Because mine certainly seems to be of late. From the heights of drafting a publishable paper, to the depths of white supremacy, and now back to the heights, as a paper I proposed has been accepted. The best part? The paper is not about blogging. Someone actually wants to hear me talk about my dissertation. Admittedly, it's from the same recently praised chapter, so there's a chance this is the only decent bit I'll ever write—the highlight of my unspectacular career. So be it. If you find yourself at the American Literature Association's Symposium on Literary Naturalism come October, drop by the panel on Darwinism and Evolution in American Literature, where I'll be saying something about this:
Accelerating Evolution: Social Reform and the Baldwin Effect in Jack London’s The Iron Heel and Before Adam
Jack London was branded by association the moment Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought hit the shelves. One of the earliest reviews recounted a session of the American Sociological Society devoted to Social Darwinism. The reviewer notes that “none of [the participants] went in for any such vociferous and belligerent discipleship as did Jack London.” Readers of London’s youthful exchanges with his friend Cloudesley Johns would consider this association appropriate: a twenty-four year-old London declared himself “An Evolutionist, believing in Natural Selection, half believing Mathus’ ‘Law of Population,’ and a myriad of other factors thrown in, [who] cannot but hail as unavoidable, the Black and the Brown going down before the White.” According to William E. Cain, this sentence—first published Joan London’s Jack London and His Times (1939) and a longtime staple of the London industry—is evidence that “London is quick to express his social Darwinism.” Such assessments overestimate the coherence of evolutionary theory during what Stephen Jay Gould has called the “decade of maximal agnosticism and diversity in evolutionary theories.” Strictly speaking, social Darwinism did not exist. The evolutionary zeitgeist is more accurately called “social Spencerianism,” for it is the teleological thought of Herbert Spencer, not the radical randomness of Darwinian natural selection, which informs the politics and literature of the period. Absent from most accounts is the teleology inherent in Spencer’s dictum that development marches from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.
In “Telic Action and Collective Stupidity” (1902), London describes how “the individual is capable of, and does perform, telic actions—that is, adjusts his acts to remote ends; a thing which society never does.” He laments the stupidity of the crowd, here functioning metonymically for society at large, which despite being composed of individuals capable of telic action, en masse behave as if such feats of foresight are impossible. Although he posits no solution to this problem, he strikes one optimistic note: it is possible for “two or three individuals, or a score, [to] organize a company or corporation and collectively perform telic actions.” Telic actions cannot be performed by acephalous organizations; democracy is hamstrung by “by the arrant idiocy of political organization.” Such actions can only be undertaken by undemocratic organizations whose leaders are chosen not because they represent society at large, but because they do not. They are superior, and will influence society by means of what is called “the Baldwin Effect,” according to which Lamarckian inheritance works alongside natural selection in the human population. Great leaders accelerate the teleological process London believed was already at work: namely, that “from the facts of [human] history…the trend of [social] development is toward greater and greater collective wisdom.” For him, the amelioration of suffering via socialism could not happen soon enough. During this talk, I will demonstrate how London’s impatience with the pace of evolution compels him to advocate Baldwinian logic in the two novels he wrote during 1906, The Iron Heel and Before Adam.
Congratulations.
I was told that it's not customary to give a paper when it has been accepted for publication -- that doesn't apply here (yet), but subsequent experience has taught me that when a paper is accepted, there is really absolutely no danger of it appearing within a year.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Friday, 15 June 2007 at 12:59 PM
Congrats, Scott. About time you received some happy news, eh?
Posted by: Mike S | Friday, 15 June 2007 at 01:10 PM
Thanks, Mike. Things are looking up ... for now.
Adam, I've never heard that. I have heard a number of people remark off-hand that this is from their forthcoming book or article. Stupid academic niceties ... fortunately, I'm only in the sending-it-out stage, so even if it gets accepted, it'll be a good long while before it'll appear in a journal only libraries can afford to buy.
Posted by: SEK | Friday, 15 June 2007 at 01:20 PM
My recently-published article came out three full years after submission.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Friday, 15 June 2007 at 01:50 PM
Congrats! Where is said symposium?
And wasn't an old curse to tell someone "May your life be interesting?" You're certainly making my boring existence look more comfortable. ...If you'd like to get in on some comforting boringness, I have a _huge_ stack of finals you can help with... :)
Posted by: Sisyphus | Friday, 15 June 2007 at 01:58 PM
Adam, so long as I can put "forthcoming" on my CV, I don't care if it takes ten. (Besides, I have more readers than the average academic journal. I slap it up here, Google'll notice. If only I could get it on a hiring committee.)
Sisyphus, the conference is in Long Beach, which is tremendously convenient, being all of twenty minutes away. All the perks of a big conference and my very own bed. Can't beat that.
Posted by: SEK | Friday, 15 June 2007 at 02:50 PM
(Also, no thanks. Much as I miss teaching, the grading, not so much.)
