Word: holub
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Holub's short essays in Shedding Life buck conventional genres: they're neither cultural studies nor conventional science writing in the Stephen J. Gould mold. Shedding Life could be best described as literary essays in a scientific mode--science, biology in particular, becomes a mirror in which to view society, politics and philosophy...
Although the first section of the book, "Angels of Disease," focuses primarily on events and personalities in the history of medicine, Holub's real interest is in the development of the social organism. Holub uses immunology, the study of what the body recognizes as "self" and "other," as model for studying the political problems of insiders and outsiders. His best essays in Shedding Life carefully tread this line between scientific fact and political metaphor...
...This Long Disease," Holub calls our attention to the "importance" of retroviruses, which integrate their genetic code into the chromosomes of the hosts they invade. Scientists believe that a large portion of our chromosomes is composed of such retrovirus DNA--what the body recognizes as "other" has, through evolution, been incorporated into who we are. When we place this fact in the context of Holub's other essays, many of which deal with the injustice of social exclusion and persecution, it acquires a powerfully political resonance. While hardly an apologist for disease, Holub uses the analogy to suggest that...
...polemics in Shedding Life, most surprising is Holub's harsh criticism of contemporary humanities. One might find it odd that Holub, an established literary figure, prefaces his book with a George Steiner quotation that laments "the pretentious triviality which now dominate so much of literary theory and humanistic studies." If voiced by an American, Holub's barb might be interpreted as another sortie in the war between C.P. Snow's "the two cultures"--the hard sciences sniping from one side of the trenches, the humanities and social sciences from the other. In reality, however, Holub has no desire to accuse...
...writer whose work was banned for twelve years by the Russians, Holub has a vested interest in combating ideology wherever he finds it. His wariness of contemporary humanistic academia is more understandable in this context. Under the Communists, the aesthetics of "socialist realism" forced history, literature and art into the service of Marxist ideology. For Holub, scientific research provided the only hope of objectivity in a world of Communist lies, fabrications and distortions...