Stefan Schöberlein's "Writing the Brain"

Stefan Schöberlein is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Central Texas. He has edited Walt Whitman's New Orleans, co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman, and published literary translations into German. He has served as president of the Digital Americanists Society and is currently a contributing editor of the Walt Whitman Archive.

Schöberlein applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Writing the Brain: Material Minds and Literature, 1800-1880, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book takes us right to an 1889 illustration from a British edition of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, depicting the famous “Fall at Lyme” episode. An unconscious woman is being attended by two men, while a third man clutches his head in anguish. The image is accompanied by half a paragraph on craniology—which, though, short, would give the reader a decent idea of the gist of the book: materialist (and often determinist) readings of the mind through the organ of the brain, emphasizing transatlantic connections between literature and science.

“Craniology” or “phrenology” is today, of course, rightly understood to be a pseudoscientific fraud and had numerous outspoken critics in its day. Still, it remains one of the earliest theories to describe the brain not as a coherent whole but as a system of somewhat independent brain regions. It is also a theory that quite openly denied free will, replacing it with an organic determinism while also inaugurating the modern self-help craze (especially in the United States). As such, discourse around it was vibrant and left a broad cultural imprint from Charles Dickens in the UK to Walt Whitman in the US.

Yet, while phrenology was the most prominent, early materialist theory of the mind, it was by no means the only one. My other chapters interrogate diverse neuro-materialist concepts and conundrums in tandem with broad literary trends: from hemispheric minds and the Gothic, to Racial Science and Realism, and, finally, to technophile newspaper fiction and brain neurons.

Still, my book hopes to go beyond influence studies and not only trace how science influenced literature but also how literature (and technology) provided structuring metaphors to the scientific discovery, tracing, for instance, a long history of the Neuron Doctrine in periodical fiction and Romantic poetry.

The book features many illustrations, novel readings of canonical texts from both sides of the Atlantic, and a number of textual (re)discoveries.

Visit Stefan Schöberlein's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy Recuber's "The Digital Departed"

Timothy Recuber is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Smith College in Northampton, MA, studying mass media, digital culture, emotions, the self, and collective memory. He is the author of Consuming Catastrophe: Mass Culture in America’s Decade of Disaster, winner of the Outstanding Recent Contribution Award from the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Emotions section.

Recuber applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Digital Departed: How We Face Death, Commemorate Life, and Chase Virtual Immortality, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Such quotes hint at the therapeutic qualities of blogging, but also at the ways that the confrontation with mortality affects the very essence of selfhood. Certainly, the affordances of blogging outlined earlier, its encouragement of regular periods of introspection amid a supportive audience, have much in common with more traditional forms of therapeutic encounter. Moreover, reframing terminal illness as something positive could be a way to combat the many stigmas associated with death and dying. Yet very few of the blog posts in the sample discussed such stigmas directly. Instead, what became clear again and again in these blogs was the transformative capacity of blogging a terminal illness. It was not just that anxieties were salved in the process of writing them down, or that order was made out of the chaos of a terminal diagnosis by creating these narratives, though undoubtedly these were important effects. The capacity to craft a new self was an even more powerful factor.

Page 99 appears in the middle of the book’s third chapter, called “Suffering, the Self, and Narrative Freedom in Blogs of the Terminally Ill.” This chapter begins to really flesh out some of the main arguments in the book. One of these arguments can be seen in the quote above, namely, that digital confrontations with one’s own mortality have the capacity to transform one’s sense of self. In this particular chapter, my evidence consists of words from a sample of 927 posts by twenty different terminally ill bloggers. These quotes are beautiful, heartbreaking, sometimes mundane, and often profound, but taken together they show people grappling with and changing their senses of self through regular writing and introspection about their terminal illnesses.

On the one hand this is a social constructionist take on the self—many of the blogs in my sample spoke explicitly about this self-transformation or recreation in the face of impending mortality, so in a sense I am simply tracking an emergent norm about how selfhood works in this particular context. At the same time, the book’s major argument is about the ways that digital media technologies have reenchanted the self. This means, in essence, that they have brought a sense of magic, wonder, or mystery back to the modern project of selfhood. Jumping off from this point, later in the chapter I play around with the concept of the digital soul. I argue that the vision of selfhood put forth in blogs of the terminally ill has a lot in common with certain theological views in which the soul is made through human suffering. In the book’s later chapters, I look at other ways in which people have used digital media technologies to create posthumous legacies for themselves or to try to continue communicating with their loved ones after death. What these things have in common with blogs of the terminally ill is the sense that one’s digital self might be transubstantiated into a kind of digital soul, a testament to who one was in life that, at least in some small way, transcends one’s corporeal death.

