For those curious as to what literary historicists do (Anthony) and those convinced I do absolutely nothing at all (Emerson), I present my dissertation abstract.
Behold!
Everything I've slaved over lo these many years, condensed into five paragraphs ... thereby ensuring that what I've written makes absolutely no sense. See, I've been over this thing so many times—made so many piddling changes, emphasizing so many stakes here, dropping so many arguments there—I can no longer read the words before me.
I don't know what they mean. So invested am I in the history of its revisions—the agonizing decision to delete this, the writhing that accompanied the diminishment of that—I'm unable to judge whether it even makes any sense. Are the stakes of my argument apparent? Can you tell how necessary my corrective is to the health of the discipline?
Does it even make any sense?
(Note: The final version of my dissertation contains a chapter on Twain which is, at the present moment, too excreable to include in the abstract. Also, my fifty-five page intellectual history of evolutionary theory at the turn of the last century will likely become my first chapter, thus necessitating the writing of an introduction which resembles my abstract and, you know, talks about literature.)
“Maximal Diversity” examines the influence of applied evolutionary theory on American literary realism and naturalism. Arguing against the tradition of literary critics who, following Richard Hofstadter, consider “social Darwinism” the ascendant evolutionary influence on fin de siècle literary and popular culture, I demonstrate how the continued presence of non-Darwinian evolutionary theories informed popular opinion about evolution and manifests in the works of writers traditionally interpreted in light of Darwinian notions like “survival of the fittest.” Writers like Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Jack London, and Silas Weir Mitchell have long been thought to traffic in the deterministic evolutionism Hofstadter presented in Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944). Intended to justify interventionist New Deal social policy, Hofstadter’s account of the influence of applied Darwinism ignores what Stephen Jay Gould calls the period’s “maximal agnosticism and diversity in evolutionary theories”: Edward Drinker Cope’s kinetogenesis, Theodor Eimer’s orthogenesis, and James Mark Baldwin’s organic selection may be forgotten today, but as the twentieth century began, their Lamarckian accounts of development were as, if not more, reputable than their Darwinian counterparts. Whig historians of the Darwinian Revolution, publishing after the establishment of the Modern Synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s, applied to the development of Darwinian theory the very thing the theory itself denies: a teleological and linear progressivism. Literary scholars followed suit. In 1957, Sherwood Cummings could approvingly cite Hofstadter as an authority, as he did in “Mark Twain’s Social Darwinism.” When historians like Richard Bannister and Peter Bowler began revealing Hofstadter’s selection bias in the 1980s, literary scholars should again have followed suit. They did not. Journals as prestigious as American Literature continue print articles asserting “for a long cultural moment at the turn of the twentieth century, the Spencerian notion of social Darwinism held a special charm.”
It was at the half, then, and not the turn of the century that social Darwinism held a special charm. The blame for this confusion lay on Herbert Spencer and his popular expositors. In Principles of Biology (1864), Spencer proves unsympathetic to the Darwinian theory of natural selection; however, in its pages he coins the phrase that branded him Darwinian bellwether, “the survival of the fittest.” When one of his American champions, Harvard’s William Graham Sumner, taught the first sociology course in American history, his textbook was Spencer’s The Study of Sociology (1873); however, Sumner omitted sections extolling the virtue of “rational altruism,” thus creating the impression of Spencer as a critic of altruism in toto, and not of what he called “unqualified” or “irrational altruism.” Considering how well-known Spencer’s own definition of evolution is—that “from the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilization, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, is that in which Progress essentially consists,” as he argues in Progress: Its Law and Cause (1857)—the degree to which his name and thought are conflated with Darwin’s, and the manner in which both are appended to a caricature of “Nature red in tooth and claw,” distorts not only the historical record, but accounts of the literature of the period. “Maximal Diversity” unearths the actual evolutionary theories influencing the literature of the period and demonstrates how they functioned as a vehicle for more than the laissez faire ideology with which Darwinism is regularly considered complicit.