Posted by: SEK | Friday, 15 June 2007 at 02:51 PM
Congrats, Scott!
Posted by: Stephen | Friday, 15 June 2007 at 03:12 PM
Congratulations!
You really have to complain to someone about the odd auto-linking that you mentioned earlier, though. I'm used to clicking on links because the author has placed them there to say something about the text, not because they link to vaguely related books on Amazon.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Friday, 15 June 2007 at 03:20 PM
Rich, I'll make the complaint. In the meantime, I've disabled the Amazon widget. Stupid technology, it's supposed to make my life easier.
Posted by: SEK | Friday, 15 June 2007 at 03:29 PM
I've seen CV's that list papers that are under review, which I find tacky as a regular practice (there may be specific reasons for it in some cases). The worst by far was someone who listed the seminar papers he'd written during coursework, with no indication that he was even attempting to publish them. Soon someone will list cool ideas he had for a paper once.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Friday, 15 June 2007 at 07:23 PM
Actually, I've heard that's a good thing. It shows a commitment to publication. Say a department thinks your work is really smart. If you show that you're actively trying to place it somewhere, they'll trust their own evaluation. They'll pin the reason it hasn't been accepted on the vagaries of the process. After all, they would like to see works published in [insert prestigious journal]. That's value to putting "out for consideration" on a CV ... or so I've been told.
Posted by: SEK | Friday, 15 June 2007 at 09:10 PM
1) It's fine to give a paper that's out for publication, or even accepted but not published, but it's bad form to give one that's been published. Not horribly bad form, but not recommended, especially if the scenario is one that matters in some way. (Giving a paper you've published, say, at a minor grad conference isn't really a big deal. At MLA, maybe it would be... A job talk should always be work that is currently underway and not published.)
2) Sometimes people say they don't like the "under review" category. Personally, I do put "under review" papers on my CV. If you haven't been accepted for publication anywhere when you go out for your first job, I definitely think it would be best to list a few papers "under review."
One thing not to do, probably, is to have a CV category called "Published Papers" that contains only papers that are under review. Call it something else (just "Papers" perhaps...) It does point out the fact that you are currently trying to publish, and gives a sense of what you've been working on... Don't list the journal where it's under review though. If it gets gonged, you don't want to answer the question of the status of your paper at Journal X. (That is, if it gets gonged, a manila envelope and postage will make it under review again instantly...)
Posted by: CR | Sunday, 17 June 2007 at 11:33 PM
As I understand it the Baldwin effect is not Lamarckian in practice, though it looks a lot like Lamarckism. It still works by natural selection, but selection is operating not on the trait in question but the plasticity that allows that trait to emerge.
Posted by: Ginger Yellow | Monday, 18 June 2007 at 07:30 AM
Congrats.
You leave the racial comment just lying there. Was this a theory of racial absorbtion as Skidmore describes for Brazil (with some interesting U.S. connections), or simply of racial supremacy in evolutionary garb? I trust that in the larger paper you address somehow how London's racial thought fit into the larger crazy quilt of his evolutionary thinking. (So, society is stupid, but humanity has ever greater collective wisdom? Huh?)
Posted by: JPool | Tuesday, 19 June 2007 at 07:37 PM
Actually, I only touch on London's racism in the final draft of the chapter. It had been front and center -- my dissertation started as an examination of race and liberalism in the '30s, and only gradually drifted back to the '00s -- but London's theories on race are unexamined, dull commonplaces. There's nothing unique about them. Not that they don't evolve as he matures -- in The Iron Heel, written six years after that letter to Johns, he expresses his belief that each of the races will ascend, through socialism, such that they are on equitable terms, evolutionarily and revolutionarily speaking -- but that he doesn't examine them in any great detail until the South Pacific books, which were written much later (and are outside the scope of my project, which focuses on evolutionary thought before the ascent of the eugenics).
Posted by: SEK | Tuesday, 19 June 2007 at 08:13 PM
OK, I know that this is/was a paper proposal, and I've certainly included elements in some of mine that I knew I wouldn't be able to follow up on, but the "the Black and the Brown going down before the White” line practically jumps off the page/screen and begs for somekind of follow up. You obviously don't want to do that kind of following up right now (leave the chapter the hell alone, he writes, trying to follow such advice himself), but it does seem potentially worthwhile later on, just because, in the pre-eugenics period, racial thought is considerably more diverse and cross pollinating with a variety of scientific and biblical debates. If you haven't read it already, I would recommend adding Thomas Skidmore's classic _Black into White_ to your eventual reading pile. Skidmore doesn't have Theodore Roosevelt reporting on Brazilian theories of whitening to a U.S. public until 1914, but I would suspect that there is a more difuse spread of ideas on evolutionary solutions to the race problem in the decades before that.
Posted by: JPool | Wednesday, 20 June 2007 at 10:21 AM