Devin Griffiths is a former biologist and now English Professor at the University of Southern California, where he studies the relation between literature and science. He is also author of _The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins_ (Johns Hopkins, 2016).
This article intervenes in recent formalist and ecocritical debates, drawing on the philosophy of... more This article intervenes in recent formalist and ecocritical debates, drawing on the philosophy of Charles Darwin and Édouard Glissant to develop an ecopoetic theory of relational form. Gathering perspectives from ecocriticism and new materialism, literary criticism and comparative literature, the history and philosophy of science, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and Black studies, it reads form as an interdisciplinary object that is part of the world, rather than an imposed feature of human language or perception. In this way, it produces a relational theory of form that is not hylomorphic or defined through the relation between form and content but, rather, is defined by the relation between a content and extant and, so, an interaction of relation and repetition. Drawing on the history of ecological science, it further explores how forms combine, how they amplify and interfere with each other, and how they support relations of harm and care. Finally, it uses this ecopoetic theory of form to read the histories of racial violence and migration in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) and Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching (2009).
This article intervenes in recent formalist and ecocritical debates, drawing on the philosophy of... more This article intervenes in recent formalist and ecocritical debates, drawing on the philosophy of Charles Darwin and Édouard Glissant to develop an ecopoetic theory of relational form. Gathering perspectives from ecocriticism and new materialism, literary criticism and comparative literature, the history and philosophy of science, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and Black studies, it reads form as an interdisciplinary object that is part of the world, rather than an imposed feature of human language or perception. In this way, it produces a relational theory of form that is not hylomorphic or defined through the relation between form and content but, rather, is defined by the relation between a content and extant and, so, an interaction of relation and repetition. Drawing on the history of ecological science, it further explores how forms combine, how they amplify and interfere with each other, and how they support relations of harm and care. Finally, it uses this ecopoetic theory of form to read the histories of racial violence and migration in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) and Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching (2009).
This essay explores what Romantic theories of life offer to the environmental humanities and the ... more This essay explores what Romantic theories of life offer to the environmental humanities and the problem of agency. It explores the turn in Erasmus Darwin’s later works toward a distributed model of organic agency and against the commitment to epigenesis featured in The Botanic Garden (1789–91) and Zoonomia (1794). Taking up Darwin’s discussion of elective affinity in Phytologia (1800), and its influence on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1809 novel, Die Verwandshaften, I explore the implication of Darwin’s analysis of the ontology of life for current debates over the distribution of agency and responsibility in the Anthropocene, with particular reference to Donna Haraway’s “sympoeisis,” Jane Bennett’s material ecologies, and Bruno Latour’s secular Gaia. Finally, the article explores how this distribution of organic agency conditions the poetics of The Temple of Nature (1803), and revises the cosmogony of Darwin’s earlier poetry.
This article intervenes in recent formalist and ecocritical debates, drawing on the philosophy of... more This article intervenes in recent formalist and ecocritical debates, drawing on the philosophy of Charles Darwin and Édouard Glissant to develop an ecopoetic theory of relational form. Gathering perspectives from ecocriticism and new materialism, literary criticism and comparative literature, the history and philosophy of science, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and Black studies, it reads form as an interdisciplinary object that is part of the world, rather than an imposed feature of human language or perception. In this way, it produces a relational theory of form that is not hylomorphic or defined through the relation between form and content but, rather, is defined by the relation between a content and extant and, so, an interaction of relation and repetition. Drawing on the history of ecological science, it further explores how forms combine, how they amplify and interfere with each other, and how they support relations of harm and care. Finally, it uses this ecopoetic theory of form to read the histories of racial violence and migration in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) and Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching (2009).
This collection of essays turns to the nineteenth century in order to weigh the legacy of its hol... more This collection of essays turns to the nineteenth century in order to weigh the legacy of its holistic conception of systems and to resurrect alternative discourses of openness, permeability, and indeterminate relation. If modern ecocriticism has sometimes been hobbled by a restrictively organic, harmonious conception of how ecologies work, we wager that a return to Victorian interrogations of natural and social collectives can furnish more open, less integrated models for how assemblages operate. The nineteenth century saw both the first acceleration of anthropogenic climate change and the birth of a host of sciences-economic, social, geological, energetic, and (yes) ecological-that now struggle to address the planetary implications of that acceleration. Our growing awareness that we are now living in the long tail of this conjuncture and at the birth of the Anthropocene has prompted a re-evaluation of what we think we know about how nature and society work, and how they might work...
