DOCSLIB.ORG

How HG Wells, Upton Sinclair, and DH Lawrence

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
How HG Wells, Upton Sinclair, and DH Lawrence Becoming (Post)Human: How H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, and D.H. Lawrence Tried to Alter the Course of Human Evolution Author: Alison Pasinella Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:104050 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2014 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Boston College The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of English BECOMING (POST)HUMAN: HOW H.G. WELLS, UPTON SINCLAIR, AND D.H. LAWRENCE TRIED TO ALTER THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION a dissertation by ALISON PASINELLA submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2014 © copyright by ALISON PASINELLA 2014 Becoming (Post)Human: How H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, and D.H. Lawrence Tried to Alter the Course of Human Evolution by Alison Pasinella Dissertation Advisor: Marjorie Howes ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the dual impacts of evolutionary theory and the industrial revolution on late 19th and early 20th century transatlantic fiction, particularly in articulating the concepts of perfectibility and degeneration. Darwinian evolutionary theory made real the possibility failing to successfully evolve and adapt as a species could cause humans to go extinct or, maybe worse, devolve into monstrosities. The industrial revolution, on the other hand, enabled humans to conquer nature to a degree that suggested a power to become engineers of our own future world and selves. At the same time, this ability to understand and alter ourselves dissolved the distinction between humans and machines, and the realities of industrial technology under a capitalist system revealed that humans could also be reduced to machine-minding cogs. The two (sometimes conflated) categories of animal and machine, which we have long used to distinguish ourselves as humans, were breaking down and threatening to undo our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. The authors whose works I discuss in this dissertation recognized that human could no longer be considered a stable category or entity, and they worked from within the received conceptual language of animals and machines to challenge our ideas about what being human means. They believed that by using imagery and narrative to re- articulate human identity and purpose, they could change behavior, morality, politics, economics, culture, and the future evolution of the species. In this dissertation, I examine the different approaches that H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, and D.H. Lawrence used to engage this dangerous and exciting problem of reimagining human meaning and human potential through narrative. By situating these authors in conversation with each other, I am able to highlight different facets, concerns, and shortcomings of each approach. This study also reveals that these authors were already engaging in a dynamic discussion currently gaining prominence and urgency in our own time as we explore through science, technology, philosophy, and narrative what we are and what we want to be. Table of Contents I. Acknowledgements ii II. Introduction: (R)Evolutionary Narratives 1 III. Chapter One: “Are we not men?”: H.G. Wells and the Coevolution of Humans and Technology 21 • The Human Animal 32 • Evolution and Technology 59 • Revolution and War 79 IV. Chapter Two: “A new and higher kind of strength”: Upton Sinclair’s Precarious Evolutionary Balance Between Animal Sympathy and Mechanical Efficiency 92 • Predators, Prey, Parasites, and Cannibals 101 • Machines, Technology, and Engineered/Engineering Man 123 • Sexual Selection and Engineered Motherhood 139 V. Chapter Three: “With a hope to quench the malady at its source”: D.H. Lawrence and the Choice Between Vital Embodiment and Lifeless Machinery 151 • Mind and Body 167 • Man and Woman 192 • Revolution and War 207 VI. Epilogue 222 VII. Notes 233 VIII. Works Cited 244 Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to the nurturing community of Boston College for fostering my intellectual and personal growth through these years. The wonderful faculty and staff of the English department made BC feel like a home. I would like to thank Jim Wallace, Paul Lewis, and Lisa Fluet for working with me on my minor and major exams, helping establish the foundations upon which this dissertation was built. I am grateful to Chris Wilson, Robert Stanton, Mary Crane, Jim Smith, and Suzanne Matson for their generosity and friendship. They made me a better scholar and a better teacher by their example. I would also like to thank Laura Tanner for guiding and supporting me through the final stages of the degree requirements. I am lucky to have had many opportunities to teach at BC, and I am grateful to the amazing students for their eagerness and enthusiasm and for working with me on some of the texts and concepts that form the basis of this dissertation. BC would not have been the same without the warm and supportive community of graduate students, and Alex Puente, Nick Gupta, Becky Troeger, Katie Daily- Bruckner, and Alison Cotti-Lowell have been particularly great friends and support. Amy Witherbee deserves special gratitude for inspiring me early on and helping me make sense of my own ideas. Matt Heitzman and Wendy Cannella have shared so many special moments with me that they have become family, and I am grateful to Wendy for sharing my enthusiasm for this project and being willing to talk through my ideas and challenges. I can’t thank my dissertation committee members enough for all of the time and attention they put into this project. Robert Kern’s gentle guidance and belief in me ii formed the backbone of my BC experience from my first days on campus. Judith Wilt has inspired me with her insatiable intellectual curiosity and has strengthened my understanding of many subjects with her