Naturalistic Models of Society and the Novel Form
Abstract This panel will seek to explore the changing relationship between scientific paradigms and society’s self-understanding as it is manifest in the novel form. If the novel itself has functioned as a record of the social imagination—a narrative ideologeme as Jameson describes it – this social imagination often borrowed its models from contemporary natural philosophy and later the social sciences. We see examples of this in Balzac’s use of taxonomical zoology, Sterne’s use of Cartesian “animal spirits,” or Joyce’s phylogenetic process in “Oxen of the Sun.” Some of the questions this panel will ask include: how do naturalistic sociological models help to mediate political and aesthetic theories? How do these models affect stylistic developments?