Wendy Wheeler

Wendy Wheeler

  • Emeritus Professor of English Literature and Cultural Inquiry, London Metropolitan University.
  • Visiting Professor, Literature and the Environment Programme, University of Oregon, USA, 2013.
  • Visiting Professor School of Art, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT, Australia, 2012-14.
  • Visiting Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, January 2010.
  • Editorial Board: New Formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics.
    Editorial Advisor: Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, U.K. and Ireland.
  • Editorial Consultant, Cybernetics and Human Knowing.

Publications

Books

  • Expecting the Earth: Life|Culture|Biosemiotics. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2016. In press.
  • Biosemiotics: Nature/Culture/Science/Semiosis, ed. and Introductory Essay, Living Books About Life Series (liviBL), series eds. G. Hall, J. Zylinska and C. Birchall, Open Humanities Press, 2011.
  • The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006, pp.173.
  • Ed & ‘Introductory essay’, The Political Subject: Essays on the Self  from Art, Politics and Science, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2000, pp. 1-13.
  • A New Modernity? Change in Science, Literature and Politics, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1999, pp.168.

Chapters in books

  • ‘Meaning’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies, eds. Ron Broglio, Undine Sellbach and Lynn Turner, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2017. Forthcoming.
  • ‘The Lightest Burden: The Aesthetic Abductions of Biosemiotics’, ed. Hubert Zapf, De Gruyter Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. In press.
  • ‘Natural Play, Natural Metaphor and Natural Stories: Biosemiotic Realism’, in Material Ecocriticism, eds., S. Iovino and S. Oppermann, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014.
  • ‘Thought Without Concepts in Angels and Insects: A.S. Byatt as Crypto-biosemiotician’, in The Semiotics of Animals Representations, eds. Kadri  Tüür and Morten Tønnessen. Rodopi Series: Nature, Culture and Literature, series editors Hubert van den Berg, Adam Mickiewicz, Axel Goodbody and Marcel Wissenburg, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi/Brill, 2014. 
  •  ‘”Tongues I’ll hang on every tree”: Biosemiotics and the Book of Nature’, in Louise Westling, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
  • ‘Play’, in A More Developed Sign: Interpreting the Work of Jesper Hoffmeyer, eds. D. Favareau, P. Cobley and K. Kull, Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 2012.
  • ‘The Book of Nature: Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Literature’, S.J. James and N. Saul, eds, The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2011, pp.171-184.
  • ‘The Biosemiotic Turn: Abduction, or, the Nature of Creative Reason in Nature and Culture’, A. Goodbody and K. Rigby, eds. Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, Charlottesville VA: Virginia University Press, 2011, pp.270-282.
  • ‘”The Loom of the Inordinate”: A.S. Byatt’s Woven Realism’, in R. Mengham & P. Tew, (eds), British Fiction Today, Continuum, 2006, pp.165-176.
  • ‘The Disguises of Truth: Postmodernism, Science and a New Modernity’ in P. Lagayette, ed., Nature et Progrès: Interactions, exclusions, et mutations, Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2006, pp.285-91.
  • ‘Political Football’, in M. Perryman, ed., Going  Oriental: Football After World Cup 2002, Edinburgh, Mainstream Publishing, 2002, pp. 176-183.
  • ‘Graham Swift’ in J. Natoli & H. Bertens, (eds.), Postmodernism: Key Figures, Oxford, Blackwell, 2002, pp. 297-301.
  • ‘On Being Alone’, The Art of Life: On Living, Love and Death, J. Rutherford, (ed.), London, Lawrence & Wishart, 2000, pp. 115-126.
  • ‘Melancholic modernity and contemporary grief: the novels of Graham Swift’,  R. Luckhurst & P. Marks, (eds.), Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, Longman/Pearson, Harlow, 1999, pp. 63-78.
  • ‘Stars and Moons: Desire and the Limits of Marketisation’, G. Andrews et al, (eds.), New Left, New Right and Beyond: Taking the Sixties Seriously, Macmillan, London, 1999, pp. 42-50.
  • ‘Together Again After All These Years: Science, Politics and Theology in the New Modernity’, A. Coddington & M. Perryman, (eds.), The Moderniser’s Dilemma, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1998, pp.175-191.
  • ‘Two Walks’, Karl Simms, (ed.), Ethics and the Subject, Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam, 1997, pp. 157-164.
  • ‘Dangerous Business: Remembering Freud and a Poetics of Politics’, M. Perryman, (ed.), The Blair Agenda, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1997, pp. 100-124.
  • ‘From the Sublime to the Domestic: Graham Swift and the Task of Contemporary Mourning’. D. Jarrett & T. Slawek, (eds.), The Most Sublime Act,  UNL & University of Silesia Presses, 1995, London, pp. 60-83.
  •  ‘Nostalgia Isn’t Nasty: The Postmodernising of Parliamentary Democracy’, M. Perryman, (ed.), Altered States: Postmodernism, Politics, Culture, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1994, pp. 94-107.
  • ‘Staging the Other Scene: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Contemporary Political Theatre’, (with Trevor Griffiths), in A. Page, (ed.), The Death of the Playwright? Modern British Drama and Literary Theory, Macmillan, London,  1992, pp. 186-203.

