In this concluding chapter, I draw conclusions about several important aspects of nature of science by drawing on the topics discussed in the various chapters of the book. Such conclusions include: that individual brilliance and creativity can make a difference; the historical milieu of the individual is equally crucial; that scientists are humans with weaknesses and concerns like all of us; and that gender may influence one’s opportunities to contribute to science.

This chapter explores images of plant life in philosophy and literature with particular focus on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. It pursues the question of what we can learn about the nature of the human being and its place in the world from plants and the way they are rooted in earth. Over the past half-century, many voices identify our disconnection from the earth with the centrality of technological progress, capitalist production, industrialization, and globalization that are essential to our modern self-understanding and way of life. What was supposed to be the root of human distinction has ended up uprooting us. Is this because we have a distorted view of what it means to be rooted in the first place, and our dependency on the rootedness of plant life? This chapter interrogates the metaphor of the root in Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous novel Nausea. Whereas Sartre considers the earth as an inert background in relation to human purposes: always there, meaningless, the earth is the static backdrop of our human drama, Nietzsche’s vegetal imaginary puts forward an idea of human life as deeply embedded in both earthly and planetary life.

The modern usage of cool was developed by jazz musicians as part of their in-group slang in post-World War II New York City. This linguistic fact remains unrecognized within scholarship on jazz, etymology, and popular culture. For jazz musicians, cool signified a calm state of mind, a relaxed style of performance, embodied composure, and a melodic low-key musical aesthetic. The roots for these meanings of cool are to be found in West African languages and drumming practices, rather than English language precedent. During the Cold War, European authors embraced jazz as a key element of rebellion against totalitarianism, with the jazz musician elevated as a literary figure of American existentialism. The cool musical aesthetic became a global style through Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and Chet Baker, and then through the bossa nova. Once the term and concept was adapted and appropriated by white writers and jazz fans, “cool” became a generalized emblem and synonym for rebellion.

African writers often bemoan Western readers’ tendency to view their work “anthropologically,” which is to say as a transparent reflection of a culture of origin. This ethnographic approach partly derives from African literary studies’ relationship to African Studies, writ large, with its roots in the social sciences and area expertise. But it is also sustained by the difficulty of placing African writers within Western pedagogical frameworks. This challenge is most apparent when Africans – obviously the majority population on the continent – are minoritized by Western curricular categories. There are also subtler questions at stake. On what scale (regional, national, continental, or global) are contemporary African writers best read as negotiating the relationship of social affiliation to aesthetic representation? How does African literature register in a Western classroom comprising students from disparate and often culturally variegated backgrounds, some of which reflexively minoritize Black and Brown writers, and some of which do not? Finally, what are some interpretive and pedagogical alternatives to seeing literary representation by Africans as necessarily representative of broader African social and cultural dynamics? This chapter draws on my own experience teaching African writing in a US university context to propose a criterion of reading for “the weird” as an alternative to reading for culture. In prioritizing African texts that are boldly unrepresentative of broader literary and cultural trends – as in the chapter’s main example of Ghanaian writer Martin Egblewogbe’s wry and existential short fiction – this approach breaks free from the aesthetic limitations of “minority literature” while introducing truly novel forms and voices to the English literature curriculum. As a result, it urges students toward a sense of curricular decolonization as an essential tool for foregrounding radical aesthetic idiosyncrasy.

By integrating the fragmented research on emergency services, armed forces, and humanitarian organizations, this book identifies the components of a new theory on frontline crisis response. To begin with, the work of responders is characterized by persistent operational dilemmas. Since there are no universal solutions, they need to adapt their approaches and decisions to the situational contingencies of a crisis. These adaptations continue throughout the crisis response process as the situation evolves. Responders usually pragmatically act their way through operational dilemmas in the crisis response process. These experiences nevertheless have an existential effect on their identities and lives. Thus, the new theory comprises operational dilemmas, situational contingencies, response processes, pragmatic principles, and existentialist ideas. This theory offers a basis for crisis response improvements and contributes to the literature on strategic crisis management, frontline work in organizations, reliable organizing in risky contexts, and post-crisis operations. The chapter ends with a research agenda and a call for more academic engagement with frontline crisis response.

On March 21, 1918, the German Army launched “Operation Michael” against British positions around Arras as the first stage of an offensive along the Western Front. Bolstered by reinforcements from the Eastern Front after the October 1917 Revolution and cessation of hostilities with Russia, the Kaiserschlacht, as it was called, represented a final gambit to win the war. A few days after the start of this titanic onslaught, Georg Simmel confided in a letter of March 25 to his friend Hermann Graf von Keyserling: “Now I am in the midst of very difficult ethical and metaphysical investigations […]” (G. Simmel, Briefe 1912–1918. Jugendbriefe. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008). It was not only premature aging that conspired against reaping his philosophical harvest: Simmel had been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. As he writes to his friend, he finds himself in “very bad health” and severely reduced in “intellectual energy.”