Introduction to a special issue of "Victorian Literature and Culture" that explores how nineteent... more Introduction to a special issue of "Victorian Literature and Culture" that explores how nineteenth-century writers can contribute to a more open theory of ecologies and nature-culture interaction, setting this in contrast to the historical relation between concepts of ecology, organicism, and settler colonialism. We define open ecologies as: 1. Situational: rather than focusing on a single actor, species, or stratum of the environment, they are defined by the interaction of diverse inorganic as well as living components. 2. They are compositional: they are not organic units or holistic cosmologies, but instead involve multiple actants with differing interests. 3. They are non-programmatic: their forms are emergent rather than pre-defined or autotelic; their patterns and futures are unpredictable, chancy. 4. They are abnatural in the sense defined by Jesse Oak Taylor: they are characterized by uncanny interpenetrations of the manufactured and the other-than-human. 5. They are marked by uneven distributions of power; they demand that we reconceptualize modes of violence, from the environmentalism of the poor and the ecologies of race, to the reframing of toxicity, threat, and predation. 6. They are neither preconcerted harmonies nor utopias.
This essay explores George Eliot's ecological engagement in her novel "Silas Marner" as an engage... more This essay explores George Eliot's ecological engagement in her novel "Silas Marner" as an engagement with contemporary theories of environmental interaction and morphological development, especially contemporary discussions of epigenesis.
Why is melodrama a key genre of energetic modernity? Critics have long emphasized the essential m... more Why is melodrama a key genre of energetic modernity? Critics have long emphasized the essential modernity of melodrama; this essay locates that claim within the infrastructures of modern energy culture, confronting melodrama as a key genre of the Anthropocene. 1 In doing so, melodrama forces us to reconsider how we think of those two poles of literary criticism, genre and period, and to trace their connections to wider social, economic, and energetic systems. To test the significance of climate change to Victorian studies, as many have noted, we must weigh the fact that its changes extend well beyond the notional bounds of the "Victorian," both geographically and temporally. 2 In identifying melodrama as both powered by and reflective of the energy regimes that drive modernity, I seek to explain the predominance of this characteristic nineteenth-century mode for more than two centuries, from the Romantic theater to modern television and film.
This essay explores the Darwinian imagination-an approach to exploring the basic ontology of natu... more This essay explores the Darwinian imagination-an approach to exploring the basic ontology of nature that was shared by both Erasmus Darwin and his grandson, Charles Darwin. It focuses on Erasmus and Charles's respective theories of generation, especially as laid out in Zoonomia (1794) and The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), and their derivation from the longstanding opposition between theories of epigenesis and panspermia. Erasmus Darwin's thinking, in particular, was torn between relatively closed and open conceptions of how organic structures assemble and reproduce. Charles, by contrast, worked hard to fashion his theory of pangenesis into a capacious model that would account for interactions of inheritance and development across all levels of physical and temporal scale. Yet beneath disagreements over the distribution of agency between matter and different sexual partners, both argued for an anti-holist, anti-organic ontologythat consistently cleared space for more open, more contingent, and ultimately more ecological theories of nature. Ultimately this required a rejection both of the Romantic conception of organic life and Romantic aesthetics, in particular, the notion that the unity of aesthetic experience communicated something about the unity of natural systems. Finally, I will argue that Charles Darwin's pangenic model-which relies upon the functional assemblage of elements derived from different lineages, on different timescales, and with distinct, non-overlapping, and incompletely integrated capacities-offers a unique way of understanding the problem of intellectual inheritance and the relation between the Darwins themselves. If most approaches to this problem have posited either a lineal genealogy of intellectual inheritance, or situate their work as reflections of a larger historical context, pangenesis can help to imagine intellectual history beyond our typically lineal or atmospheric models of influence.
Keyword discussion of the role "teleology" has played in recent literary theory, including suspic... more Keyword discussion of the role "teleology" has played in recent literary theory, including suspicious reading and the reparative turn.
This article studies the modern development of the comparative method in the humanities and socia... more This article studies the modern development of the comparative method in the humanities and social sciences within Europe and the United States, and specifically addresses comparative subfields of philology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, political science, literature, history, and folklore studies. A juxtapositional study of these disciplinary histories demonstrates the historical relation between their methods and relation to other fields, like comparative anatomy. It elucidates several recurrent features of the different applications of comparativism, particularly a consistent tension between genetic (or historical) versus functionalist (or contextual) explanations for common patterns, and suggests that comparatists would benefit from closer study both of the history of the method and its development within other fields. Ultimately this study casts fresh light on the modern history of the humanities, their incomplete differentiation from social-scientific fields like sociology and political science, and the interdisciplinary exchanges that have often shaped entire fields of study.
