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SUMMARY:Vivisection by storytelling: the experimental novel in the late 19
 th century - Paul White (Darwin Correspondence Project)
DTSTART:20130128T130000Z
DTEND:20130128T141500Z
UID:TALK42482@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:29667
DESCRIPTION:In his 1880 essay\, 'The experimental novel'\, Zola modelled l
 iterature on the physiological laboratory. The writer\, he proposed\, shou
 ld experiment with his fictive subjects\, manipulate their feelings and en
 vironments in order to grasp the laws of nature: 'we should operate on the
  characters\, the passions\, on the human and social data ... as the physi
 ologist operates on living beings'. Zola drew extensively on Claude Bernar
 d's 1865 _Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine_\, which desc
 ribed the central role of the laboratory for the production of scientific 
 knowledge\, the use of instruments to penetrate inside bodies and prise th
 em apart\, to intervene in the course of life\, altering or destroying it.
  In this paper\, I look first at the _literature_ of physiology\, how it w
 as written\, how it disciplined its readers\, and how it stood in relation
  to other practices\, especially those of the experimental laboratory with
  its transcription of living bodies by new precision machines. I then conc
 lude with a reading of the novel\, _Heart and Science_ (1883) by Wilkie Co
 llins\, in which the physiological laboratory and the character of its pra
 ctitioners were composed from the fragments of specialist physiology and r
 ecast as fiction using the methods of the experimenter. The novelist does 
 indeed become a physiologist\, manipulating the bodies of readers with the
  instrument of the text\, revealing the Bernardian practices of the labora
 tory as a process in which human character is eroded and finally erased.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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