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Nature Morte: Decomposing Darwinism's Evolutionary Aesthetics
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- Author / Creator
- Bezan, Sarah
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This dissertation illuminates how contemporary creative engagements with the evolutionary thinking of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) work to decompose Darwinism’s evolutionary aesthetics. Redefining death and decay as a creative threshold for evolutionary progress, this study demonstrates how innovative fiction, film, poetics and art incite a radical reinterpretation of the principles of life, matter, and being in Darwin’s natural scientific oeuvre. By contextualizing Darwin’s treatises and correspondence in the history of vitalist debates from the nineteenth century to the present, this study identifies four exemplary organisms that foment and sustain decompositional processes: worms, molluscs, corals, and fish. These four case studies are informed by several of Darwin’s book-length studies, including The Zoology of the Beagle (1838), The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (1842), Living Cirripedia and Fossil Cirripedia (1851), On the Origin of Species (1859), and The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, With Observations on Their Habits (1881). Reading Darwin’s exploration of life through the lens of decomposition, this dissertation makes two critical interventions. First, it argues that this examination of Darwin’s principle of decomposition in turn reforms our understanding of the intellectual lineage of vitalist philosophy that followed in Darwin’s wake, particularly in the work of Henri Bergson (1859-1941), along with Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Félix Guattari (1930-1992). Second, it contends that the remarkable collection of film, fiction, poetics and art in this analysis portrays the seen and unseen operations of matter across deep time, both in and through the life/death distinction and the human/animal divide. This study concludes that this vitalist principle of decomposition contributes a new and provocative reinterpretation of Darwinism that has so far gone unnoticed ii in classical studies of Darwin by scholars in the History and Philosophy of Science, and that furthermore has important implications for reorienting treatments of death and animality in the fields of New Materialism, Posthumanism, Animal Studies, and the Environmental Humanities more broadly. The collection of creative work explored in this study includes Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott's zoopoetic decomposition of Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species, in their poetry collection decomp (2013), A.S. Byatt's neo-Victorian meditation on vegetable mould and the vermiform in Angels and Insects (1992), filmmaker Peter Greenaway’s pageantry of putrefaction in A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), Rebecca Stott’s historical roman à clef featuring ancient marine life in The Coral Thief (2008), Jason deCaires Taylor’s Anthropocenic underwater coral sculptures (2012-present), Richard Flanagan’s colourful post-modern fiction, Gould’s Book of Fishes (2001), and novelist Jim Crace’s fishy funeral ecology in Being Dead (1999). Each chapter explores how Darwin’s fascination with the “decaying branches” and “fresh buds” of the great Tree of Life inform our understanding of natural history, and moreover continue to shape our responses to urgent issues of the present day, such as the loss of species biodiversity and the decline of ecological habitats. In sum, my analysis of these creative divergences of matter across deep time seeks to unearth the impact of Darwin's thinking in literature, film, art, and poetry of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. This approach is both dialogical and reciprocal. In other words, the texts of this project extend back to Darwin to creatively re-interpret his thinking of lost life forms, but they also invite new ways of reading and representing Darwinism’s evolutionary aesthetics in and through the imminent crisis of the Anthropocene.
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- Graduation date
- Fall 2017
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.