This essay explores what Romantic theories of life offer to the environmental humanities and the ... more This essay explores what Romantic theories of life offer to the environmental humanities and the problem of agency. It explores the turn in Erasmus Darwin’s later works toward a distributed model of organic agency and against the commitment to epigenesis featured in The Botanic Garden (1789–91) and Zoonomia (1794). Taking up Darwin’s discussion of elective affinity in Phytologia (1800), and its influence on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1809 novel, Die Verwandshaften, I explore the implication of Darwin’s analysis of the ontology of life for current debates over the distribution of agency and responsibility in the Anthropocene, with particular reference to Donna Haraway’s “sympoeisis,” Jane Bennett’s material ecologies, and Bruno Latour’s secular Gaia. Finally, the article explores how this distribution of organic agency conditions the poetics of The Temple of Nature (1803), and revises the cosmogony of Darwin’s earlier poetry.
This article surveys recent scholarship in Romantic science and literature, exploring what such s... more This article surveys recent scholarship in Romantic science and literature, exploring what such studies may offer the recent " planetary turn " in ecocriticism and postcolonial research on the Anthropocene.
This essay examines Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities through the defining historical mode o... more This essay examines Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities through the defining historical mode of the nineteenth-century historicism: comparative history. An under-appreciated response to the failure of stadial and progressive accounts to explain the French Revolution, comparative history drew from a range of allied disciplines, including comparative philology, mythology, and anatomy. This investigation tracks comparatist inquiry through a range of nineteenth-century theories of society and nature, and--by addressing the novel’s concern with historiography, secularism, melodrama, alterity, and multiple modernities--locates Dickens’s sensational account of Revolutionary France as a key text in the emergence of comparative history as an independent Victorian discipline.
This article intervenes in recent formalist and ecocritical debates, drawing on the philosophy of... more This article intervenes in recent formalist and ecocritical debates, drawing on the philosophy of Charles Darwin and Édouard Glissant to develop an ecopoetic theory of relational form. Gathering perspectives from ecocriticism and new materialism, literary criticism and comparative literature, the history and philosophy of science, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and Black studies, it reads form as an interdisciplinary object that is part of the world, rather than an imposed feature of human language or perception. In this way, it produces a relational theory of form that is not hylomorphic or defined through the relation between form and content but, rather, is defined by the relation between a content and extant and, so, an interaction of relation and repetition. Drawing on the history of ecological science, it further explores how forms combine, how they amplify and interfere with each other, and how they support relations of harm and care. Finally, it uses this ecopoetic theory of form to read the histories of racial violence and migration in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) and Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching (2009).
This article intervenes in recent formalist and ecocritical debates, drawing on the philosophy of... more This article intervenes in recent formalist and ecocritical debates, drawing on the philosophy of Charles Darwin and Édouard Glissant to develop an ecopoetic theory of relational form. Gathering perspectives from ecocriticism and new materialism, literary criticism and comparative literature, the history and philosophy of science, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and Black studies, it reads form as an interdisciplinary object that is part of the world, rather than an imposed feature of human language or perception. In this way, it produces a relational theory of form that is not hylomorphic or defined through the relation between form and content but, rather, is defined by the relation between a content and extant and, so, an interaction of relation and repetition. Drawing on the history of ecological science, it further explores how forms combine, how they amplify and interfere with each other, and how they support relations of harm and care. Finally, it uses this ecopoetic theory of form to read the histories of racial violence and migration in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) and Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching (2009).
This essay explores what Romantic theories of life offer to the environmental humanities and the ... more This essay explores what Romantic theories of life offer to the environmental humanities and the problem of agency. It explores the turn in Erasmus Darwin’s later works toward a distributed model of organic agency and against the commitment to epigenesis featured in The Botanic Garden (1789–91) and Zoonomia (1794). Taking up Darwin’s discussion of elective affinity in Phytologia (1800), and its influence on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1809 novel, Die Verwandshaften, I explore the implication of Darwin’s analysis of the ontology of life for current debates over the distribution of agency and responsibility in the Anthropocene, with particular reference to Donna Haraway’s “sympoeisis,” Jane Bennett’s material ecologies, and Bruno Latour’s secular Gaia. Finally, the article explores how this distribution of organic agency conditions the poetics of The Temple of Nature (1803), and revises the cosmogony of Darwin’s earlier poetry.