breadth of knowledge and attention to detail. Kalpana Seshadri’s passion, expertise, and enthusiasm have given new life and depth to my own work and opened my eyes to new exciting possibilities. I would especially like to thank Marjorie Howes, who was willing to go with me on a meandering journey that took us both rather far from where we started or expected to go. I am grateful for her calm wisdom, her sense of humor, and for her tireless work in reading, discussing, and challenging the ideas that have evolved into this final product. I also want to thank my family for all the love and encouragement they have given me. My aunts and uncles, Betsy Connors, Kassie Randall, and Joseph and Gerard Fuqua, always gave me an extra boost in confidence just when I needed it most. My sister, Ashley, has been by my side and shared the intellectual curiosity that got me started and carries me onward. The love and support of my parents, Ben and Marjorie Van Vort, have made everything I’ve accomplished possible. And finally, I want to thank my husband, Brett Pasinella, and our daughter, Imogen, for filling my life with love and fun and for making everything more worthwhile. iii Introduction: (R)Evolutionary Narratives Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future. Charles Darwin The Descent of Man (1871) In his 1906 essay “Future in America,” H.G. Wells confesses that he has always possessed a “mental idiosyncrasy” of looking at life not for what is, but for what it is in the process of becoming.1 This “anticipatory habit” he shared with many writers and thinkers of his day, including Upton Sinclair and D.H. Lawrence. Two compelling and, I will argue, interrelated factors that made the turn of the century in Europe and America a period preoccupied with change were the increasing influence of the evolutionary theories put forth by Charles Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck2 and the dramatic and pervasive impact of the Industrial Revolution.3 The first half of the twentieth century was a time of destabilization in almost every imaginable way, including social, economic, political, environmental, and ontological. It was also, therefore, a time of both great anxiety and great hope. Earlier fears about social decay became imbricated with fears about species degeneration, and for the first time in history, it became possible to believe that humanity could and should intentionally evolve into something else. The authors whose works I explore in this dissertation were attempting to shape the human species through their writing. They were convinced that at their moment in history, humanity had reached a crossroads in its evolutionary journey and was veering toward self-destruction. Their literary mission, at times stated overtly, was to awaken their readers to the perils of the present course and to galvanize them to actively reclaim 1 and reshape the destiny of the human race. As part of that process, Wells, Sinclair, and Lawrence sought to redefine what being human means. They attempted to establish new ethical imperatives and to deconstruct what they considered to be the false belief in a stable reality, the dangers of capitalist ideology, and the misguided moral values of their day, aiming their critique at the level of the individual organism and of the social/political system. While Wells and Sinclair predicted that engineers, doctors, and other middle- class professionals versed in the sciences of technology and biology would undertake the management of human evolution, they also clearly believed, as Lawrence did, that novelists were the best equipped to understand the idiosyncrasies of human nature but also that they alone had the ability to alter minds and hearts by stimulating imagination and evoking feelings through narrative engagement.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Impacts of Future Agricultural Change on Ecosystem Service Indicators Sam S
    https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-2019-44 Preprint. Discussion started: 15 August 2019 c Author(s) 2019. CC BY 4.0 License. Impacts of future agricultural change on ecosystem service indicators Sam S. Rabin1, Peter Alexander2,3, Roslyn Henry2, Peter Anthoni1, Thomas A. M. Pugh4,5, Mark Rounsevell1, and Almut Arneth1 1Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research / Atmospheric Environmental Research, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany 2School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, UK 3Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Security, The Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, University of Edinburgh, UK 4School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, UK 5Birmingham Institute of Forest Research, University of Birmingham, UK Correspondence: Sam S. Rabin ([email protected]) Abstract. A future of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, changing climate, growing human populations, and shifting socioeconomic conditions means that the global agricultural system will need to adapt in order to feed the world. These changes will affect not only agricultural land, but terrestrial ecosystems in general. Here, we use the coupled land use and vegetation model LandSyMM to quantify future land use change and resulting impacts on ecosystem service indicators 5 including carbon sequestration, runoff, and nitrogen pollution. We additionally hold certain variables, such as climate or land use, constant to assess the relative contribution of different drivers to the projected impacts. While indicators of some ecosystem services (e.g., flood and drought risk) see trends that are mostly dominated by the direct effects of climate change, others (e.g., carbon sequestration) depend critically on land use and management. Scenarios in which climate change mitigation is more difficult (Shared Socioeconomic Pathways 3 and 5) have the strongest impacts on ecosystem service indicators, such as a loss 10 of 13–19% of land in biodiversity hotspots and a 28% increase in nitrogen pollution.
