Lamarckianism(s)

One of the most startling developments in the post-genomic biology of C21 is the revival of what the geneticists Eve Jablonka and Marion Lamb call the “Lamarckian dimension.” The Lamarckian premises that organisms have the... [ view full abstract ]

One of the most startling developments in the post-genomic biology of C21 is the revival of what the geneticists Eve Jablonka and Marion Lamb call the “Lamarckian dimension.” The Lamarckian premises that organisms have the power of self-organization; that organism and environment exist in constant recursive rapports; and that acquired characteristics are transmitted across the generations were premises discredited the rise of the genetics-based neo-Darwinian Modern Synthesis of the 1940s. But the gene-centered biology of C19 has been overturned in C21; epigenetics, evo-devo, niche construction, and infomatics (to name no more) reveal that Lamarckian processes have been going on all along. There is also, demonstrably, a Lamarckian dimension to the new materialist and post- human turn in critical and feminist theories, as scholars like Karen Barad challenge the boundary between nature and culture and theorists like Elizabeth Wilson elicit biology as the ally and not the antagonist of feminism.

This position paper argues that Lamarckian thinking –and Lamarck’s model of the evolutionary self—has been visible in American literature across the long nineteenth century, and that our perduring critical paradigm of an autonomous liberal subject has made the Lamarckian body impossible to see. Taking a cluster of examples (Charles Brockden Brown, Margaret Fuller, Thoreau, Whitman, Stowe, DuBois, Wharton, Glaspell, and Toomer) I will both show that Lamarck is central to American and African-American visions of self-development. I will also consider just why the disciplines of American literary criticism and American Studies (and their emergence during the Cold War and the establishing of the Modern Dogma) had a hand in obscuring that Lamarckian subject.