부산대학교 도서관

My second book project explores the paradox of how a period ostensibly characterized by increasingly materialist conceptions of life—roughly bookended by On the Origin of Species (1859) and the discovery of DNA's structure (1953)—perpetuated a vitalist (yet murderous) metaphysics that became the lifeblood of modern Western thought. This metaphysics values living beings according to the degree they embody the supposed ideal of biological life: free agency. Not only does such a model come to authorize violence against certain populations deemed naturally unfree, it also demands—as an expression of superior vitality—mastering the Earth. I thus contend, against specific versions of new materialism and neovitalism, that extending vitality to encompass all things furthers rather than forecloses a worldview central to eugenics and climate change alike. In sections on the history of biology, evolutionary aesthetics, and literary model organisms, I exhibit both life's horrific reach and its utter fictionality—exemplified in this essay through an examination of the genocidal impulses inherent to Gaia discourses old and new. Drawing on scholarship in Black studies, disability studies, biopolitics, queer theory, and animal studies, my project's final section explores fugitive alternatives to life in two distinct late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archives: silent film comedies of mortal imperilment and Black speculative fictions envisioning nonlethal (because nonvitalized) modes of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]