Chapter One, “The Ambivalent Naturalist: The Authority of Evolutionary Rhetoric in Edith Wharton’s ‘The Descent of Man’ and The House of Mirth,” contends that Wharton’s fictions struggle against a singular evolutionary theory—the pessimistic environmental determinism Donald Pizer and Carol Miller claim is operative in The House of Mirth (1905). Wharton identifies Darwin and Spencer as formative influences. As evidenced in her short story “The Angel at the Grave,” her careful study of their work allowed her to clear what she calls “that old metaphysical lumber” from her mental landscape. Like many of her contemporaries, Wharton’s metaphysical unmooring forced her to turn to science for answers to social questions previously provided by religion and tradition; unlike many of her contemporaries, however, she thought herself unequipped to adjudicate between competing evolutionary claims. In “The Descent of Man,” she not only details the dangers of extrapolating from one school of evolutionary thought for the moral benefit of a popular audience, she also demonstrates the extent to which scientific discourse was speculative. To those who sought her advice, she would recommend Vernon Kellogg’s notoriously equivocal Darwinism Today (1907), which aimed to familiarize “the student and general reader wishing to understand and compare the general characteristics and significance of the various new theories of species-forming with whose names, such as heterogenesis, orthogenesis, metakinesis, geographic isolation, biologic isolation, organic selection, or orthoplasty, he occasionally meets in his general reading.” Familiar with—but unable to determine the comparative validity of—these various evolutionary theories, Wharton chose to dramatize their competing claims in The House of Mirth: Lily Bart is presented as a tableau upon which the other characters in the novel can speculate as to the nature of the forces acting upon her. No final determination as to the evolutionary cause of Lily Bart’s demise can be established because the scientific community had not (and would not for another forty years) reach a consensus as to the mechanism of evolution. She offers the plight of Lily Bart not to illustrate the validity of a particular evolutionary theory, but as an experiment in evolutionary speculation in which documenting the dismal niceties of American high society will provide evidence for future social anthropologists who know what she and her contemporaries could not: which evolutionism would prove scientifically valid.
Chapter Two, “Accelerating Evolution: Social Reform and the Baldwin Effect in Jack London’s The Iron Heel and Before Adam,” details the profound confusion attendant upon those who lacked Wharton’s restraint. Scholars like Lawrence Berkove have long contended that London wrote under the thrall of what appear to be mutually incompatible master narratives: socialism and social Darwinism. Instead of dramatizing the competition between theories of evolutionary and social development like Wharton, London forged an idiosyncratic amalgam from theories he had adopted and discarded with casual cruelty his entire adult life. He held colloquy with Nietzsche, Spencer, Darwin, Marx, Tyndall, and Haeckel; but his core commitment was to an unsophisticated theory of progress to which the thought of these philosophers and scientists could be appended. Whether this progress bespeaks the inevitable rise of the proletariat or the continued perfecting of the human species matters little, because London did not adopt Marxist or Darwinian thought so much as adapt the useful elements of those theories to his philosophically unsophisticated presumptions. He embraced two aspects of Lamarckian evolution critical to Spencer’s account of social development. The first is the classic Lamarckian mechanism: the preservation of favorable characteristics via use or disuse, i.e. the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The second, more powerful, mechanism Lamarck called “the complexifying force.” Long considered anathema by naturalists, this teleological drive continued to exert influence in the form of Spencer’s dictum that “organic progress consists in a change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.” As evidenced in “Telic Action and Collective Stupidity,” London believed progress inevitable, but that it could be retarded by forces acting upon the body social. Industrial capitalism prevents what, in The Iron Heel, London calls “the orderly procedure of social evolution.” A body acclimating itself to industrial labor is a body whose form perpetuates the oppression acted upon it. London’s conviction that evolution could be harnessed for the betterment of humanity entails a process outlined by (and named for) the sociologist James Mark Baldwin. The Baldwin effect describes how individuals, by dint of their own cleverness, can alter the conditions of competition both for their offspring and the general population. Baldwin assumes that certain individuals would possess what are now called “mental modules” more adaptable than those of their contemporaries. Because of the greater plasticity of their mental modules, they are better able to recognize a good idea when they encounter one and, more importantly, reshape their mental modules in accordance with it. He believes this plasticity was heritable and distributed evenly throughout the human race. His theory presupposes that when a great leader with a genuinely great idea challenges the prevailing ideology, the people who follow that leader will have more plastic mental modules than those who do not. And since that genuinely great idea would increase the evolutionary fitness of those who followed it, the next generation of the human race would, on the whole, have more people with more plastic mental modules. Within the course of two generations, a people psychologically distinct from their forebears could be created. The Baldwin Effect underpins the narratives of development in both The Iron Heel and Before Adam: in the former, it is pivotal to the art of deception practiced by members of the opposition party; in the latter, it accounts for the presence of the ancestral memory of a higher primate in a modern human.