Dictionary/Encyclopaedia entries

  • ‘Graham Swift’ in The Literary Encyclopedia, on-line dictionary, ed., Robert Clark, www.litencyc.com, 2001.
  • Entry on The Life and Death of Harriet Frean, in Bloomsbury Guide to Women’s Literature, ed., C. Buck, Bloomsbury, London, 1992, pp. 744-5.

Articles in journals

  • ‘Introduction’ and Guest Ed. with Louise Westling, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism Vol. 19, no. 3. Special issue on Biosemiotics and Culture. Autumn 2015.
  • ‘A Feeling for Life: Biosemiotics, Autopoiesis and the Orders of Discourse’, Anglia. Journal of English Philology, 133/1. Literature and Science Special Issue, ed. Hubert Zapf, 2015.
  • ‘The Carrying: Material Frames and Immaterial Meanings’ – The 1st Annual Jakob von Uexküll Lecture, 30 May 2014, University of Tartu, Estonia. Published in Sign Systems Studies, 42 (2/3), 2014, 399-411.
  • ‘The Wrecked Vessel: The Effects of Gnosticism, Nominalism and the Protestant Reformation in the Semiotic Scaffolding of Modern Science’, Biosemiotics, Volume 8, Issue 2, August 2015, pp 305-324. Special issue on Semiotic Scaffolding, ed. Jesper Hoffmeyer. Online 2014. Print 2015. 
  • ‘A Connoisseur of Magical Coincidences: Chance, Creativity and Poiesis from a Biosemiotic Perspective’, Biosemiotics Volume 7, Issue 3, special issue on Chance, ed. Victoria N. Alexander, 2014.
  • Guest Ed and Editors’ Introductory Essay (with L. Williams) of The Animals Turn, a special issue of New Formations 76, Autumn/Winter 2012.
  • ‘Gregory Bateson and Biosemiotics: Transcendence and Animism in the 21st Century’, special issue on Ecophenomenology and Practices of the Sacred, guest eds P. Curry and W. Wheeler, Green Letters, 13 (Winter 2010).
  • ‘Delectable Creatures and the Fundamental Reality of Metaphor: Biosemiotics and Animal Mind’, special issue on The Semiotics of Perception, guest eds M. Tønnessen & K. Lindström, Journal of Biosemiotics vol. 3, no. 1. 2010.
  • ‘Creative Evolution: A Theory of Cultural Sustainability’, Communications, Politics and Culture, Vol. 42, No. 1 (2009).
  • ‘Postscript on Biosemiotics: Reading Beyond Words – and Ecocriticism’, and ‘Introduction’, in guest eds, W. Wheeler and H. Dunkerley, New Formations, 64, Spring 2008, special issue Earthographies: Ecocriticism and Culture, pp. 137-154 (plus Editors’ Introduction, pp.7-14).
  • ‘”Do not block the path of inquiry!" Peircean Abduction, the Tacit Dimension, and Biosemiotic Creativity in Nature and Culture’, The American Journal of Semiotics, 24, 1-3 (2008), special issue on Biosemiotics, ed. Don Favareau, pp.171-187.
  • ‘Figures in a Landscape: Biosemiotics and the Ecological Evolution of Cultural Creativity’, L’esprit créateur, general eds., Mária Minich Brewer and
    Daniel Brewer,special issue on Literature and Ecology, volume 46 n°2, ed. L. Desblache, Summer, 2006, pp.100-110.
  • ‘The Complexity Revolution’, Soundings, 29: ‘After Identity’, Winter 2004, pp.72-84.
  • ‘A long and Complex Revolution: The Theo-Ontological Expansion of Science’ , New Formations, 50, (Summer, 2003), pp.75-93.
  • Guest Editor and Introduction (with Philip Tew), Special Issue: Complex Figures: Art and Science, New Formations, 49, (Spring, 2003), pp. 7-13.
  • Invited Guest Editor, ‘Introduction’ and ‘The Intelligent Process of Living’, Soundings, 14, (Spring, 2000), pp. 106-110 and 127-140.
  • Guest Editor, incl. Editorial Introduction, ‘Diana and Democracy’, New Formations, 36, (Spring, 1999), Introduction, pp. 5-8.
  • ‘In the Middle of Real Things: Rites, Procedures, and (Last) Orders’, New Formations, 34, (Winter, 1998), pp. 129-151.
  •  ‘Omagh — Where We All Meet’, guest Leader Comment, New Times, no. 151, (September 12 1998).
  • ‘The Uncanny Family’, Soundings, no. 7, (Autumn, 1997), pp. 29-44.
  • ‘Mourning Becomes Us: Mourning Diana, Mourning Ourselves’, New Times, September, 1997.
  • ‘The Enlightenment Effect’, Signs of the Times Discussion Paper, London, SOTT, 1997.
  •  ‘Lacan and Love’, New Times, no. 73, (February, 1995).
  • ‘After Grief? What Kinds of Inhuman Selves?’, New Formations, 25, (Spring, 1995), pp. 77-95.
  • ‘The Uses of Elegy: E.P. Thompson and the Uses of History’, History Workshop Journal, 39, (Spring, 1995), pp. 113-116.
  • ‘Socialism or Melancholy?’, New Times, no. 67, (October, 1994).
  • Article adviser to Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature, ed., M. Wynne-Davies, Bloomsbury, 1989.
  • ‘Filofaxions’, (with Beatrix Campbell), Marxism Today, (December), 1988.
Image of Wendy Wheeler