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Item Prehistoric to Posthuman: Animality, Inheritance, and Identity in American Evolutionary Narratives(2010) Bailin, Deborah; Wyatt, David M; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines how Darwinian discourse has influenced representations of the relationship between animality and humanness in twentieth-century American literature. Scholarship in the conceptually rich and growing field of animal studies, to which my dissertation contributes, covers a wide range of topics, from the symbolic and metaphoric treatment of nonhuman animals to the ethics of representation and the politics of animal rights. Recent theoretical work has further broadened the scope of inquiry by raising questions about the cultural construction of animality and its relationship to definitions of the human. Although some scholars have argued for the importance of embodiment in (re)considering twentieth-century representations of the human, challenging the opposition between "animal" and "human," only a few have addressed how Darwin's descriptions of prehuman ancestry and a potentially posthuman future might have shaped these representations. My study aims to rectify this critical lack. By examining how evolutionary narratives of growth, mutation, and transformation intersect with American narratives of history, progress, and identity, my dissertation complicates traditional associations between the cultural impact of Darwin's ideas and the determinism and social Darwinism often associated with literary naturalism during its classic phase. Beginning with a chapter comparing the treatment of animality and evolution in works by Frank Norris and Jack London, I trace the imaginative and metanaturalistic reshaping of these narratives across the century through chapters on abolition and evolution in novels by William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, evolution as apocalypse in Bernard Malamud's God's Grace and Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy, and animals, evolution, and language in Edward Albee's plays. Varying in the scope of its concerns about natural and cultural inheritance, each of my chapters considers how animality operates as a recursive trope against the disembodiment of the subject, expressing both possibilities and fears about what it means to be human.Item Life's Rich Pattern: The Role of Statistics and Probability in Nineteenth Century Argumentation for Theories of Evolution, Variation, and Heredity(2006-04-26) Wynn, James; Fahnestock, Jeanne; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Though modern philosophers of science recognize the inappropriateness of the reduction of all scientific investigations to mathematics, mathematics and science share a long history with one another during which mathematics has been employed as a major component of scientific argumentation. Over the last twenty years, rhetoricians have done substantial work studying the role of argumentation in science (Bazerman 1988; Gross 1990, 2002; Myers 1990; Fahnestock 1999); however, despite the importance of mathematics in making scientific arguments, little effort has been made to understand the role mathematics has played in making these arguments. This dissertation represents a move to resolve this shortcoming by investigating the role of mathematics in arguments in evolutionary biology from the middle of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. In the first part of the nineteenth century, the mass collection and mathematical assessment of data for scientific purposes provides the context for understanding some of the rhetorical choices of an important group of natural philosophers and biologists who developed arguments in the second half of the century about the nature of variation, evolution, and heredity. In the works of Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Francis Galton, and Karl Pearson, arguments from probability and statistics play important roles as support for their arguments and as a source of invention for their claims. This investigation of the rhetorical situations of these four biologists, their arguments, and the role of the principles, operations, and formulae of probability and statistics supports the position that mathematization had a major impact on the nature of scientific evidence in the nineteenth century. What it also suggests is that, though mathematized arguments may have had a great deal of credibility within the scientific community in general, factors such as the stature of the rhetor and of their biological theory within their specific discourse communities played an equally important role in the persuasiveness of their arguments.