Chapter Three, “Novel Form: The Expression of Character in Silas Weir Mitchell’s Revolutionary Romances,” turns to another popular novelist who embraced a Lamarckian vision of social evolution, the neurologist and novelist Silas Weir Mitchell. Unlike London, who found points of agreement with sundry evolutionary schools, Mitchell held a Lamarckian position unsophisticated enough to compel him to speak against higher education for women on biological grounds: “I have sometimes been led to think that over brain-work tends not only to stunt the body and to contract the pelvis, but, by the law of evolution, to develop bigger headed offspring, or at least offspring with heads relatively disproportioned to the pelvis of the mother.” Implicit in this bald Lamarckism is a theory of social development: history is guided not only by the implicit and explicit mores of a society, but also by the biological consequences of them. In the United States, Mitchell observed that changes brought about by the toils of industrial life had a deleterious effect on national character and attempted to ameliorate these through the writing of historical romances set in a period of healthier living: the Revolutionary Era. Mitchell identified this period as the one that shaped the character he feared was atrophying, and saw his contemporary’s increasingly imperialist politics a means by which to restore it. While not openly advocating war with Spain, Mitchell chose this moment to celebrate the refining fires of the Revolution in the novel Hugh Wynne, about a soldier in George Washington’s army, and a fictional autobiography of Washington himself, The Youth of Washington. Both works evince a poetic vision of history Mitchell appropriated from the theory of Joshua Reynolds and the practice of John Keats; this theory suggest an author wishing to improve the moral character of his audience appeal to an inaccurate, but plausible, historical moment and take advantage of its attendant nostalgia. For Mitchell, this moment was the Revolutionary War, the nostalgia for which was palpable at the turn of the last century; and, if effective, the moral improvement of American character would establish the biological supremacy of the American people for generations to come.
And may I just point out, you know, to all the haters, that my serious scholarly work looks different from anything I post. Point of fact, if I previewed something I was about to post and saw that, I'd whittle it into a few more paragraphs. Massaging the medium, you know ...
Posted by: SEK | Tuesday, 04 December 2007 at 09:01 PM
May I ask where this is going? (ie does this go at the front of your dissertation, is it the "abstract" one sends out while on the market, or grant proposal, or what? It surely isn't the "prospectus" or you wouldn't want feedback on it at this late date ... I think.
After all, knowing where it goes and what you're going to do with it would affect what suggestions we make. (And if you accept my changes, do I get royalties?)
Posted by: Sisyphus | Tuesday, 04 December 2007 at 09:26 PM
It's the abstract that would go out with my job letters ... you know, to show how IMPORTANT and EARTH-SHATTERING my dissertation is, so that some school will decide to employ me in perpetuity ...
Posted by: SEK | Tuesday, 04 December 2007 at 09:33 PM
As for the royalties, well, yes, I'll profit-share any profit I profit off this profitable enterprise that is my dissertation.
(Just don't ask for residuals from the blog, which has, sadly, been far more lucrative.)
Posted by: SEK | Tuesday, 04 December 2007 at 09:34 PM
Dude, on the interwebs 2.0, the users create the content. The comments are more valuable than the posts. Therefore, you owe us all Amazon Bux. QED.
Posted by: todd. | Tuesday, 04 December 2007 at 09:50 PM
Well, good, cause my school's grad division wants the abstract on the first page of your diss to be 500 words max (I think it's for the sciences to do searches or something).
Unfortunately, I was told that the diss abstract for the market should be a single page, single spaced (no cheating on the margins, 10 pt font is not great but ok.) Mine is exactly two pages --- maybe that's why I haven't had much luck so far?
I could send you mine, but it'd be worth its weight in gold to ya.
