Modernism and Immortality

Immortality.

“Is death necessary?“, asked biologist G. R. Taylor and stated that in 1968 in the USA alone more than a thousand teams of scientists were working on the issue of growing old and the problem of death. Some people are frozen at their death. They want to be revived as soon as a cure for their disease or the aging process has been found. Most of humanity seems to have the desire to live forever. M...

Women and Psychiatric Modernism

he therapies of Rivers and Yealland represented the two modes of English psychiatric modernism which would affect women both inside and outside the asylum from the 1920s to the 1960s: psychoanalysis, which offered the twentieth century's most influential theory of femininity and female sexuality; and traditional medical psychiatry, which made rapid advances in scientific knowledge and technolog...

Modernism and Nation Building

Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism

(NLR 146), Fredric Jameson argues that pastiche, rather than parody, is the appropriate mode of postmodernist culture. ‘Pastiche’, he writes, ‘is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language; but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongsid...

Aging, fertility, and immortality.

Evolutionary theory suggests that fecundity rates will plateau late in life in the same fashion as mortality rates. We demonstrate that late-life plateaus arise for fecundity in Drosophila melanogaster. The result qualitatively fits the evolutionary theory of late life based on the force of natural selection. But there are a number of alternative interpretations. Fecundity plateaus could be sec...