Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature

by Robert Mitchell

Experimental Life establishes the multiple ways in which Romantic authors appropriated the notion of experimentation from the natural sciences. Winner of the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, BSLS Book Prize of the British Society for Literature and Science If the objective of the Romantic movement was nothing less than to redefine the meaning of life itself, what role did experiments play in this movement? While earlier scholarship has established both the importance of science generally and vitalism specifically, with regard to Romanticism no study has investigated what it meant for artists to experiment and how those experiments related to their interest in the concept of life. Experimental Life draws on approaches and ideas from contemporary science studies, proposing the concept of experimental vitalism to show both how Romantic authors appropriated the concept of experimentation from the sciences and the impact of their appropriation on post-Romantic concepts of literature and art. Robert Mitchell navigates complex conceptual arenas such as network theory, gift exchange, paranoia, and biomedia and introduces new concepts, such as cryptogamia, chylopoietic discourse, trance-plantation, and the poetics of suspension. As a result, Experimental Life is a wide-ranging summation and extension of the current state of literary studies, the history of science, cultural critique, and theory.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published October 2, 2013

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read superb scholarship like this book by Robert Mitchell, I want to cheer and cry at the same time -- cry, oh woe is me! How can I ever rise to the level of this scholarship? and cheer, yes, this is the way scholarship should be approached. Also, I want to cry because I realize how much Mitchell has already written, material that I would benefit in knowing, and I also know time is too short to read everything. But as Scarlett said, tomorrow is another day! Let me cite from the final paragraph of the book which helps get a sense of the scope of the project: "Artistic experimentation shares with [Isabelle] Stengers's image of philosophical experimentation the desire to produce something like friction. Yet in place of Stengers's concept of friction, which is drawn from the physical sciences, I have developed here a series of other terms drawn from the sciences of life, such as suspension, disorientation, nausea, media, and cryptogamia [the seduction of the human by vegetable vitality]. There is no either/or contrast to be drawn here, of course, as we can see friction as one among several concepts for 'recovering what has been obscured by specialized selection' [Stengers, "Constructivist Reading", p. 95, in Theory, Culture and Society, 25.4, 2008]. Yet the contribution of Romantic experimental vitalism is to emphasize that the friction of experimentation always takes place within the milieux and atmopsheres of living beings" (p. 229). In other words, while focusing on the Romantic era, Mitchell is fully able and willing to bring those issues directly into our present, and does so throughout the book and especially in the concluding chapter. I hope to derive some particular benefits from the way he develop this experimental vitalism and life for my work on French Romantic writers.