Earth, Life, and System

Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science and chair of the Department of English at Texas Tech University. His research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and science, with special interests in systems theory, narrative theory, and ecology. In 2010–11 he was senior fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy, Bauhaus-University Weimar. His books are Allegories of Writing (1995), Dora Marsden and Early Modernism (1996), Energy Forms (2001), Posthuman Metamorphosis (2008), and Neocybernetics and Narrative (2014). He has coedited From Energy to Information (2002), Emergence and Embodiment (2009), and the Routledge Companion to Literature and Science (2010). He is now writing a cultural history of the American locations, transnational authors, and key concepts of the systems discourses gathered in the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly.

In a nod to Margulis’s work, the assembled essays represent an attempt at discipline-bridging literary symbiosis. Contributors include biologists, philosophers, historians, and even Margulis’s son, a science writer who sets the tone for the rest of the text in an intimate first chapter about his mother. Clarke’s sought-after interdisciplinarity shines in the finished product.

Stacy Alaimo, University of Texas at Arlington:
Earth, Life, and System is a strikingly original and challenging collection of essays, which places the work and broad intellectual interests of Lynne Margulis in a variety of contexts and develops original arguments and interpretations that expand on and complement her interests.

Altogether, Earth, Life, and System offers a series of often fascinating, always stimulating...invariably enriching essays in an incisive and unruly science and its existential repercussions. It is a fitting tribute to one of modern science’s most generative and productive independent spirits, a gadfly like Socrates whose ultimate concern was to ensure that enquiry and debate were never stifled by received opinion and ‘normal’ expectations.