So all in all I think that page 99 is a pretty good representation of the kinds of evidence that appear throughout the book and of where the rest of the book is headed.

Visit Timothy Recuber's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Russ Castronovo's "American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability"

Russ Castronovo is the Tom Paine Professor of English and director of the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His books include Fathering the Nation, Necro Citizenship, Beautiful Democracy, and Propaganda 1776.

Castronovo applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability, and reported the following:

Page 99 of American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability centers on one of the conceptual origin points for this book as whole. In his fairytale about the creation of property, John Locke famously asked readers to imagine a hunter chasing rabbit. As this page from the book’s third chapter explains, Locke draws a startling conclusion that “when the hunter discovers, tracks, and pursues the rabbit, he ‘hath begun a property.’ He does not even have to catch it, for Locke, pursuit creates property.”

This simple story became important for me because I wanted to understand how something could become property even before one has it in one’s hot little hands. The answer, as I discovered in the course. of writing this book is that there is an intimate connection among security, surveillance, and property. Here, I start to untangle this conceptual mystery by turning to white renditions of the frontier, contending that James Fenimore Cooper’s novels disclose the settler colonial logic by which the carving out of property from the wilderness is essential to white ideas about security. In short, I can report that American Insecurity passes the Page 99 Test with flying colors.

And yet, it gives the false impression that the book is wholly concerned with literary and historical episodes from another century. The surveillance programs of the 21st century, the algorithms that pinpoint our locations and predict our behaviors, and the contemporary anxieties about terrorism and crime that make individuals so frequently feel insecure are big part of this book. In this way, American Insecurity sets up a dialogue between earlier instances of vulnerability and present-day fears in an effort to understand how and why so much of our democratic energy has been sacrificed to security.

Learn more about American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability at the Princeton University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Propaganda 1776.

--Marshal Zeringue

Asher D. Cutter's "Evolving Tomorrow"

Asher D. Cutter is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto, Canada. A former Fulbright Scholar, Cutter trained at Tufts University, USA, James Cook University, Australia, the University of Arizona, USA, and the University of Edinburgh, UK. He authored the textbook A Primer of Molecular Population Genetics (2019) as well as nearly 100 scientific articles on the topics of genome evolution, population genetics, speciation, and the biology of Caenorhabditis nematode roundworms.

Cutter applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Evolving Tomorrow: Genetic Engineering and the Evolutionary Future of the Anthropocene, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the last page in a chapter titled “Genetic welding”, and does a good job of touching on some of the key themes explored in my book Evolving Tomorrow as a whole. This page points out how a cutting-edge version of genetic engineering presents a new and distinct force of evolution that has the potential to shape the DNA of entire species in the wild. It includes a quote by writer Elizabeth Kolbert that states, “In a world of synthetic gene drives, the border between the human and the natural, between the laboratory and the wild, already deeply blurred, all but dissolves.” Page 99 also lays out a brief roadmap for how later parts of the book will explore some of the complications that this provocative idea presents, for example, in relation to ethics and ecosystem alterations and if we were to alter the genomes of our own human species. One aspect of this page that is not representative of the book overall is that much of the rest of the book presents stories of interesting biology of organisms and the natural world, or about laboratory research, or about bioethical quandaries. As the final page of a chapter, page 99 does not provide this sense of compelling storytelling that I hope is found throughout many of the other pages in the book. Nonetheless, I think it is fair to say that Evolving Tomorrow passes the Page 99 Test.

Learn more about Evolving Tomorrow at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert W. Rix's "The Vanished Settlers of Greenland"

Robert W. Rix is Associate Professor and Director of Research at the University of Copenhagen. He is widely known for his prolific publication profile in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies. This includes areas such as politics, religion, language, nationalism, and print culture. Rix has also published on earlier periods, for example, The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination Ethnicity, Legend, and Literature (2014).

Rix applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Vanished Settlers of Greenland: In Search of a Legend and Its Legacy, and reported the following:

Page 99 contains a discussion of the Dutch lawyer and historian Jan Jacob Mauricius and his tract, Naleesing over Groenland voor de historie van den Noorweeschen Erik [Rereading Greenland’s History concerning the Norwegian Erik], which he published in the early 1740s.