    [Show full text]
  • The Advent Futures Studies and Research Curriculum Guide; the Advent Futures Studies and Learning Resources Guide
    DOCUMENT MUNE ED 099 249 110 007 909 AUTHOR Miller, David C.; Hunt, Ronald L. TITLE The Advent Futures Studies and Research Curriculum Guide; The Advent Futures Studies and Learning Resources Guide. PUB DATE 73 NOTE 209p. AVAILABLE FROM DCM Associates, 908 fox Plaza, San Francisco, California 9410 2 (85.00 each for the curriculum and learning resources guides) EDRS PRICE MF-$0.75 RC Not Available from EDRS. PLUS POSTAGE. DESCRIPTORS Class Activities; Course Content; Curriculum Guides; *Futures (of Society); Higher Education; Instructional Materials; Lesson Plans; *Prediction; Reference Materials; Resource Guides; *Social Change; *Trend Analysis; *Values ABSTRACT This two-part curriculum and resource guide provides an undergraduate and graduate level coursemethodology tn contemporary future studies and research. The objectives ofthis curriculum are to create awareness and appreciation of the fundamental concepts, methods, and limitations of future studies. The curriculum design is conceptual, general in nature, and designed to be used with topical content and focus provided by the instructor and/or the students. The curriculum outline of 15 free-standing modules includes topics on standard study procedure, thetime-line, appraising futures reports, futures studies methods, change, alternative futures, forecastability, confidence in forecasts, attitudes toward futures, causality and futures, manageability of futures, values and futures, transcendental change, and stability. The learning resources guide is designed for use with the curriculum guide and includes suggested exercises, assignments, and references for each of the 15 modules; lists of basic reading references and useful 16mm films; and referral title lists of useful popular music recordings and future-oriented poems. (Author/DE) S OE PAR TmE N OF HEAL TN PERMISSION 10 Re P11000C1 THIS EDUCATION WLLFARE COPYRIGHTED MA II It 'At ST M1CRO NATIONAL soditToTta OF PICAUL ONI.YI4jS 90N C T D pY aDutAtiON wp lit ft 't 6'140 1 rA.I.
