Appendix

Air Bubbles

Suggested Reading

The work of German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk looms large over this subject. The first volume of his Spheres trilogy, Bubbles (2011), rigorously theorized the globular form to consider the spatial dimensions of western thought, while Foams (2016), the third volume, extended this into a poetics of plurality. Any philosophical investigation into bubbles today inevitably brushes up against this work, although it is still not the only way to think of the bubble. As a result, this bibliography is broken up into sections to give respect to the importance of Sloterdijk’s work, alongside other approaches that can be taken and scientific texts that may prove useful. 

The Sloterdijk Effect

Bergthaller, Hannes. “Living in Bubbles: Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherology and the Environmental Humanities.” In Spaces In-Between. Edited by Mark Luccarelli and Sigurd Bergmann, 163–75. Leiden and Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Brill Rodopi, 2015.

Couture, Jean-Pierre. Sloterdijk: Key Contemporary Thinkers. Key Contemporary Thinkers. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity, 2016.

Ernste, Huib. “The Geography of Spheres: An Introduction and Critical Assessment of Peter Sloterdijk’s Concept of Spheres.” Geographica Helvetica 73, no. 4 (October 18, 2018): 273–84. 

Kaji-O’Grady, Sandra. “Privatized Atmospheres, Personal Bubbles.” Architecture and Culture 3, no. 2 (May 4, 2015): 175–95. 

Kirksey, Eben. “Bubbles.” In Emergent Ecologies, 72–85. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

Nogueira, Luis Castro. “Bubbles, Globes, Wrappings, and Plektopoi : Minimal Notes to Rethink Metaphysics from the Standpoint of the Social Sciences.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, no. 1 (February 2009): 87–104.

Rashof, Sascha. “Spheres: Towards a Techno-Social Ontology of Place/s.” Theory, Culture & Society 35, no. 6 (November 2018): 131–52.

Sloterdijk, Peter. Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011.

———. Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2016.

———. Globes: Spheres Volume II: Macrospherology. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014.

A Century of Popular Science 

Barber, Jacqueline. Bubble-Ology. Great Explorations in Math and Science. Berkeley, CA: Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, 1992.

Boys, Charles Vernon. Soap Bubbles: Their Colours and the Forces Which Mould Them. Being the Substance of Many Lectures Delivered to Juvenile and Popular Audiences, with the Addition of Several New and Original Sections. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1890.

“Bubbles: A Fascinating Little Experiment Reveals a Surprise and Later May Lead to Some Utilitarian Purpose.” Scientific American 160, no. 2 (1939): 75–75.

Clift, Roland, John R. Grace, and Martin E. Weber. Bubbles, Drops, and Particles. New York, NY Acad. Press, 1978.

Epstein, Irving R. “Can Droplets and Bubbles Think?” Science 315, no. 5813 (2007): 775–76.

Finkbeiner, Douglas, Meng Su, and Dmitry Malyshev. “Giant Bubbles of the Milky Way.” Scientific American 311, no. 1 (2014): 42–47.

Gardner, Robert, and Robert Gardner. Experiments with Bubbles. Getting Started in Science. Springfield, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 1995.

Rosenberg, Benjamin. The Drag and Shape of Air Bubbles Moving in Liquids. David W. Taylor Model Basin. Washington, D.C.: Navy Dept., 1950.

Art/Historical Approaches 

Baudot, Laura. “An Air of History: Joseph Wright’s and Robert Boyle’s Air Pump Narratives,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 46, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 1-28.

Conisbee, Philip, and Joseph Fronek. Soap Bubbles by Jean-Siméon Chardin. Masterpiece in Focus. Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1990.

Emmer, Michele. “Soap Bubbles in Art and Science: From the Past to the Future of Math Art.” Leonardo 20, no. 4 (1987): 327–34. https://doi.org/10.2307/1578527.

Hovig, Kristen A. “The Surreal Science of Soap: Joseph Cornell’s First Soap Bubble Set.” American Art 20,  no. 1 (2006).

Kareem, Sarah Tindal. “Enlightenment Bubbles, Romantic Worlds.” The Eighteenth Century 56, no. 1 (2015): 85–104.

Rousseau, Theodore. “A Boy Blowing Bubbles by Chardin.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 8, no. 8 (1950): 221–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/3257493.

Beyond the Bubble: Culture, Capital, Form, Metaphor

McClanahan, Annie. Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twentieth-Century Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017.

McKeon, Michael. “Mediation as Primal Word: The Arts, the Sciences, and the Origins of the Aesthetic.” In This Is Enlightenment. Edited by Clifford Siskin and William Warner. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 384-412.

Ngai, Sianne. Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgement and Capitalist Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020.

———. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. 

Poovey, Mary. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Pop, Andrei. A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth-Century. New York, NY: Zone Books, 2019. 

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th-Century. New York, NY: NYU Press, 2012.