Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This book is the result of the intersection of two lines of research I initially thought of as quite separate. It had its origins in research that I conducted for Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era (2007). That book focused on eighteenthand nineteenth-century theories of sympathy, a term that then referred not only to moral relationships among individuals but also to a physiological action-at-adistance that occurred within a living body. Although I was not able to include discussion of the latter, medical sense of sympathy in that earlier project, my research on this topic put me on the path of those Romantic concepts of life that are the focus of this book. The book is also the result of a quite different line of research, one focused on the cultural logic and economics of our own, contemporary systems of biological research and healthcare. Relatively little of my work in this area has engaged literature , and I have focused primarily on technologies and techniques developed since the 1970s (e.g., genetic engineering, organ transplantation, and biobanking ). Yet with some degree of regularity, peculiar resonances emerged between my literary critical work on the Romantic era and my more sociological work on contemporary biotechnology. I became fascinated, for example, with the final stages of the process by means of which contemporary biologists create immortal cell lines, as cells were lowered into waist-high cylindrical liquid nitrogen tanks to be frozen. I saw these cylinders as urns that quite literally produced what Keats had called frozen time, as the liquid nitrogen suspended the living processes of this matter so that the biologist could return to these same cells later, as though no time at all had passed for the cells. When, at about the same time, I read John Hunter’s late-eighteenth-century reflections on the newly coined term “suspended animation,” and reflected on his hopes that suspended animation might allow for a new kind of human existence and a new mode of scientific observation , I became convinced that it was worth pursuing further these resonances between the Romantic era and the present—and this volume is the result of that viii acknowledgments endeavor (though early versions of chapters 2 and 6 appeared in PMLA and European Romantic Review, respectively). Because this project has been under way for a relatively long time, and because I have pursued its concepts, questions, and problems across several research communities, I have been assisted by a quite considerable list of people, and I especially wish to thank the following: Lindsey Andrews; Alan Bewell; James Bono; Andrew Burkett; David Clark (to whom I owe the phrase “experimenting with experimentation”); Matthew Cohen; David Collings; Allison Dushane; Michael Eberle-Sinatra and the members of the Technologies, Media, and Representations in Nineteenth-Century France and England Research Group; Tim Fulford; Denise Gigante and the members of the Seminar on Enlightenment and Revolution ; Nick Halmi; Orit Halpern; Tim Lenoir; Tracie Matysik, Sam Baker, and Phillipa Levine and the members of the Nineteenth-Century Workshop; Sean Metzger; Colin Milburn; Thomas Pfau; Michelle Puetz; Phillip Thurtle; Charles Rzepka; Alexander Schlutz; Barbara Herrnstein Smith; Alan Vardy; Priscilla Wald; and Nancy Yousef. I also wish to thank Colleen M. Weum and Cheyenne Maria Roduin for assistance with textual resources in the Health Sciences Rare Book Room at the University of Washington; Duke University’s Arts and Sciences Research Council, which provided vital financial support for this project at various points; and the National Humanities Center and the Duke Endowment Fellowship, which made it possible for me to complete the manuscript of the book in the Center’s convivial surroundings. I am also grateful to Meghan O’Neil, Chris Catanese, and Glenn Perkins for their able proofreading assistance, and to Matthew McAdam, my editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press, with whom it was a joy to work. And last, but definitely not least, my heartfelt thanks go to Inga Pollmann, who not only patiently read and commented on many drafts of each of these chapters, and whose work on the life of film has been an inspiration for my own project here, but who has, in addition, always been a vitalizing pneuma for me. Experimental Life This page intentionally left blank ...