Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature

320 Pages·2013·2.931 MB·English

by  Robert Mitchell

Experimental Life
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Experimental Life
Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature
Robert Mitchell
Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
© 2013 Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2013
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mitchell, Robert, 1969–
Experimental life : vitalism in Romantic science and
literature / Robert Mitchell.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4214-1088-3 (hardcover : acid-free paper) —
ISBN 978-1-4214-1089-0 (electronic) — ISBN 1-4214-1088-5 (hardcover :
acid-free paper) — ISBN 1-4214-1089-3 (electronic)
1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature
and science—England—History—19th century. 3. Romanticism—
England. 4. Vitalism in literature. 5. Life in literature. I. Title.
PR585.S33M58 2013
820.9(cid:2)36—dc23 2013004819
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction Three Eras of Experimental Vitalism 1
1 Romanticism, Art, and Experiments 14
2 Suspended Animation and the Poetics of Trance 43
3 Life, Orientation, and Abandoned Experiments 74
4 Nausea, Digestion, and the Collapsurgence of System 104
5 The Media of Life 144
6 Cryptogamia 190
Conclusion Biopolitics and Experimental Vitalism 218
Notes 231
Bibliography 271
Index 295
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Acknowledgments
This book is the result of the intersection of two lines of research I initially thought
of as quite separate. It had its origins in research that I conducted for Sympathy
and the State in the Romantic Era (2007). That book focused on eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century theories of sympathy, a term that then referred not only
to moral relationships among individuals but also to a physiological action-at-a-
distance that occurred within a living body. Although I was not able to include
discussion of the latter, medical sense of sympathy in that earlier project, my
research on this topic put me on the path of those Romantic concepts of life that
are the focus of this book.
The book is also the result of a quite different line of research, one focused on
the cultural logic and economics of our own, contemporary systems of biological
research and healthcare. Relatively little of my work in this area has engaged lit-
erature, and I have focused primarily on technologies and techniques developed
since the 1970s (e.g., genetic engineering, organ transplantation, and biobank-
ing). Yet with some degree of regularity, peculiar resonances emerged between
my literary critical work on the Romantic era and my more sociological work on
contemporary biotechnology. I became fascinated, for example, with the final
stages of the process by means of which contemporary biologists create immortal
cell lines, as cells were lowered into waist-high cylindrical liquid nitrogen tanks
to be frozen. I saw these cylinders as urns that quite literally produced what Keats
had called frozen time, as the liquid nitrogen suspended the living processes of
this matter so that the biologist could return to these same cells later, as though
no time at all had passed for the cells. When, at about the same time, I read
John Hunter’s late-eighteenth-century reflections on the newly coined term “sus-
pended animation,” and reflected on his hopes that suspended animation might
allow for a new kind of human existence and a new mode of scientific observa-
tion, I became convinced that it was worth pursuing further these resonances
between the Romantic era and the present—and this volume is the result of that
viii acknowledgments
endeavor (though early versions of chapters 2 and 6 appeared in PMLA and Eu-
ropean Romantic Review, respectively).
Because this project has been under way for a relatively long time, and be-
cause I have pursued its concepts, questions, and problems across several research
communities, I have been assisted by a quite considerable list of people, and I es-
pecially wish to thank the following: Lindsey Andrews; Alan Bewell; James Bono;
Andrew Burkett; David Clark (to whom I owe the phrase “experimenting with
experimentation”); Matthew Cohen; David Collings; Allison Dushane; Michael
Eberle-Sinatra and the members of the Technologies, Media, and Representa-
tions in Nineteenth-Century France and England Research Group; Tim Fulford;
Denise Gigante and the members of the Seminar on Enlightenment and Revo-
lution; Nick Halmi; Orit Halpern; Tim Lenoir; Tracie Matysik, Sam Baker, and
Phillipa Levine and the members of the Nineteenth-Century Workshop; Sean
Metzger; Colin Milburn; Thomas Pfau; Michelle Puetz; Phillip Thurtle; Charles
Rzepka; Alexander Schlutz; Barbara Herrnstein Smith; Alan Vardy; Priscilla Wald;
and Nancy Yousef.
I also wish to thank Colleen M. Weum and Cheyenne Maria Roduin for assis-
tance with textual resources in the Health Sciences Rare Book Room at the Uni-
versity of Washington; Duke University’s Arts and Sciences Research Council,
which provided vital financial support for this project at various points; and the
National Humanities Center and the Duke Endowment Fellowship, which made
it possible for me to complete the manuscript of the book in the Center’s convivial
surroundings. I am also grateful to Meghan O’Neil, Chris Catanese, and Glenn
Perkins for their able proofreading assistance, and to Matthew McAdam, my edi-
tor at the Johns Hopkins University Press, with whom it was a joy to work.
And last, but definitely not least, my heartfelt thanks go to Inga Pollmann, who
not only patiently read and commented on many drafts of each of these chapters,
and whose work on the life of film has been an inspiration for my own project
here, but who has, in addition, always been a vitalizing pneuma for me.
Experimental Life