This article intervenes in recent formalist and ecocritical debates, drawing on the philosophy of... more This article intervenes in recent formalist and ecocritical debates, drawing on the philosophy of Charles Darwin and Édouard Glissant to develop an ecopoetic theory of relational form. Gathering perspectives from ecocriticism and new materialism, literary criticism and comparative literature, the history and philosophy of science, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and Black studies, it reads form as an interdisciplinary object that is part of the world, rather than an imposed feature of human language or perception. In this way, it produces a relational theory of form that is not hylomorphic or defined through the relation between form and content but, rather, is defined by the relation between a content and extant and, so, an interaction of relation and repetition. Drawing on the history of ecological science, it further explores how forms combine, how they amplify and interfere with each other, and how they support relations of harm and care. Finally, it uses this ecopoetic theory of form to read the histories of racial violence and migration in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) and Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching (2009).
This collection of essays turns to the nineteenth century in order to weigh the legacy of its hol... more This collection of essays turns to the nineteenth century in order to weigh the legacy of its holistic conception of systems and to resurrect alternative discourses of openness, permeability, and indeterminate relation. If modern ecocriticism has sometimes been hobbled by a restrictively organic, harmonious conception of how ecologies work, we wager that a return to Victorian interrogations of natural and social collectives can furnish more open, less integrated models for how assemblages operate. The nineteenth century saw both the first acceleration of anthropogenic climate change and the birth of a host of sciences-economic, social, geological, energetic, and (yes) ecological-that now struggle to address the planetary implications of that acceleration. Our growing awareness that we are now living in the long tail of this conjuncture and at the birth of the Anthropocene has prompted a re-evaluation of what we think we know about how nature and society work, and how they might work...
Introduction to a special issue of "Victorian Literature and Culture" that explores how nineteent... more Introduction to a special issue of "Victorian Literature and Culture" that explores how nineteenth-century writers can contribute to a more open theory of ecologies and nature-culture interaction, setting this in contrast to the historical relation between concepts of ecology, organicism, and settler colonialism. We define open ecologies as: 1. Situational: rather than focusing on a single actor, species, or stratum of the environment, they are defined by the interaction of diverse inorganic as well as living components. 2. They are compositional: they are not organic units or holistic cosmologies, but instead involve multiple actants with differing interests. 3. They are non-programmatic: their forms are emergent rather than pre-defined or autotelic; their patterns and futures are unpredictable, chancy. 4. They are abnatural in the sense defined by Jesse Oak Taylor: they are characterized by uncanny interpenetrations of the manufactured and the other-than-human. 5. They are marked by uneven distributions of power; they demand that we reconceptualize modes of violence, from the environmentalism of the poor and the ecologies of race, to the reframing of toxicity, threat, and predation. 6. They are neither preconcerted harmonies nor utopias.
This essay explores George Eliot's ecological engagement in her novel "Silas Marner" as an engage... more This essay explores George Eliot's ecological engagement in her novel "Silas Marner" as an engagement with contemporary theories of environmental interaction and morphological development, especially contemporary discussions of epigenesis.
Why is melodrama a key genre of energetic modernity? Critics have long emphasized the essential m... more Why is melodrama a key genre of energetic modernity? Critics have long emphasized the essential modernity of melodrama; this essay locates that claim within the infrastructures of modern energy culture, confronting melodrama as a key genre of the Anthropocene. 1 In doing so, melodrama forces us to reconsider how we think of those two poles of literary criticism, genre and period, and to trace their connections to wider social, economic, and energetic systems. To test the significance of climate change to Victorian studies, as many have noted, we must weigh the fact that its changes extend well beyond the notional bounds of the "Victorian," both geographically and temporally. 2 In identifying melodrama as both powered by and reflective of the energy regimes that drive modernity, I seek to explain the predominance of this characteristic nineteenth-century mode for more than two centuries, from the Romantic theater to modern television and film.
This essay explores the Darwinian imagination-an approach to exploring the basic ontology of natu... more This essay explores the Darwinian imagination-an approach to exploring the basic ontology of nature that was shared by both Erasmus Darwin and his grandson, Charles Darwin. It focuses on Erasmus and Charles's respective theories of generation, especially as laid out in Zoonomia (1794) and The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), and their derivation from the longstanding opposition between theories of epigenesis and panspermia. Erasmus Darwin's thinking, in particular, was torn between relatively closed and open conceptions of how organic structures assemble and reproduce. Charles, by contrast, worked hard to fashion his theory of pangenesis into a capacious model that would account for interactions of inheritance and development across all levels of physical and temporal scale. Yet beneath disagreements over the distribution of agency between matter and different sexual partners, both argued for an anti-holist, anti-organic ontologythat consistently cleared space for more open, more contingent, and ultimately more ecological theories of nature. Ultimately this required a rejection both of the Romantic conception of organic life and Romantic aesthetics, in particular, the notion that the unity of aesthetic experience communicated something about the unity of natural systems. Finally, I will argue that Charles Darwin's pangenic model-which relies upon the functional assemblage of elements derived from different lineages, on different timescales, and with distinct, non-overlapping, and incompletely integrated capacities-offers a unique way of understanding the problem of intellectual inheritance and the relation between the Darwins themselves. If most approaches to this problem have posited either a lineal genealogy of intellectual inheritance, or situate their work as reflections of a larger historical context, pangenesis can help to imagine intellectual history beyond our typically lineal or atmospheric models of influence.
