Courses

This course will explore how 19th century American authors registered the transformation of natural history into the sciences of life. During that period, the fixed classifications of beings were destabilized by new sciences-- chemistry, biology and pathology--that emphasized process and transformation, and traditional, herbal methods of healing, predicated on studies of anatomy, were replaced by the clinic. With the emergence of experimental medicine, discourses of life and personhood changed, profoundly affecting law, theology, philosophy and literature. At the same time, as scientific discourses concerning the vital were being transformed, the American authors we will read were changing their understanding of what the natural is, and proposing a series of cosmological, poetic and ethical responses to the idea that life is common not only to all creatures but in fact to all phenomena. Most of our authors adopted a vitalist and materialist understanding of life, which led them to understand the boundaries of individual phenomena as porous and environmental. Such vitalist accounts of the world explored matter as indistinguishable from life, interpreting it as both germinal and formative: beings emerge out of an ocean of agitated matter that gives them form and to which they return, as if reimmersing themselves in unmodified, impersonal, and infinite life. However, although the authors we will be interested in share some version of the major faith that matter is inherently dynamic and vitalized, their accounts of just what that means differ considerably. They sometimes take the form of cosmologies that understand the earth as sensuous, and even, in the case of Poe and Melville, composed of little brains; at other times they render vegetal life capable of perception and inherently sensuous, and end up discussing modalities of vegetal happiness (as is the case with Thoreau, Whitman), or consider the organic and inorganic to be composed of the continuous flow of qualia. The course will explore a variety of theories that propose life as material but our interest will be less in cosmological than ethical and ecological questions. We will want to know the consequences of such accounts of matter for our understanding of the human; we will inquire into what counts as personhood for those authors, as well as what kind of ethics and politics they formulate on the basis of their materialist ontologies.