Mauricius criticizes the history of Erik the Red’s arrival in Greenland in the late tenth century to spearhead a purported large-scale colonization of Greenland. Mauricius had political motives for opposing this widely accepted narrative. The tract was published in the wake of a 1739 skirmish between a Danish naval vessel and four Dutch ships at Disko Bay over fishing rights. The battle was quickly over and resulted in Dutch surrender. Mauricius challenges Danish-Norwegian claims to all of Greenland (including its waters), defending the rights of all nations to the profitable whaling and fishing industry. Therefore, in a series of ‘discourses’, he sets out to prove that Danish historical claims to Greenland are based on spurious sagas and legends. Mauricius’ primary argument is that historians, allegedly sponsored by the Danish crown, have perpetuated an exaggerated legend about Erik the Red’s control over Greenland.

The Page 99 Test both works and it doesn’t. The argument that underpins the examination on page 99 is that Danish history writing at the time was more than just a straightforward reproduction of facts about the past; rather it aimed to construct a collective memory of Greenland that served a national agenda. This analysis is representative of the chapter as a whole, which deals with the political motives behind seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historiography. The analysis also gives the accidental browser who opens the book on this page a fair impression of what is at stake throughout the book. Controversy over rights to use Greenland and its waters centered on the history of the erstwhile settlers who were known to have farmed the land the centuries. However, contact with the colonists, who were considered subjects of the Dano-Norwegian crown, had been completely lost since the early fifteenth century. The book shows how Greenland was not only a Danish matter; it became a contested territory associated with colonial as well as semi-utopian desires throughout Europe and North America.

In some sense, the Page 99 Test would never fully succeed because of the disciplinary breadth and wide timespan the book covers. I track the mystery of the vanished Greenland colonists and the many theories of where they could be found from the late sixteenth century to the 1920s. The memory of Greenland’s “lost colony” was transmitted, interpreted, and negotiated not only in political discourses but also through numerous literary representations. Especially in the second half of the book, the focus is on novels and magazine stories (often adventure tales of the pulp fiction variety) that imagine explorers discovering the descendants of the lost colonists. In The Vanished Settlers of Greenland: In Search of a Legend and Its Legacy, I examine how the ‘lost colony’ lived on in Western imagination and attained an extensive narrative afterlife. The Dutch controversy over the accuracy of Greenland’s colonial history on page 99 is only one example of this.

Learn more about The Vanished Settlers of Greenland at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa Herzog's "Citizen Knowledge"

Lisa Herzog works at the intersection of political philosophy and economic thought. She works at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen since 2019; since 2021 she is the Director of the Center for Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and as of January 2023, Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy.

Herzog applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy, and reported the following:

On page 99 of my book Citizen Knowledge I discuss what happens if market thinking enters social realms in which this is dysfunctional. I first discuss the problem of indicators (which have often been understood as a kind of simulation of market prices) and their potentially distortive effects on the practices they are meant to monitor. Then I turn to the problem of competitiveness – another central tenet of market thinking – being introduced in other spheres of knowledge production, where it often also does more harm than good.

The page is quite a good lead into the book. My central claim is that democracies need to keep up the knowledge structures on which they rely: what I call their “epistemic infrastructures,” which encompass institutions such as schools, media, or well-functioning online communication systems. In the last decades, the idea that markets are wonderful knowledge machines has undermined many of these knowledge structures. For example, if the scientific system is organized as a competitive race where success is measured in terms of publication output, it becomes rather difficult for researchers to turn to either fundamental problems in which they could really widen human knowledge, or to applied issues that address urgent societal questions. Or, to give another example: the idea of a “free market place of ideas” in which unregulated exchanges somehow lead to truth has, arguably, influenced the (lack of) regulation of social media platforms when these were first created. But it is quite naïve to think that unregulated speech would automatically lead to a careful weighing of evidence and arguments; it can also lead to hate speech and large-scale manipulation. This does not imply an argument for censorship – which I reject – but it suggests that we need to carefully consider the role that social media in democracies, and the rules by which both the corporations and their users should play.