Keyword discussion of the role "teleology" has played in recent literary theory, including suspic... more Keyword discussion of the role "teleology" has played in recent literary theory, including suspicious reading and the reparative turn.
This article studies the modern development of the comparative method in the humanities and socia... more This article studies the modern development of the comparative method in the humanities and social sciences within Europe and the United States, and specifically addresses comparative subfields of philology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, political science, literature, history, and folklore studies. A juxtapositional study of these disciplinary histories demonstrates the historical relation between their methods and relation to other fields, like comparative anatomy. It elucidates several recurrent features of the different applications of comparativism, particularly a consistent tension between genetic (or historical) versus functionalist (or contextual) explanations for common patterns, and suggests that comparatists would benefit from closer study both of the history of the method and its development within other fields. Ultimately this study casts fresh light on the modern history of the humanities, their incomplete differentiation from social-scientific fields like sociology and political science, and the interdisciplinary exchanges that have often shaped entire fields of study.
This essay explores what Romantic theories of life offer to the environmental humanities and the ... more This essay explores what Romantic theories of life offer to the environmental humanities and the problem of agency. It explores the turn in Erasmus Darwin’s later works toward a distributed model of organic agency and against the commitment to epigenesis featured in The Botanic Garden (1789–91) and Zoonomia (1794). Taking up Darwin’s discussion of elective affinity in Phytologia (1800), and its influence on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1809 novel, Die Verwandshaften, I explore the implication of Darwin’s analysis of the ontology of life for current debates over the distribution of agency and responsibility in the Anthropocene, with particular reference to Donna Haraway’s “sympoeisis,” Jane Bennett’s material ecologies, and Bruno Latour’s secular Gaia. Finally, the article explores how this distribution of organic agency conditions the poetics of The Temple of Nature (1803), and revises the cosmogony of Darwin’s earlier poetry.
This article surveys recent scholarship in Romantic science and literature, exploring what such s... more This article surveys recent scholarship in Romantic science and literature, exploring what such studies may offer the recent " planetary turn " in ecocriticism and postcolonial research on the Anthropocene.
This essay examines Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities through the defining historical mode o... more This essay examines Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities through the defining historical mode of the nineteenth-century historicism: comparative history. An under-appreciated response to the failure of stadial and progressive accounts to explain the French Revolution, comparative history drew from a range of allied disciplines, including comparative philology, mythology, and anatomy. This investigation tracks comparatist inquiry through a range of nineteenth-century theories of society and nature, and--by addressing the novel’s concern with historiography, secularism, melodrama, alterity, and multiple modernities--locates Dickens’s sensational account of Revolutionary France as a key text in the emergence of comparative history as an independent Victorian discipline.
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Papers by Devin Griffiths
1. Situational: rather than focusing on a single actor, species, or stratum of the environment, they are defined by the interaction of diverse inorganic as well as living components.
2. They are compositional: they are not organic units or holistic cosmologies, but instead involve multiple actants with differing interests.
3. They are non-programmatic: their forms are emergent rather than pre-defined or autotelic; their patterns and futures are unpredictable, chancy.
4. They are abnatural in the sense defined by Jesse Oak Taylor: they are characterized by uncanny interpenetrations of the manufactured and the other-than-human.
5. They are marked by uneven distributions of power; they demand that we reconceptualize modes of violence, from the environmentalism of the poor and the ecologies of race, to the reframing of toxicity, threat, and predation.
6. They are neither preconcerted harmonies nor utopias.
1. Situational: rather than focusing on a single actor, species, or stratum of the environment, they are defined by the interaction of diverse inorganic as well as living components.
2. They are compositional: they are not organic units or holistic cosmologies, but instead involve multiple actants with differing interests.
3. They are non-programmatic: their forms are emergent rather than pre-defined or autotelic; their patterns and futures are unpredictable, chancy.
4. They are abnatural in the sense defined by Jesse Oak Taylor: they are characterized by uncanny interpenetrations of the manufactured and the other-than-human.
5. They are marked by uneven distributions of power; they demand that we reconceptualize modes of violence, from the environmentalism of the poor and the ecologies of race, to the reframing of toxicity, threat, and predation.
6. They are neither preconcerted harmonies nor utopias.