Evolutionary landscapes: adaptation, selection, and mutation in 19th century literary ecologies 【翻译】

adaptation, selection, and mutation in 19th century literary ecologies 【翻译】"/>

Evolutionary landscapes: adaptation, selection, and mutation in 19th century literary ecologies 【翻译】

ABSTRACT
How can a literary theorist account for unselected texts and narratives, and
measure the importance of voices no longer audible to readers today? The following
dissertation uses 19th
Bridging literary theory and Darwinian science, “Evolutionary Landscapes”
argues that concepts of mutation, replication and selection can provide a framework for
thinking about emerging narratives and literary genres in the 19
century literary texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Edward
Bellamy, W. D. Howells, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and others as points of departure for
considering the complex forces affecting the selection and replication of literature over
time within a wider field of anonymous and unwritten narratives.
th
The relationships between texts and ecologies fore-grounded in the following
chapters necessitate reading literature from the point of view of the random mutation and
subsequent selection of texts in the face of a collectively determined ecology of formal
expectations. My approach to the evolution of literature builds on the work of the literary
critic Franco Moretti and the philosopher Daniel Dennett; as a study of U.S. rather than
British fiction, however, it casts a different light on literary evolution than that described
yet by Moretti, and deals more specifically with questions of literary and cultural history
century United States.
Current attempts to bring biological insights directly into literary study through
evolutionary psychology or cognitive Darwinism ignore the complex systems, including
cultural and market forces, affecting a given text’s chances for longer-term survival. The
figure I choose to represent these economic, unwritten, and cultural influences on literary
texts is the “adaptive landscape” developed by the geneticist Sewall Wright, and recently
expanded upon by the evolutionary theorist Michael Ruse.
2
than either Dennett’s philosophy of memetics or Carroll’s socio-biologically inflected
Literary Darwinism alone would allow.
The 19th
Abstract Approved: ____________________________________
Thesis Supervisor
century literary ecology to which the fictions of Poe, Melville, Bellamy
and Freeman were well or poorly adapted can be imagined as a kind of fitness landscape
where literary publications are drawn towards the metaphoric “peaks” established by
successful precedents and formulae in the past. A gradualist focus on textual silence and
extinction within literary history, through the lens of evolutionary and ecological theory,
can, I argue, reveal the complex ecology of oral, cultural, written, printed and reprinted
information that constitutes the “soft tissues” always missing from the archival past.
____________________________________
Title and Department
____________________________________
Date
EVOLUTIONARY LANDSCAPES: ADAPTATION, SELECTION, AND MUTATION
IN 19TH CENTURY LITERARY ECOLOGIES
by
Chad Allen Hines
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in English
in the Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
May 2010
Thesis Supervisor: Associate Professor Laura Rigal
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
_______________________
PH.D. THESIS
_______________
This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of
Chad Allen Hines
has been approved by the Examining Committee
for the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in English at the May 2010 graduation.
Thesis Committee: ___________________________________
Laura Rigal, Thesis Supervisor
___________________________________
Loren Glass
___________________________________
Garrett Stewart
___________________________________
David Wittenberg
___________________________________
Russell Valentino
ii
To the whole family.
iii
“Very little literature strays far from science, and much brings us back to science. Very
little science strays far from literature, and much brings us back to literature.”
Michel Serres
The Parasite
iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My sincere thanks to Laura Rigal, Loren Glass, Garrett Stewart, David
Wittenberg, Russell Valentino, Scott Robinson, Thomas Casavant, Matthew Brown,
Bluford Adams, Doris Witt, Philip Round, Ralph Hall, Patrick Dolan, Rengin Firat, Dan
Berkowitz, Cherie Riesenkamp, and the University of Iowa. The evolution of this project
is indebted to the friends, family, and colleagues who provided an extensive ecology of
advice and encouragement.
v
ABSTRACT
How can a literary theorist account for unselected texts and narratives, and
measure the importance of voices no longer audible to readers today? The following
dissertation uses various, and variously successful 19th
Bridging literary theory and Darwinian science, “Evolutionary Landscapes”
argues that concepts of mutation, replication and selection can provide a framework for
thinking about how narratives and popular genres developed in the 19
century literary texts as a point of
departure for considering the complex forces affecting the fragment of texts selected over
time from within a wider field of anonymous and unwritten narratives.
th
The following chapters, even when dealing with individual authors, foreground
the complex relationships between texts and their surrounding ecologies, looking at
literature from the point of view of the random mutation and subsequent selection of texts