The book as a whole argues that democratic societies need to manage the tension between the moral equality of all citizens and the differential authority that experts have in their respective fields of expertise. They need to find a way between a populism that would deny all knowledge differences, and a technocracy that fails to recognize that ultimately, democracy “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln famously put it. Managing this tension is not impossible, but it becomes all the more difficult if one assumes that the best way to deal with decentralized knowledge is the free market. Markets can play a certain role in some types of processing knowledge through the price mechanism, but only if they are carefully regulated. For many other issues, we instead need the interaction of expert knowledge and democratic deliberation.

Learn more about Citizen Knowledge at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Inventing the Market.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara Byala's "Bottled"

Sara Byala is a Senior Lecturer in Critical Writing at University of Pennsylvania and Associate Director of the Penn Global Documentary Institute. South African by birth, Byala has also lectured on African history in Penn's History department, Wharton School, and Lauder Institute. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and a BA from Tufts University.

Byala applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African, and reported the following:

Page 99 takes us into the middle of Chapter Three, “Know Your Country: How Coca-Cola Branded a Continent and Itself,” which I often think of as my favorite in the book. The page describes the Animals of African Campaign – a novel 1960s advertising campaign launched by Coca-Cola bottlers in then named Kenya colony, where consumers could trade bottle caps for ivorine figurines of African animals. Proceeds from the promotion supported the nascent world of wildlife conservation. To this day, these animal sets are highly sought after among collectors. (When he was CEO of the company, Muhtar Kent kept one on display in his office high in the Atlanta home of corporate Coca-Cola.)

Still, it is the multilayered nature of this campaign – and not its rarity – that makes it so intriguing. It was an effort born alongside the dawn of postcolonial nations (in many places on the continent) meant to engage large scores of Black consumers, while also being a novel method of marketing and the first campaign overtly comingled with conservation. These processes, I suggest, were in fact related. Just as African nations were winning their independence, Coca-Cola embraced a new advertisement strategy that equated that which was natural with the continent. And, as this chapter explains, Animals of Africa was not the only marketing initiative of its kind. Throughout this chapter, we are introduced to a whole range of Coca-Cola campaigns that, I demonstrate, not only peddled product, but also came to help brand the African continent as a place of wildness at precisely this political moment. Most importantly, this chapter shows that these campaigns were wildly successful.

This one-page excerpt gives a decent sense of the book. It shows something of the methodology, where I telescope across the continent and use micro stories to chart larger processes, all in the service of a series of central points, presented chrono-thematically. It also gives a sense of my sources. This book is based upon extensive research in corporate Coca-Cola’s closed archives, as well as fieldwork in eight countries in Africa. Everyone knows that Coca-Cola is an unmatched marketer. And some people know that it is the single biggest employer on the African continent. This chapter gives an insight into how and why that came to be by showing one instance where Coca-Cola, as I put it, became African. So, yes, I think the Page 99 Test works here!

Visit Sara Byala's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

William S. Cossen's "Making Catholic America"

William S. Cossen is a historian specializing in the intersection of religion and nationalism. He is a faculty member of The Gwinett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology.

Cossen applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Making Catholic America: Religious Nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Making Catholic America: Religious Nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era comes about one-third of the way through the book’s fourth chapter, “Catholic Gatekeepers: The Church, Immigrants, and the Forging of an American Catholicism.” The page begins in the middle of a paragraph discussing native-born American Catholics’ perceptions that they were already integral parts of their nation, despite growing anti-immigrant sentiment at the turn of the twentieth century, much of which also targeted the Catholic Church and its members. As the next paragraph notes:

A similar article in the Catholic World from 1871 described the founding of the American colonies as a project carried out by a diverse group of European immigrants. Even the founding documents of the United States, according to the piece, were of foreign provenance, with the Declaration of Independence springing from Dutch origins, the common law coming from the English, and the civil law born of the French and Spanish.

Although the author described above seemed to aim toward a more pluralistic conception of American nationhood, they still shared in other prevailing sentiments of the period:

[T]he author demonstrated an essentialized understanding of race and ethnicities, ascribing qualities supposedly inherent to each of them. The author expressed faith in the ability of the “practical genius of Americans” to harness, control, and eventually assimilate immigrants into the national community, pointing to an outlook on racial differences shared by many native-born Catholics and Protestants alike and an understanding of the “genius of Americans” that was just as dependent on its Catholic members as on its non-Catholic constituents.

