Anton Kirchhofer – författare

Since first they emerged into the Victorian limelight, dinosaurs have fascinated generations of artists, scientists, and general readers. This book approaches their history from a literary-critical perspective, arguing that the enormous and enduring popularity of Mesozoic fauna offers a fresh way to understand the relationship between the arts and sciences. We tend to treat those two as opposites -- but dinosaurs, Will Tattersdill argues, cannot exist without an entanglement of both evidence and imagination. Tracing these entanglements across scientific works, literary texts, artworks, and museum displays of all kinds from the nineteenth century to the present day, this book suggests that the history of dinosaurs is one in which the boundaries between categories of knowledge, genre, and species are constantly being renegotiated.

Moving from the micro world of quantum physics to the macro scales of earth science and ecology, this book considers how, in contemporary literature, affective experiences like desire, suffering, anxiety, and joy shape scientific persons, practices, and products.This book brings into dialogue close readings of scientific writing and contemporary literary works by authors like Jeanette Winterson, Richard Powers, Hanya Yanagihara, Thalia Field, and Jenny Offill. Combining narrative and affect studies, it uses formal strategies such as moving metaphor, visceral or affective description, plot-level analogy, contraction, and rhythm to engage with western scientific epistemologies, which still tends towards the impassive, universal, and objective.While each chapter focuses on a different field (or fields) of science, all foreground bodies—human and nonhuman—as a way of exploring knowledge production. Through close readings, the book argues that select ‘scientific stories’ raise important questions about how ‘knowledge’ is defined and who (and what) is invited into its processes of production.

Starting from an analysis of practices of participation in contemporary print and other media, the volume opens up a historical perspective, probing the potential of the concept of participatory cultures for the exploration of past forms of collaboration between individual and collective actors (i.e. authors, editors, publishers, fans, critics etc.). In doing so, the volume sheds new light on the historically, culturally, and medially specific forms and functions as well as on the economic, political and institutional parameters that contributed to the emergence and transformation of what turn out to be precarious alliances.