Heather A. Love is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Waterloo, and her research draws on the interdisciplinary field of cybernetics to explore connections between early twentieth-century literary and technological discourses. Her work has appeared in Modernism/modernity, the Journal of Modern Literature, and the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.
Heather A. Love
Contributions
Modernism and Diagnosis
Questions of scientific testing, symptomatology, medical solutions, and epidemiological modeling have been front-page news this past year. But our diagnostic moment began long before the COVID-19 pandemic: from 23andme’s mail-in genetic analysis to WebMD’s online medical symptom checkers; from wearable fitness trackers that get smaller and sleeker with each new model to books and web series that promise inner joy through a simplified material existence; from a resurgence in theories of genetic determinism born of “scoring” individual genomes to the advent of a professional field dedicated to “diagnosing organizational culture.”
Modernism, Cybernetics, and Systems Theory: Disciplinary Relevance in a STEM-focused World
In 1926, Gertrude Stein delivered the lecture “Composition as Explanation” to the Cambridge Literary Club at Oxford University (fig. 1).