Course No: 350:645
Index #: 17962
Distribution Requirement: A3, A4, D
Tuesdays - 2:00 PM
MU 207
Natural Histories
Iannini, Christopher
This courses traces the development of natural history as a new scientific method, intellectual obsession, and literary practice during the long eighteenth century. Defined in its broadest sense as the study of organic life and its environment, and encompassing emerging Enlightenment disciplines including botany, geography, ornithology, entomology, climate theory and anthropology (among many others) natural history quickly attained new prestige and influence in the period. By the early 1700s, as historian Richard Drayton describes it, natural history had “captured the attention of the upper and middle classes of imperial Britain” and its colonies (Nature’s Government). By the end of the century, it served as lingua franca of letters, art, and politics in Europe and the Americas.
Beginning with the founding of the Royal Society in London and its efforts to reform empiricist method and prose, we will read some newly canonical natural histories of the early Americas by writers such as Hans Sloane and Richard Ligon. We will consider how the formal and stylistic requirements of natural history writing—specifically the specimen description and the manners and customs sketch— as well as its underlying environmentalist logic, influenced the development of the early novel (Oroonoko, Crusoe). We will pay particular attention to the importance of natural history for the development of early modern conceptions of race (Wheeler, The Complexion of Race; Parrish, American Curiosity) and sexuality (Lafleur, The Natural History of Sexuality), and to the literary representation of both within a range of popular genres (travel narrative, captivity narrative, criminal narrative, early slave narrative etc.) From there we turn to the rise of Creole natural history in the age of revolutions, examining how white colonial writers from throughout the Americas drew on natural history as they attempted to challenge their subordinate place within a transatlantic republic of letters, and asking how the demand for eyewitness reports of New World nature provided openings (however tenuous) for black and indigenous participation in the public sphere (Johnson, Encyclopédie Noire). We conclude with two weeks on Moby-Dick; or the Whale, considering how natural history shapes the aesthetics and politics of Melville’s sprawling, encyclopedic novel, composed during the period when professionalized science first emerges, demoting the natural historian to curious amateur, and when literary and scientific epistemologies diverge decisively. One guide for this unit will be Brit Rusert’s concept of “fugitive science.” Faced with the rise of racial science in the antebellum United States, how did writers such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delaney transform the stage and page into “laboratories of knowledge and experimentation,” and how can recovering this history shed new light on Melville’s own ambivalent representations of race.
Primary readings will include works by most of the following: Aphra Behn, Hans Sloane, Richard Ligon, Daniel Defoe, Comte de Buffon, Carl Linneaus, Mary Rowlandson, St. John Crévecoeur, Thomas Jefferson, Leonora Sansay, Fredrick Douglass, and Herman Melville. Requirements will consist of one class presentation and a final seminar paper (based on independent research and composed in stages during the second half of the semester).