A two-day conference at the
University of Cambridge, 10-11 April 2015
The decades
around 1900 are a crucial period for the impact of biological thought on the
intellectual cultures of the western world. The impulses of
Darwinism were taken up by intellectuals, writers and artists from the 1860s onwards,
and both Darwinian and anti-Darwinian currents of thinking exercised a powerful
influence on the intellectual climate of the early decades of the twentieth
century. It was a period that saw major developments in cell biology and the
establishment of genetics as we know it, the movement of medical science and
psychiatry beyond mechanistic conceptions of illness, and the emergence of
psychoanalysis and sexology as new disciplines. "Biological
Discourses", a student-led conference to be held in Cambridge on 10-11
April 2015, is part of a collaborative venture between the Cambridge Department
of German & Dutch and the Institute for Modern Languages Research, London,
investigating the interplay and the forms of mediation between literary and
biological discourses in that period.
The conference
builds on the substantial body of research literature that has evolved in the
last few decades both in English and other languages on the 'hermeneutic
potential' of Darwin's thought (Gillian Beer) and the interrelationship between
biological thought and literature and the visual arts more broadly. Recent work
has also brought out the senses in which the historical emergence of such
biological terminology as 'heredity' and 'genealogy' should be seen as part of
European cultural history (e.g. Sigrid Weigel, Genea-Logik (2006); Staffan
Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, A Cultural History of Heredity (2012)).
Key issues relating to these and other strands of inquiry were reviewed at an
initial workshop hosted by the collaboration partners in London in March 2014
(see here).
The conference
in April 2015 is intended to provide an opportunity to explore certain of those
issues more closely, homing in particularly on the processes and potentials of
mediation between biological science and literature, and to extend the inquiry
to countries beyond the German-speaking world. The themes on which the organisers
particularly wish to invite contributions are these:
- What kinds of relationship do we see between the discourses of biological science and literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Are there senses in which we find them sharing models, metaphors, and elements of each other's discourse?
- How are developments in biological and medical thinking reflected in the print media of the time, both verbally and visually?
- How are the emerging discourses of sexology and psychopathology reflected in the literary writing of this period, and what insights arise from comparisons between writings of the early 20th century and the critical perspectives of the present day (e.g. gender theory)?
- How do the developments in biological thinking inform the world-views and ethical values of western societies in the period, and what evidence of this do we find in literary and other writings?
- To what extent do we find the
discourse of German writings on biological issues taken up and developed in
other European languages, and with what implications?
Proposals (no
more than 500 words please) should be sent to Conference-ge@mml.cam.ac.uk by 30 November 2014.
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