    [Show full text]
  • Looking Ahead to 2050: Evolution of Agricultural Trade Policies
    Looking Ahead to 2050: Evolution of Agricultural Trade Policies Tim Josling* The past four decades have seen remarkable developments in agricultural trade and in the policies and institutions that provide the environment for that trade. Agricultural trade has moved from being dominated by the purchase of raw materials from land-rich countries and those blessed with tropical climates to a complex network of marketing chains supplying food and other farm products to all corners of the world. The multilateral trade rules have evolved from informal codes of conduct for manufactured goods that had little impact on agricultural trade to a treaty-based agreement that determines in what form and by how much governments can intervene in agricultural markets at home and at the border. The regional trade rules that have been adopted in an explosion of preferential agreements also increasingly apply to agricultural and food trade, leading to a partial polarization of trade around several major markets. The task of this paper is to discuss future trends in agricultural and food trade policies. How are the institutions, domestic, regional or multilateral, likely to evolve over the next forty years? Will the emphasis be on consolidation of progress already made? Will globalization reach its ultimate endpoint of a borderless market for agricultural and food products with consumer choice determining trade flows along with the cool logic of sourcing from low-cost suppliers? Or are we likely to see trade evolve in different directions? Will we see a resurgence
    [Show full text]
  • The Inventory of the H.G. Wells Collection #458
    The Inventory of the H.G. Wells Collection #458 Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center Wells, Herbert George, 1866 - 1946 Purchi.se 1969 Box 1 Letters . 16 AIS, l postcard AIB, 3 holograph envelopes ✓1899 AIS 1899 N0 vember 27, Sandgate, Ken} to Harold Grost, Esq. ✓ 1900 AIS 1900 January 28, Sandgate, Kent, to "Connell" Conal 0 •Riordan 2 PPo ✓AIS 1900 October 19, Sandgate, Keny to 'lftMy Dear Sir" 3 PPo on l Marked "iBrivaten o V ALS 1900 November _22, Sandgate, Kent, to 11Dear Sir11 2 PP• on l Marked 11Private 11 ·v'Envelope holograph. Postmarked 1900 November 23. Addressed to William H. Maas, Esqo, Londono ✓1905 AIS 1905 April 30, Sandgate, to the Director of trre Natural History Museum~ ✓1914 ALS 1914 April 7, t,1ondonJ to «.DEar Sirs" ✓ 1922 AIS nodo, Dun.mow, to Mrs o Dawson Scott. Envelope holograph. Postli"..arked 1922, June 12, London. Addressed to Mrs. Dawson Scott. ✓ ALS n.d., London, to Mrs 0 Scotto Envelope holograph. Postmarked 1922, June 15, Londono Addressed to Mrs. Dawson Scott. ( 1924 AIS 1924 November 3, Dunmow, to Miss Hordero /1925 AIS 1925 June 8, Dunmow, to Miss H0 rdero v/1928 Postcard ALSo Postmarked 1928 January 21, London, to Mrs• Dawson Scotto V" 1935 ALS 1935 May 15, r.Londonl, to -Miss Hordero Wells, Herbert George 1866 - 1946 Page 2 AL5 November 15, n .y., r.London l to Lord Du...visa.ny. AL5 Ilodo [London] to 11 :My dear Sir" 4 PP• on 2 cards. Ats n.d. Dunmow to Mr. Ridling ?, 1 P• ' .AL5 n.d.
    [Show full text]
  • Peter D. Ward – Curriculum Vitae Born May 12, 1949, Seattle Washington, USA Married, Two Children
    1 Peter D. Ward – Curriculum Vitae Born May 12, 1949, Seattle Washington, USA Married, two children 1. Education B.S., 1971 Interdisciplinary Studies (Paleoecology), University of Washington, Seattle M.S., 1973 Geology, University of Washington, Seattle Ph.D., 1976 Geology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Employment 1976-1978 Assistant Professor, Department of Geology, Ohio State University 1978-1981 Assistant Professor, Department of Geology, University of California, Davis 1981-1983 Associate Professor with Tenure, Department of Geology and Division of Environmental Sciences, University of California, Davis 1982 Visiting Scientist, Laboratoire Arago (C.N.R.S.), Banyuls, France 1984 Professor, Department of Geology, University of California, Davis 1985 Associate Professor, University of Washington 1986 Professor, Department of Geological Sciences, and Adjunct Professor, Department of Zoology, University of Washington 1989- 1996 Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology, Thomas Burke Memorial Museum, University of Washington 1991. Visiting Scientist, South African Museum 1992-1996 Chairman and Head, Division of Geology and Paleontology, Thomas Burke Memorial Museum, University of Washington 2000. Visiting Scientist, South African Museum 2001 – present, Adjunct Professor, Department of Astronomy, University of Washington 2003- present, Professor, Dept. of Biology, and Professor, Department of Earth and Space Sciences, The University of Washington 2007- Adjunct Curator, Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, University of
    [Show full text]
  • Bealby; a Holiday
    HANDBOUND AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS BE ALBY BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE TIME MACHINE THE WONDERFUL VISIT THE WHEELS OF CHANCE THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND (Short Stories) THE INVISIBLE MAN THE WAR OF THE WORLDS LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON THE SEA LADY ANTICIPATIONS THE FOOD OF THE GODS IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET A MODERN UTOPIA KIPPS NEW WORLDS FOR OLD THE FUTURE IN AMERICA THE WAR IN THE AIR TONO BUNGAY ANN VERONICA THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY THE NEW MACHIAVELLI MARRIAGE THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD THE WORLD SET FREE B E A LB Y A HOLI'DAY ,X BY H. G. WELLS METHUEN & GO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.G. LONDON First Published in 1915 PR 5774 DEDICATION AND NOTE TO THE READER irresistible impulse made me give a lead- to a Lord Chancellor ANing part in this story who delighted in Hegel. I fought against in the it, in vain. Well I knew that there was world a Lord Chancellor who read Hegel and was in no other respect like my Lord Chancellor. No one who knows the real man will for a moment is meant for imagine that my figure him, are physically, temperamentally they absolutely unlike. But there is always that provincial " " fool who reads behind the lines and who and "cari- is always detecting "portraits" catures" in innocently creative work. Him, " not take I warn. You may say, But why it Lord Chief out the figure, alter it, make other mental Justice for example, give it some " habit than the Hegelian ? That shows you know nothing of the art of fiction.
