Pieter Vermeulen

Regulable vascular endothelial growth factor165 overexpression by ex vivo expanded keratinocyte cultures promotes matrix formation, angiogenesis, and healing in porcine full-thickness wounds.

The intricate wound repair process involves the interplay of numerous cells and proteins. Using a porcine full-thickness wound (FTW) healing model, we hypothesized that the ex vivo gene transfer of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF)-transfected basal keratinocyte (KC) cell suspensions may generate cross-talk and induce matrix formation, angiogenesis, and accelerated healing. Moreover, to regulate overexpression of isoform 165 of VEGF and its effect on healing, we introduced a tetracycline (TC)-inducible gene switch in the expression plasmid. Autologous basal KCs were cultivated from the porcine donor and transfected using cationic liposomes. A dose-response curve was established to determine optimal activation of the gene switch by TC. In vivo, FTWs were treated with VEGF-transfected KCs and controls. Wound fluids were collected daily and examined using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Biopsies were evaluated using hematoxylin and eosin and immunostaining for fibronectin, CD144, and lectin BS-1. In vitro, highest regulable VEGF165-expression was obtained with 1 microg/mL of TCs. In vivo, after induction of the gene switch by adding 1 microg/mL of TCs to the FTW, we obtained upregulated VEGF165 levels and enhanced fibronectin deposition and found more endothelial cell tubular formations and higher rates of reepithelialization than in controls. This ex vivo gene transfer model may serve as a platform for vascular induction in full-thickness tissue repair.

A Plasma-Based Biomatrix Mixed with Endothelial Progenitor Cells and Keratinocytes Promotes Matrix Formation, Angiogenesis, and Reepithelialization in Full-Thickness Wounds

In search of an autologous vascularized skin substitute, we treated full-thickness wounds (FTWs) with autologous platelet-rich plasma gel (APG) in which we embedded endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) and basal cell keratinocytes (KCs). We cultivated autologous KCs in low-serum conditions and expanded autologous EPCs from venous blood. FTWs (n = 55) were created on the backs of four pigs, covered with wound chambers, and randomly assigned to the following treatments: (1) APG, (2) APG + KCs, (3) APG + EPCs, (4) APG + KCs + EPCs, and (5) saline. All wounds were biopsied to measure neovascularization (lectin Bandeiraea Simplicifolia-1 (BS-1), alpha smooth muscle actin [alphaSMA], and membrane type 1 matrix metalloproteinase (MT1-MMP)), matrix deposition (fibronectin, collagen type I/III, and alphavbeta3), and reepithelialization. Wound fluids were analyzed for protein expression. All APG-treated wounds showed more vascular structures (p < 0.001), and the addition of EPCs further improved neovascularization, as confirmed by higher lectin, alphaSMA, and MT1-MMP. APG groups had higher collagen I/III (p < 0.05), alphavbeta3, and fibronectin content (p < 0.001), and they exhibited higher concentrations of platelet-derived growth factor subunit bb, basic fibroblast growth factor, hepatocyte growth factor, insulin growth factor-1, transforming growth factor-beta1 and -beta3, matrix metalloproteinase-1 and -z9, and tissue-inhibiting matrix metalloproteinase-1 and -2. Applying APG + KCs resulted in the highest reepithelialization rates (p < 0.001). No differences were found for wound contraction by planimetry. In this porcine FTW model, APG acts as a supportive biomatrix that, along with the embedded cells, improves extracellular matrix organization, promotes angiogenesis, and accelerates reepithelialization.

Reading alongside the market: affect and mobility in contemporary American migrant fiction

How can we read contemporary fiction in the age of its real subsumption under capital? How can we avoid explaining it as just one more commodity? This presentation explores these questions by returning to the proximity between neoliberalism and biopolitics in Foucault’s 1978–1979 lectures, and by describing the tension between contemporary literature and neoliberal biopolitics as a relation of reciprocal saturation: while the market has colonised all but the most marginal fields of culture, the market has in its turn adopted markedly literary strategies, of which the mobilisation of affect and the manipulation of potentiality are the two most important. Neither a form of surface reading nor of interpretation, the reading alongside the market that I propose reads for contemporary fiction’s engagement with affect and potentiality, in order to trace the minimal difference between its textual performance and its biopolitical solicitation. I illustrate this approach through a brief reading of Teju Cole’s Open City and a more extensive discussion of Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears.