Chapter 3 represents a brief foray into the broad topic of nihilism in English Romanticism. It begins with a close reading of Lord Byron’s poem Manfred, which tells the story of a man who is tormented by knowledge and in a sense dies as a result of it. Manfred is a kind of Faustian figure zealous for learning. He pursues his occult studies alone in a tower in the Alps. Over time he attains powers of magic that allow him to evoke supernatural spirits. Manfred is haunted by a memory in the past that leaves him no rest. This is read as an autobiographical reference to Byron’s incestuous relations with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, which resulted in such a scandal that he felt obliged to leave England forever. Manfred seeks in vain for help from the different spirits of nature, who are unable to oblige him in his request to make him forget his past completely. Manfred heroically rejects that even the most powerful spirit can stand in the way of his freedom, and he insists on dying on his own terms. The chapter concludes with a brief analysis of Shelley’s famous poem “Ozymandias,” which is read as a call for self-reflection on the fleetingness of our existence and all human accomplishment.

Chapter 2 gives a reading of the obscure work The Nightwatches by the dramatist August Klingemann. The protagonist Kreuzgang is an odd outsider, highly critical of society around him. He is a night watchman, who goes out each night and observes people in their ordinary lives. Kreuzgang begins with some semblance of normalcy but then becomes increasingly disenchanted with the world until he finally fully embraces nihilism. Klingemann presents a mishmash of carefully framed scenes of horror and despair. It is a gallery of personalities with strange images and stories. People are portrayed as vain, pretentious, cruel, and hypocritical. The work raises the question of whether we, as human beings, are really anything beyond the social masks that we wear. Theater metaphors are often used to emphasize the idea there is nothing substantial in human life, but we are all playing meaningless roles, and then we die. Kreuzgang’s description of his fellow inmates in the insane asylum reveals an inverted world where what is usually accepted as reasonable by mainstream society is in fact irrational, and vice versa. The mad are the sane in an insane world.

The Introduction begins with an attempt to understand the concept of nihilism itself. Six different aspects of the concept are identified and briefly explored. While nihilism is usually associated with twentieth-century schools, it is argued that in fact the true origins of modern nihilism can be found in the rapid development of the sciences in the Enlightenment. The scientific perspective revealed the seemingly insignificant role of humans in the universe and led to a struggle with nihilism, which became an important topic for many thinkers in the nineteenth century. Five theses are outlined: (1) the problem of modern nihilism arose in the wake of the scientific development of the Enlightenment; (2) nihilism was not a local issue confined only to a specific place or country, but instead was something central to the general Zeitgeist of the entire nineteenth century in Europe and the West; (3) nihilism was not a problem confined to philosophy, but it received detailed treatment in works of poetry, drama, and other forms of literature; (4) the problem of nihilism is more widespread than has been acknowledged; and (5) the discussions of nihilism in the nineteenth century anticipate the key topics of the existentialist movement.

With the publication of various translations of French surrealist essays and poems in Japanese avant-garde publications of the 1930s, small groups of writers and individual artists began to make surrealism their own. However, due to the multifarious misunderstandings and often inaccurate adaptations of these texts resulting from their translation into Japanese, the term chō-genjitsushugi (surrealism) expanded to incorporate culturally and regionally specific concerns and concepts. Novelist Kōbō Abe surveyed post-war Japan from a very particular vantage point, having spent years of his life witnessing war and conflict in Manchuria before settling in Tokyo’s metropolis. This chapter examines Abe’s engagement with French surrealism, his frequently black (surrealist) humour, and the quest for the marvellous that manifests across his oeuvre. Writing against the grain of Japanese modernist literary convention, Abe’s surrealism revels in the convulsive beauty of metamorphoses via animal, mineral, and plastic forms. Through the figures of the box, the mask, the dendrocalcalia, or the cocoon of thread, the reader is aligned with narrators who disrupt and critique the order of things, disturbing the surface so as to reveal a sham society that seems hellbent on dehumanizing its citizens.

This chapter examines the history of Black diasporic fiction in the Atlantic world as it informed, and continues to be informed by, the artistic and geopolitical coordinates of the surrealist movement. From the surrealist interest in and appropriation of Blackness in Jazz-age Paris through the post-WWII development of pan-African and Third World movements, the writing and cultural production of African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American intellectuals fuelled the global development of leftist and anti-colonial politics. So too did Black writing and art both inform and, in part, constitute the proliferation of aesthetic radicalism throughout the Atlantic world. This chapter traces the intersecting histories of surrealism, existentialism, and the Black radical tradition through the production of fiction; in doing so it traces the politics of literary activism – as well as the vexed histories of racism, cultural appropriation, exploitation, and erasure – in the work of Black writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It contends not only that surrealism should be understood as a significant coordinate in the Black radical tradition (as e.g. Robin D.G. Kelley has demonstrated), but also that the surrealist movement is inconceivable without an appraisal of its relation to race, diaspora, and the writing and cultural production of Black intellectuals.