Text

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.2/rucore10001600001.ETD.17457

ETD_1250

theses

In 1818, Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein causes science and literature--two different discourses, two different signifying systems, two different realities--to collide. As it addresses the givenness, or "naturalness," of "the human," Frankenstein reimagines the putative boundary between the human and the nonhuman, a fictive border made perceptible by contemporary scientific investigation. Catalyzing a new genre, science fiction, Shelley estranges the enlightenment discourse of "reason," revealing it as a highly regulative structure through which societies are forged and bodies governed. "Estranging Science, Fictionalizing Bodies: Viral Invasion, Infectious Fictions, and the Biological Discourses of 'the Human,' 1818-2005," posits a mutually infective relationship between science and literature. It both exposes the logic of purification that delimits "modern" forms of knowledge as discursively distinct (science v. literature) and considers how this distinction informs the evolutionary/philosophical shifts in how we think about the possible, the human, and the novel. Since literature plays a significant role in the history of science and science a significant role in the history of literature, the dissertation uses each imaginary technology to interpret the other. In so doing, it defamiliarizes and recontextualizes not only individual texts, but entire literary histories and scientific discourses that are rarely thought of as science fiction. Finally, the dissertation argues that the question of "the human," of what we invoke when we invoke "the human," emerges most powerfully through an interpretive matrix of science and literature, genre and the novel. Though radically different methods of shaping those narratives that concern us all, science and literature both employ the process by which novelty enters the world and affects our experience of the self and the relatedness of bodies. The epistemological--and epidemiological--encounters the dissertation explores make possible a whole range of new entities, properties, and kinships that connect through unfamiliar evolutionary and intellectual bonds. "Human nature" emerges as neither essential nor unchanging, random nor inevitable.

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 288-304).

doi:10.7282/T3NG4QX4

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.

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