David Mitchell's Ghostwritten and the “Novel of Globalization”: Biopower and the Secret History of the Novel

David Mitchells debut novel Ghostwritten (1999) not only depicts a globalized world; its peculiar formal organization also embodies the mode of relatedness that characterizes globalization. This article shows that the invisible, decentralized power that defines globalization can be understood as what Michel Foucault called biopower. As a “novel of globalization,” Mitchells novel lays bare the hidden historical and theoretical affinities between the novel genre on the one hand and biopower on the other.

Future readers: narrating the human in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT This essay argues that the growing awareness of anthropogenic climate change and of the possibility of human extinction has begun to alter the very function of narrative; understood as a mode of knowledge, and as a technology through which cultural knowledge is archived in the present, narrative no longer only serves as a way of (cognitively) organising and emplotting human experience, but also as a way of (affectively) apprehending the end of possible human life. The essay develops this argument through a discussion of one of the most popular tropes in the Anthropocene imagination: that of a future reader who, in an imagined future, reads the remains of contemporary existence. Drawing on an archive of contemporary and of popular science writing, the essay argues that this future reader takes two different disciplinary forms: as a historian who chronicles historical errors that she, unlike us, is able to appreciate, or as an archaeologist who will be left to read mankind’s geological footprint after its extinction. While the former, historical mode conforms to a traditional use of narrative, the second, geological one points up the anxieties, desires, and uncertainties besetting the anticipation of human extinction - here routed through the imagining of a radically nonhermeneutic and nonhuman form of registration.

Disappearing the Future: Memory Culture and Dystopia in Elliott Hall's The Rapture

In the last few years, the fields of utopian studies and memory studies have independently developed an interest in how a concern with the past can inform the imagining of alternative futures. Both fields have interrogated the present possibility of utopian projects that look beyond the confines of the current socioeconomic order, a possibility that has been under pressure since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s. Elliott Hall’s dystopian noir thriller The Rapture (2010), which is part of his Strange trilogy, offers an acute diagnosis of the difficulties besetting themobilization ofmemory for a utopian future. At the same time, the novel shows that one particular element in the discourse of memory studies, the notion of “trauma,” can play a vital role in restoring the conditions under which the utopian imagination can flourish again.

How Should a Person Be (Transpersonal)? Ben Lerner, Roberto Esposito, and the Biopolitics of the Future

This essay complements Roberto Esposito’s analysis of the political category of the person by outlining the role of literature, and especially the genre of the novel, in consolidating this category and allowing it to do its political and affective work. The essay shows how Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04 dismantles three central features of the traditional novel’s poetics of the person: its investment in the notion of literary character, its use of fictionality, and its structural reliance on the narrative future. Lerner’s novel, like Esposito’s biopolitical work, aims to overcome the hierarchical divisions within human life that are endemic to the category of the person and that have historically fostered biopolitical violence. Both projects intimate a less destructive politics—what Lerner calls “the transpersonal” and Esposito “the impersonal.”

Bildung and the State in the Long Nineteenth Century

The relations between literature and the political community have figured prominently on the research agenda in the humanities in the last few decades. The tension between political power and its different rhetorical and literary figurations can be productively explored by focusing on the juncture of two prominent nineteenth-century discourses: those relying on notions of Bildung (a term capturing processes of self-development and organic growth) and the state (which often denotes those aspects of power that cannot be couched in a naturalizing rhetoric of the nation or, indeed, Bildung). This forum traces the mobilization of figures of Bildung for the legitimation of political power in the paradigmatic genre of the Bildungsroman as well as in novelistic, biological, utopian, architectural, educational, and journalistic discourses.

“Remember, or now know”: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and the Politics of Melancholia

Abstract While the extensive criticism on Chang-rae Lee’s 1995 novel Native Speaker (which upon its publication immediately became the most successful Korean American novel of all time) has not failed to assess the novel’s negotiation of issues of ethnicity and identity, as well as of the possibilities and pitfalls of political enfranchisement, it has generally concluded that in the last analysis, Native Speaker despairs of the possibility of political change. By paying attention to the (ostensibly apolitical) question of how the novel deals with strategies for coping with personal loss, with histories of dispossession, and with social injuries, this essay argues that the political significance of the novel lies in its dismissal of a melancholic conception of political agency and its concomitant recognition of the need to develop adequately explanatory social narratives for coming to terms with experiences of loss (a process that is related to Freud’s notion of mourning). As such, the novel undertakes a wide-ranging critique of the recuperation of melancholia as an adequate ethico-political posture in critical theory in the last quarter century