

“Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human.” (Stryker)

“The prospect of a monster with a life and will of its own is a principal source of horror for Frankenstein.” (Stryker)

“we had then/Remain’d still happy, not as now, despoil’d/Of all our good, sham’d, naked, miserable.” (Milton)

“Like the monster, the longer I live in these conditions, the more rage I harbor.” (Stryker)

“If I cannot change my situation I will change myself.” (Stryker)

“I immediately began telling myself a story to explain my experience.” (Stryker)

“Gender attribution is compulsory; it codes and deploys our bodies in ways that materially affect us, yet we choose neither our marks nor the meanings they carry.” (Stryker)

“Upon learning its history and experiencing the rejection of all to whom it reached out for companionship, the creature’s life takes a dark turn.” (Stryker)

“Could she have been so wrong, so deceived by her own eyes?” (Butler 14)

“You are hierarchical.” (Butler 39)

“Writing materials. Such small things, and yet they were denied to her.” (Butler 63)

“What’s frightening is the idea of being tampered with.” (Butler 76)

“And you don’t understand us at all. You never will, really, though you’ll be given much more information about us.” (Butler 112)

“Some things deserved to be called ‘it’.” (Butler 49)

“Some has decided he’s something called a faggot and the other dislikes the shape of his eyes.” (Butler 159)

“Now he was ready to accept what he had wanted from the beginning.” (Butler 190)

“It gave her…a new color.” (Butler 226)

“Human sperm and egg will not unite without us.” (Butler 245)

“One of the first things Lilith had learned during her own earlier training period was not to lean against the trees.” (Butler 199)

“And you think destroying what was left of our cultures will make us better?” (Butler 34)

“‘Can you breathe underwater?’ she asked him.” (Butler 28)

Lilith learning the Oankali language. (Butler)

The Oankali and their trade with humans. (Butler)

“A certain number of phenomena observed on Earth follow a seven-day rhythm.” (Levi 612)

“A bold new theory deserving of attention asserts that they are aquatic animals, the periodic ones intelligent, the others less so (or less well endowed with a sense of direction).” (Levi 615)

“Therefore, when, for example, cities or ships are mentioned, it is necessary to remember that these are ‘cities’ (i.e., dense conglomerates of human habitations) and ‘ships’ (i.e., voluminous floating objects constructed and piloted by humans) for us, but not for the unknown author of the Report, to whom both appeared in a much less discernible guise.” (Levi 608-609)

"The end of the Anomalous Period was marked by two very bright explosions, occurring in Japan within 2 days of each other." (Levi 616)

“Diesbach dubbed his new colour ‘Prussian Blue’ to establish an intimate and long-lasting connection between his chance discovery and the empire that would surpass the glory of the ancients, as it would have taken a much more gifted man–one endowed, perhaps, with the curse of foresight–even to conceive of its future fall.” (Labatut 15-16)

“His sentence served, he renounced all pretense to humanity, and engaged in countless experiments on live and dead animals, which he dissected with unnatural fervour.” (Labatut 18)

“Clara accused him of perverting science by devising a method for exterminating human beings on an industrial scale.” (Labatut 26)

“suffocating all forms of life beneath a terrible verdure.” (Labatut 33)

“He died in Basle in 1934…not knowing that, years, later, the Nazis would use in their gas chambers the pesticide he had helped create to murder his half-sister…” (Labatut 32)

Recounting history of scientific endeavors. (Labatut)

“HERSKIN/SPLITS/ATTHENOSE/CROWDSBACK/OFFHER/BODY” (Bervin 6)

“INIDEAL/CONDITIONS/THEEGGS/STARTINCUBATING/WHENTHEBUDS/ONTHEMULBERRY/ARETWO/CENTIMETERS LONG” (Bervin 26)

“FUNNYTO/READTHIS/4609YEARS/AFTER/OURFIRST/NARROWFABRICS/WEREBURIEDIN/ZHEJIANGCHINA” (Bervin 38)

“ITISAFUNCTIONOFPOETRY/TOLOCATE/THOSEZONES/INSIDEUS/THATWOOULDBE/FREE/ANDDECLARE/THEMSO/WRITESCD/WRIGHT” (Bervin 49)

“AREYOUSURPRISED/IQUOTEAPOET/DONTBE/WEINVENTEDLANGUAGE” (Bervin 50)

“THERADICAL/INTHECHARACTERFOR/SILK/PRECEDES/HUNDREDSOFWORDS/WORDSFORPAPER/TEXTILE/FORTHEVOLUMEOFABOOK” (Bervin 88)

“IMAGINETHIS/FORFIVETHOUSANDYEARS/DEATHCOMESORIT/COMESTHREEWEEKSLATER/ITSTHECOMINGBACK/THATSHARD/YOUTHINK/IAMMORBIDIAM/IMAGINETHELANGUAGE/WRITTENINME” (Bervin 104-105)

“SILK/COMESSPUTTERINGOUT” (Bervin 128)

“Her poem had nearly eight thousand possible readings.” (Bervin 158)

Silkworms as a commodity. Silkworms talking at humans. (Bervin)

“By insisting that poetry be a visually and haptically mediated experience, Bervin confronts poetic ‘fit’ as a compositional and material imperative and, as I’ll argue, confronts her audience with the structures of social and scientific perception.” (Crim 100)

“And it raises the question of why a creative project of this nature garners such ‘investment.’” (Crim 100)

“In Silk Poems, only the worm comprehends its global history, and in the context of a millenia-long cultural practice, the 1609 document is but a minor episode.” (Crim 102)

“But while ‘unproductive’ refers to similar conditions, it lays special emphasis on the perspective of the capitalist, not the experience of the worker…Reading Marx’s analogy in this light cuts away from any idealizing account of poetry as either a natural process or a work of self-fashioning.” (Crim 114)

“all motion is always one long chain and new motion arises out of the old in order invariable” (Lucretius)

“that while the first bodies are being carried downwards by their own weight in a straight line through the void, at times quite uncertain and uncertain places, they swerve a little from their course, just so much as you might call a change of motion.” (Lucretius)

Margaret Cavendish “A Dialogue between an Oake, and a Man Cutting Him Downe”

Ursula K. Le Guin “Direction of the Road”

Jen Bervin Silk Poems

Milton Paradise Lost

Primo Levi “Observed from a Distance”

Victor LaValle Destroyer

Mary Shelley Frankenstein

I am most drawn to the line “as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence” because of the way it ascribes human qualities to the inert. Like we’ve seen over and over in this class, humans twisted the neutral findings within science into perverse weapons against the world. Also, the phrase “chemical structure” also draws to mind the issues of nature vs. nurture. The “chemical structure” of the blue paint in nature is neutral, while the “nurture” of the substance has mixed reactions. The parallelism between its use in magnificent artworks like Starry Night versus the “dangerous of all human arts” in chemical warfare, is summarized neatly within this passage as “blind.” The references to major pieces of art also draws my attention because of the way art has been historically pitted against science, despite both having similar trajectories in terms of innovation and social impact. Van Gogh’s work was a part of the impressionist movement while Hokusai’s work related to the Ukiyo-e movement; both of which were interested in sensuality, nature, and emotions; these artworks were also capable of being twisted. The use of the word “shines” is a perfect visual cue within artwork, a bright light that gives warmth or inspiration to the viewer, but it also invokes explosive imagery that comes to mind when “uniforms” and “army” follow. Most words, images, inventions, etc are initially neutral, but it is the user that determines their moral/ethical value. In this passage, we are reminded of those stakes.