I guess that means I should, I dunno, actually _read_ yours. Alrighty then.
Posted by: Sisyphus | Tuesday, 04 December 2007 at 10:50 PM
My abstract was 350 words, as required by my institution. This is.... more like the length of the prospectus I wrote to convince my advisors that I had a plan before I started writing the damn dissertation.
I have seen abstracts sent with job applications that were as long as two pages, though, close to a thousand words. Any longer than that and you have to call it a "writing sample"....
Sorry, I'm already grading: I'll come back to this when I actually need a break.
Posted by: Ahistoricality | Wednesday, 05 December 2007 at 12:16 AM
More comments tomorrow, but some general thoughts tonight (as it's somewhat late over here in the central time zone):
Very smart stuff here and I think this is, in fact, a very good compressed draft of your introduction, but this isn't an abstract, at least it isn't like any abstract I've seen (which would include some English/Comp Lit ones). Sisyphus is right about the length thing (this is too long), but it's also missing an intro paragraph that lays out the argument for your diss as a whole. Why does all this matter? Why is it interesting/important? Right now you've got framed in terms of why should one do it the way that you're doing it, but that's the starting rather than the ending point. Having done it (looked at non-Darwinian evolutionary ideas in fin-de-sicele lit) what does it get you? It could be something as simple as, "Allow us to better appreciate the complex and idiosycratic nature of these writers engagement with evotionary ideas, rather than reducing their literature to social Darwinist zeitgeist," but this needs to be fronted up.
Like I said, more tomorrow.
Posted by: JPool | Wednesday, 05 December 2007 at 12:35 AM
Shouldn't there be something on Selma Hayek in there?
Posted by: Adam Roberts | Wednesday, 05 December 2007 at 04:51 AM
Salma Hayek has a doppleganger? Sweet.
Posted by: Jake | Wednesday, 05 December 2007 at 09:22 AM
In terms of length, maybe this is an institutional thing, but I've always been told that the abstract you send out when you're on the market should be five pages, single-spaced. Its purpose is to give potential employers a more substantive account of your research, after they've already read the more condensed account of your work in your application letter. So this abstract, once the Twain chapter is added in, will be the right length.
In terms of this particular abstract, I can pretty much tell you what our mutual advisor's going to say about it: the first two paragraphs need to be more literary. Right now, they do a great job of laying out the complexities of evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century, but they don't really explain why this is important to our understanding of American realism/naturalism. The way to go, I think, is to say much, much more about naturalism/realism as genres and why your changed conception of evolutionary theory matters in terms of how we read it. I.e., say more about the aesthetics of late nineteenth century lit., less about the content.
Posted by: Stephen | Wednesday, 05 December 2007 at 11:39 AM
You know, were this a larger community blog, the first comment on every post would now be:
MOAR SALMA!
Ahem.
So, as to the concerns about length: this is one of those things I assume my advisor has correct, because, well, because he landed a tenure track job at two R1 institutions in the five years he's been on the market. Of course, you're right to point out that this might be a ploy designed to force me to condense, condense, and condense (even more maddeningly than I already have).
(And JPool, the fact that I may have condensed the stakes -- the "so what?" -- right out of this thing is exactly the reason I wanted unfamiliar eyeballs on it.
Posted by: SEK | Wednesday, 05 December 2007 at 11:45 AM
Happy to be an unfamiliar set of eyeballs.
To return to my comments from last night, I think that you're burying the lead here. You've made the stronger argument in the past that there was no such thing as social Darwinism, as we typically understand it. You give a weaker version of this argument and why it's important in the sentence "'Maximal Diversity' unearths the actual evolutionary theories influencing the literature of the period and demonstrates how they functioned as a vehicle for more than the laissez faire ideology with which Darwinism is regularly considered complicit." A stronger version of this might be, "Commonly held understandings of Hofstadter's Social Darwinism have lead to overlydetermined readings of these writers' politics. By reading them in light of a more heterogenous understanding of evolutionary thinking, we are better able to understand the intentions and effects of their fiction."
If you want actual ms word red pencilings, I can email them to you. Otherwise here are a couple structural observations.
