Overview
Welcome to English 355, 02, “Biotechnology and Culture: From Victorian Eugenics to Contemporary Genomics,” taught by Professor Jay Clayton at Vanderbilt University.
Thursday 12:30-3:00
Benson 200
In the nineteenth century, evolutionary theory was as much a cultural as a scientific concern. Questions about evolution’s impact on religion, social theory, racial science, degeneration, and eugenics were debated among scientists, religious leaders, politicians, journalists, poets, and novelists. Today, the revolution in genomics has had an equal impact on contemporary culture. Novels, films, visual arts, and popular culture explore topics such as cloning and stem-cell research; genes for violence, homosexuality, and long life; ecological protests against manipulating the genetic code; religious objections to evolution; genetic privacy; the patenting of genes; DNA evidence in criminal cases; and bioterrorism
This course will look at new models of interdisciplinary work in the humanities by focusing on the changing relationship of biotechnology and culture from the mid-nineteenth century through the twenty-first century. We will discuss texts from a number of different genres, including science writing, Victorian fiction, postmodern fiction, science fiction novels and films, autobiography, and critical essays on science theory and biotechnology.
Readings will be roughly divided between the nineteenth and the twentieth/twenty-first centuries, and will include the following texts:
- Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and Origin of the Species (1859)
- Francis Galton’s “Hereditary Talent and Character” (1865)
- Thomas H. Huxley’s “Evolution and Ethics” (1893)
- Wilkie Collins’s The Legacy of Cain (1889)
- H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896)
- J.B.S. Haldane “Daedalus, or, Science and the Future” (1923)
- Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)
- Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1992)
- Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever (1996)
- Zadi Smith’s White Teeth (2000)
- Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex (2003)
- Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003)
- David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004)
- Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005)
- Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005).
- Films will include: Island of Lost Souls (1932), Blade Runner (1982, 1992, 2007), and Gattaca (1997).
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