Browsing by Author "Mitchell, Robert"

This dissertation is concerned with the relationships between experiments in literature, science, and politics in twentieth-century United States culture. I argue that the three can be considered together by understanding "experimentation" as a set of processes rather than a method, and highlighting the centrality of writing and reading to experiments in all three arenas. Drawing on scientist Ludwik Fleck's concept of "valuable experiments," I read specific experiments in each field in conversation with the others, highlighting the ways in which science and politics require aesthetic structures, the ways in which science and literature reconfigure politics, and the ways in which politics and literature can intervene in and reconfigure scientific practices. Ultimately, I try to develop a reading practice that can make visible the shared transformative capacities of science, literature, and radical politics.

In the course of three chapters, I analyze the formal and conceptual innovations of writers such as William Burroughs, Ralph Ellison, and Carson McCullers, who were intimately affected by the uses of experimental science in corrective institutional practice. In doing so, I develop a concept of "experimental literature" that is distinct from avant-garde literature and can account for the investments that these writers share with scientists such as Albert Hofmann, Albert Einstein, and Margaret Mead. I argue that experimental writers denature literary genres that depend on coherent subjects, transparent reality, and developmental progress in order to disrupt similar assumptions that underpin positivist science. By understanding valuable experimental science and writing as continuous challenges to standardized scientific knowledge, I show how these writers contribute to ongoing radical social projects of queer and black radical traditions--such as those of George Jackson and the Combahee River Collective--which are grounded in knowledge as an aesthetic and political practice.

What we now call “liberal individualism”—that is, the belief in the inalienable rights and freedom of the individual—first emerged in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods in Europe, and continues to be a defining feature of Western democracies. The liberal valorization of freedom as the sovereign moral concept was a consequence of Enlightenment philosophy, scientific progress, and secularization, which led to the view that human life is self-contained and without an externally defined purpose, and that human relations can be understood by considering society simply as an aggregate of individuals who are each driven by desire and self-interest. Values previously safeguarded by divine authority devolved into matters of choice by the individual will, and many observers have suggested that this change resulted in a moral lassitude that, paradoxically, made it more difficult to realize the Enlightenment ideals of universal liberty, rights, and justice. Arguments grounded in premises of natural freedom and rights often end up rationalizing absolute authoritarian power, as we see, for example, in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.

This dissertation examines how British writers of the Romantic period such as Olaudah Equiano, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley responded to this moral dilemma of liberal individualism by developing a new understanding of humility in their works. The meaning of humility in the West has been fundamentally shaped by the Jewish and Christian traditions that view humility as a spiritual quality that disposes an individual toward reverence for and submission to God. As a quality that goes against the Enlightenment emphasis on human reason and agency, humility underwent a steady devaluation in the eighteenth century and onward, perceived, for example, as a “monkish kind of virtue” by David Hume and a “slave morality” by Friedrich Nietzsche. This study argues that instead of returning to the religiously infused concept of humility, British Romantic authors developed a new form of humility for the secular age, one that not only preserves human agency but also emphasizes the need for human action for collective good. This humility does not focus on self-abasement but on a selfless mood, predicated on an immanent framework derived from Stoicism and the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, which were influential in the eighteenth century. In three chapters, this study shows how Equiano, Godwin, and Shelley’s instantiations of Romantic humility respectively illuminate Romantic humility as it informs human relations, historical progress, and human-nonhuman relations. In so doing, this study shows that Romanticism cannot be viewed simply as an extension of Enlightenment individualism but also as an era of collectivist humility.

Moving beyond traditional conceptions of suicide in Romantic literature as indices of Romanticism's fascination with tragic or mad genius, this dissertation traces how Romantic-era writers also employed the trope of suicide as a political tool to argue for the rationality of individuals without rights, or with limited rights, such as slaves, women, and the poor. In both scholarly and post-Romantic artistic engagements with so-called Romantic suicide, suicide is typically interpreted as neither a critique of an unlivable society, nor even a mark of mental illness, but instead operates as a meta-critique of art itself, suggesting that the artist, by virtue of his creativity, is somehow beyond this world. But by showing how suicide also emerged, in the Romantic period, as a metaphor for challenging social structures associated with liberal individualism, Suicidal Romanticism posits that the emphasis on the link between creative and suicidal proclivities associated with Romanticism, which persists even in our contemporary imagination in spite of social scientific arguments to the contrary, troubles our capacity to talk either about the problem of mental illness or about the social injustices that would drive somebody to want not to live. The Romantic writers examined here--including Thomas Day and John Bicknell, Mary and Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth--proposed an alternative conception of suicide, positing the need to open the social field to recognize all those who are considered "non-subjects." By using suicide as a metaphor to interrogate the roots of inequality within a social structure based on exclusive individualism, these writers suggest that acts of suicide represent responses not only to private phenomena, but also to social conditions, and that the two are not mutually exclusive. By thus reading Romantic-era discourses of suicide as radical interrogations of liberalism, Suicidal Romanticism also positions Romanticism itself as a response to political questions that first emerged in abolitionist and women's rights discourses of the long eighteenth century.