You introduce "Spencerian" without prior expalnation at the end of the first paragraph, so I think the second needs to be reorganizaed to move the explanation of him to the front and then move on from there. The second paragraph and parts of the first would also make more sense if they were reframed as a summary of your historical first chapter.
The trhee chapter summaries are good, but need condensing as what you're trying to do is abstract/summarize the argument rather than recapitulate it. [OK, having read the comments after I drafted this, which was based on an understanding of abstracts derived from the ones that go at the front of dissertations, you can maybe ignore this and recapitulate to your heart's content.]
In general, while I'm encouraging you to edit down, you need to unpack your sentences, cut down on the independent clauses and explain the unclear referents.
Hope that helps.
Posted by: JPool | Wednesday, 05 December 2007 at 12:30 PM
As others have said so far, you definitely need to sell the "literary" upfront, lest readers wonder why you're applying for a position as an Americanist and not, say, a historian of science.
Does this require us to revise our understanding of what constitutes "realism" and "naturalism"? Imaginary Reader will probably wonder about the latter in particular, given naturalism's frequent links to scientific modes of observation, evolutionary theory, etc.
Minor stylistic point, as the late Al Wlecke would say: "In Principles...; however..." "When one of his...; however..." The argument doesn't appear to mandate repeating your sentence structure.
Posted by: Miriam | Wednesday, 05 December 2007 at 01:55 PM
I can't really offer substantive comments, as my own field (thirteenth-century catechesis in England) is pretty far and away removed from yours.
In the realm of pure puffery, though, I would like to note that I will almost certainly download a copy of your dissertation once you've defended the thing and it's up on ProQuest.
Posted by: Andrew R. | Thursday, 06 December 2007 at 08:22 AM
I'm so glad you posted this, Scott--I've been really curious to see how your whole project fits together, and this draft has given me a lot to think about (in fact, I was just talking about Lamarck (and you!) in my postbellum novel course).
Since you're asking for advice, I'd say that JPool, Stephen, and Miriam are exactly right: you're defending an approach when you should be summarizing an argument, and the payoff of your argument should be literary. (I do have thoughts about how to translate this advice into specific revisions, and you can e-mail me if you're interested). It seems to me that one way of getting to the literary payoff might be to explain why you're focusing on these four authors, which you need to do in any case since this is not the obvious canon.
As for length, I'm surprised to see such differences of opinion here, although I'm guessing that at least some of it is disciplinary. In my department, we tell students to write two pages, single-spaced, with one page describing the project as a whole and one page summarizing the chapters. I had thought that this was the norm for English jobs--certainly, it describes the vast majority of abstracts I've read in my time on various search committees. But Stephen's comment suggests I'm misremembering?
Posted by: Amanda Claybaugh | Thursday, 06 December 2007 at 09:44 AM
For real condensation, you should just do it in a limerick:
Late 19th, when Darwin was young,
Evolutionary theories did throng
Wharton, London, and Twain
Had Lamark on the brain
So Hofstadter is just wrong
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Thursday, 06 December 2007 at 10:36 AM
The comments here point to what I think is a structural problem with my dissertation: my "introduction" currently consists of the intellectual history you see in the first two paragraphs. It shouldn't. That should be my first chapter and -- I can't believe I'm writing this -- I need to produce another introduction, one which, as you all advise above, demonstrates how the shift from social Darwinism to what I call "evolutionisms" impacts literary naturalism and realism. At the moment, I'm not exactly sure how to do that -- that is, I'm not sure what this means to the big picture. I'm just glad I have the opportunity to address the big picture at all.
Now, I just need to start thinking about which version of realism/naturalism I think I'll be revising. So many to choose from!
Posted by: SEK | Thursday, 06 December 2007 at 12:35 PM
Rich, I think that last line would scan better as "And so Hofstadter is wrong."
I rendered my research as a haiku once. Fun, but there's damned few hiring committees that would be favorably impressed. Though I'd love to work in a department like that....
I find introductions are much easier to write once I have conclusions.
Posted by: Ahistoricality | Thursday, 06 December 2007 at 12:54 PM
"At the moment, I'm not exactly sure how to do that"
And I gave him a perfectly good limerick, too. Some people are never satisfied.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Thursday, 06 December 2007 at 01:42 PM