in the face of a collectively determined ecology of formal expectations. My approach to
the evolution of literature builds on the work of the literary critic Franco Moretti and the
philosopher Daniel Dennett, although a turn to U.S. rather than British fiction, casts a
different light on literary evolution than that described yet by Moretti, and deals more
century U.S.
Current attempts to bring biological insights directly into literary study through
evolutionary psychology or cognitive Darwinism ignore the complex systems, including
cultural and market forces, that might have been used to predict a given text’s chances for
longer-term survival. The figure I choose to represent these economic, unwritten, and
cultural influences on literary texts is the “adaptive landscape” developed by the
geneticist Sewall Wright, and recently adapted by the evolutionary theorist Michael Ruse.
vi
specifically with questions of literary and cultural history than either Dennet’s philosophy
of memetics or Carroll’s sociobiological Literary Darwinism alone would allow.
The 19th century literary ecology to which the fictions of Edgar Allan Poe,
Herman Melville, Edward Bellamy and Mary Wilkins Freeman were well or poorly
adapted can be imagined as a kind of “adaptive landscape” where literary publications are
drawn towards the peaks climbed by previous writers, representing conventions or
formula that proved to be successful in the past. A gradualist focus on textual silence and
extinction within literary evolution, along with evolutionary and ecological theory, can
provide abstract models for the complex ecology of oral, cultural, written, printed and
reprinted information that constitutes the “soft tissues” always missing from the archival
past.
vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................... viii
INTRODUCTION: EVOLUTION, CRITICAL ECOLOGIES AND LITERARY
SURVIVAL......................................................................................................2
Drift: Mutation and Continuity.......................................................................10
Adaptive Landscapes: Pragmatic Pluralism ...................................................18
CHAPTER
I. REPLICATION GAMES: APING DETECTIVES AND GOTHIC
DISEASES......................................................................................................23
Generic Maelstroms: Bottled Ambiguity (1832-1835)...................................38
Comic Mystification: How to Lose at Literary Replication (1837-1838) ......47
Mad Descent: Decaptitation of Reason (1839-1841) .....................................55
Rational Forgeries: Chain Letters (1843-1845)..............................................63
II. MELVILLE’S ANONYMOUS SAVAGERY...............................................89
Incoherent Structure: Songs and Stories.........................................................96
Unreadable Allegory: Professionalism to a Point.........................................104
Adaptive Anonymity: Literary Possessions..................................................114
III. UTOPIAN LANDSCAPES: LOOKING BEYOND LOOKING
BACKWARD...............................................................................................121
Looking Backward: Dynamic Memory........................................................133
Looking Forward: “More Witnesses than One” ...........................................142
Looking Beyond: Evolution of the Future....................................................149
IV. COLLABORATIVE ECOLOGIES: GREEN HOUSES AND FAMILY
TREES..........................................................................................................156
Six Trees: Extensive Reference ....................................................................164
Unruly Ecology: Symmetry and Growth......................................................170
The Whole Family: Symbiosis in New England Publishing ........................180
CONCLUSION: SOFT TISSUES, AMBIGUOUS PROGRESS....................................191
Prehistoric Fictions: Evolution and American Literature.............................195
Life: Scale and Selection ..............................................................................203
BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................214
viii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure
1. Sewall Wright’s Adaptive Landscape, from “The Roles of Mutation,
Inbreeding, Crossbreeding, and Selection in Evolution” (1932) ..............................19
2. “The Gold Bug”, the Dollar Newspaper, Baltimore (1843) .....................................68
3. The Round Robin, from Omoo (1847)....................................................................115
4. Monopolizing Light and Rain on Mars, W. S. Harris’ Life in a Thousand
Worlds (1905). ........................................................................................................137
5. Arthur Bird’s Vision of the Future, Looking Forward (1889). ..............................144
6. Ferdinand de Saussure’s Linguistic Sign, Course in General Linguistics,
(1916)......................................................................................................................156
7. Darwin’s Morphological Tree, On the Origin of Species (1859) ...........................157
8. The Elm Tree, Six Trees (1903)..............................................................................174
9. Cover of The Whole Family (1908) ........................................................................180
10. Life Configuration, Garden of Eden 5, found by Nikolay Beluchenko (2009)......209

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