This page is a good reflection of one of the book’s main arguments. A major theme in Making Catholic America is the ability of Catholics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to make successful claims for themselves as quintessential Americans and as the most authentic exemplars of American ideals. Central to this argument is a focus on how Catholics used a merger of religion, race, and nationalism to make these assertions. While this is the only chapter focusing exclusively on immigration – the others address western expansion and missionary activity on Native American reservations; the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893; the American colonization of the Philippines; and politics and anti-Catholicism in the Progressive Era – the passages from page 99 described above work very well as illustrations of one of the book’s principal claims.

Visit William S. Cossen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steve Tibble's "Templars: The Knights Who Made Britain"

Steve Tibble is a graduate of Cambridge and London Universities, and is a research associate at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He is one of the foremost academics currently working in the field of the crusades, and is the author of the warfare and strategy chapters in both The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades and The Cambridge History of the Crusades (2023).

His recent publications have been critically acclaimed and include The Crusader Armies (2018) and The Crusader Strategy (2020, short-listed for the Duke of Wellington's Military History Prize).

Tibble applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Templars: The Knights Who Made Britain, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Templars - The Knights Who Made Britain is about something close to all our hearts, for good and bad - income tax.

In particular, it discusses the way in which the English crown under Henry II began to raise taxes in the 1180s in response to the increased and unremitting threat posed to the crusaders by Saladin and his hugely powerful cavalry armies.

The content on page 99 is ostensibly very specific, but the test works rather better than one might imagine - it acts, in a way, as a metaphor for the role adopted by the Templars, and the almost sublime strategy they used to fulfill that role.

The Templars were created as a way of defending the Holy Land and its local Christian communities. They did this with a twin-track strategy - being a standing army in the East, and marshalling aid from the West. This meant, ironically, that while they were masters of war in the Holy Land, they were also masters of peace and stability in Europe - undistracted kings and more productive states were needed to better support the crusading movement.

The Templars were thus committed to helping the development of taxation and banking in England (in order to get money sent to the east) and to ingratiating themselves within Henry II's administration (in order to persuade the king and his men to go on crusade).

Ultimately, the Templars wanted to operate within effective, stable societies. Such societies could generate more resources to be sent to the East (to help bolster up the crusader states). A far-reaching consequence of this surprisingly internationalist agenda, however, was to help create more modern instruments of government on a provincial level. The interests of the order were fundamentally their own – but those interests often coincided with those of a stabilising and centralising monarchy.

This was not an ideal world. However frustrating it might be, the local monarchies (such as the kings and queens of England and Scotland) almost invariably put their own interests first. But the Templars, and their papal masters, generally strove for improvement rather than perfection. They made the best of what they found. And they tried to make it better.

Visit Steve Tibble's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Russell Neuman's "Evolutionary Intelligence"

W. Russell Neuman is Professor of Media Technology at New York University. A founding faculty of the MIT Media Laboratory, he served as Senior Policy Analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. His recent books include The Digital Difference: Media Technology and the Theory of Communication Effects.

Neuman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Evolutionary Intelligence: How Technology Will Make Us Smarter, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Evolutionary Intelligence falls in the middle of a cautionary chapter about the perils of artificial intelligence and digital omnipotence entitled “There Be Dragons.” The book’s concern is not that a malevolent robot will try to kill us but that Big Tech has strong incentives to invade our privacy and manipulate our attention. In the middle of page 99 there is pause…

Wait. What? This section began under a heading of “personal privacy.” What is all this dissertating about just the opposite—systematically making personal information available to other entities? Actually, I believe that is entirely the point. Intelligent personal privacy makes it routinely convenient for each of us to take control of our personal information. If you don’t want anybody to know of your weakness for fine chocolates, so be it. When you purchase fine chocolates or download a recipe for chocolate truffle ganache, you keep your identity contractually private and happily forfeit the financial benefit or discount.

The book goes on to argue that “intelligent privacy” can allow those inclined to actually profit personally from making their market-relevant information available to marketers while others opt out of the financial benefit and keep personal information personal. It is an example of using smart technology to empower the individual. As page 99 says: “that is entirely the point.”

The public is justifiably concerned that evolving AI promises to be a powerful tool. Evolutionary Intelligence is a book about how the locus of control of that power can be in the hands of the individual rather than the big corporations.

The idea of evolutionary intelligence interprets evolving AI as the next stage of human evolution as our capacities co-evolve with the technologies we create. The wheel made us more mobile. Machine power made us stronger. Telecommunication gave us the capacity to communicate over great distances. Evolutionary intelligence will make us smarter.

Learn more about Evolutionary Intelligence at the The MIT Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue