The Body Made Visible: Scientific Practices of Seeing and Literary Naturalism

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dc.contributor.advisorAuerbach, Jonathanen_US
dc.contributor.authorSolomon, Jennifer Welchen_US
dc.contributor.departmentEnglish Language and Literatureen_US
dc.contributor.publisherDigital Repository at the University of Marylanden_US
dc.contributor.publisherUniversity of Maryland (College Park, Md.)en_US
dc.date.accessioned2005-02-02T06:37:29Z
dc.date.available2005-02-02T06:37:29Z
dc.date.issued2004-11-29en_US
dc.description.abstractThis study examines how ideas about the body in the late 19th century--how to see them better and how best to represent them--are circulating in discussions among physiologists and sociologists, and how naturalist writers engage these discussions with their own representational strategies. Often, what their works create is a strong tension between methods of corporeal control--immobilizing bodies, abstracting bodies, establishing distance from bodies--and the fact that many bodies refuse to submit to any normative power. I argue that scientists develop visual strategies as a way of learning more about bodies, and ultimately this knowledge can be used for purposes of social reform and regulation. Likewise, naturalist writers focus their narrative upon the body as a way of demonstrating lack of agency and problems with developing identity. In using some of the strategies for bodily representation that physiologists and sociologists do, naturalist writers also point to social problems that warrant change. In Chapter One, I trace the desire for bodily penetration on the part of physiologists and naturalist writers such as Émile Zola and Frank Norris. I argue that the bodily interior is conceived of as mechanistic and that naturalist writers use visual methods of magnification and immobilizationsuccessful in the physiological fieldto elicit a sense of the interior. In Chapter Two, I discuss how physiologists and sociologists use abstraction to reduce bodies to an essence as a way of ordering excessive detail for measuring purposes. I argue that naturalist writers like Norris and Stephen Crane also engage in abstraction, producing familiar types on the one hand and surreal figures on the other. Finally, in Chapter Three, I examine the multitude of bodiesthe crowds. Again, I examine the relationship between social science and visual strategies of order. I juxtapose the early actualities of Edison and the Lumière Brothers with naturalist texts by Edith Wharton, Norris, and Crane, examining ways that visual strategies of ordering crowdschiefly by establishing distance and perspectiveare used and subverted in literary texts so as to highlight the disruptive power of the crowd.en_US
dc.format.extent2971975 bytes
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdf
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2059
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledLiterature, Americanen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledAmerican Studiesen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledvisualen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrollednaturalismen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledbodyen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledNorrisen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledCraneen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledWhartonen_US
dc.titleThe Body Made Visible: Scientific Practices of Seeing and Literary Naturalismen_US
dc.typeDissertationen_US

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