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SoSe 18: Evolution and Literature

James Dorson

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Darwin’s seminal thesis in On the Origin of Species (1859) that nature is not designed by an original creator but evolves through a gradual process of genetic variation and selection under environmental pressures had revolutionary potential for all branches of knowledge. It also had a profound impact on literature. The late nineteenth- and early twentieth century saw writers struggling to come to terms with the implications of evolutionary theory. The Darwinian emphasis on chance over design and process over creation paved the way for new experiments with literary form. The language of evolution also lent itself to radically different social and political ideologies that transformed the literary imagination—from social conservatism and eugenics to utopian feminism and socialism. This class probes the formal and political implications of evolutionary theory on the early twentieth-century literary imagination in the US. We will read excerpts from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871); we will examine how literary criticism has discussed evolutionary theory by reading excerpts from Gillian Beer’s formative study Darwin’s Plots (1983), as well as texts on the recent emergence of the field of literary Darwinism. The primary texts we will read are Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899), Edith Wharton’s Sanctuary (1903), James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915). We will end the class by considering more recent implications of evolutionary theory by reading Donna Haraway’s feminist “The Cyborg Manifesto” (1984) and Octavia Butler’s science fiction story “Bloodchild” (1995). close