    [Show full text]
  • European Journal of American Studies, 11-2 | 2016, « Summer 2016 » [En Ligne], Mis En Ligne Le 11 Août 2016, Consulté Le 08 Juillet 2021
    European journal of American studies 11-2 | 2016 Summer 2016 Édition électronique URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11535 DOI : 10.4000/ejas.11535 ISSN : 1991-9336 Éditeur European Association for American Studies Référence électronique European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016, « Summer 2016 » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 11 août 2016, consulté le 08 juillet 2021. URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11535 ; DOI : https:// doi.org/10.4000/ejas.11535 Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 8 juillet 2021. Creative Commons License 1 SOMMAIRE The Land of the Future: British Accounts of the USA at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century David Seed The Reader in It: Henry James’s “Desperate Plagiarism” Hivren Demir-Atay Contradictory Depictions of the New Woman: Reading Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence as a Dialogic Novel Sevinc Elaman-Garner “Nothing Can Touch You as Long as You Work”: Love and Work in Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden and For Whom the Bell Tolls Lauren Rule Maxwell People, Place and Politics: D’Arcy McNickle’s (Re)Valuing of Native American Principles John L. Purdy “Why Don’t You Just Say It as Simply as That?”: The Progression of Parrhesia in the Early Novels of Joseph Heller Peter Templeton “The Land That He Saw Looked Like a Paradise. It Was Not, He Knew”: Suburbia and the Maladjusted American Male in John Cheever’s Bullet Park Harriet Poppy Stilley The Writing of “Dreck”: Consumerism, Waste and Re-use in Donald Barthelme’s Snow White Rachele Dini The State You’re In: Citizenship, Sovereign
    [Show full text]
  • The Masses Index 1911-1917
    The Masses Index 1911-1917 1 Radical Magazines ofthe Twentieth Century Series THE MASSES INDEX 1911-1917 1911-1917 By Theodore F. Watts \ Forthcoming volumes in the "Radical Magazines ofthe Twentieth Century Series:" The Liberator (1918-1924) The New Masses (Monthly, 1926-1933) The New Masses (Weekly, 1934-1948) Foreword The handful ofyears leading up to America's entry into World War I was Socialism's glorious moment in America, its high-water mark ofenergy and promise. This pregnant moment in time was the result ofdecades of ferment, indeed more than 100 years of growing agitation to curb the excesses of American capitalism, beginning with Jefferson's warnings about the deleterious effects ofurbanized culture, and proceeding through the painful dislocation ofthe emerging industrial economy, the ex- cesses ofspeculation during the Civil War, the rise ofthe robber barons, the suppression oflabor unions, the exploitation of immigrant labor, through to the exposes ofthe muckrakers. By the decade ofthe ' teens, the evils ofcapitalism were widely acknowledged, even by champions ofthe system. Socialism became capitalism's logical alternative and the rallying point for the disenchanted. It was, of course, merely a vision, largely untested. But that is exactly why the socialist movement was so formidable. The artists and writers of the Masses didn't need to defend socialism when Rockefeller's henchmen were gunning down mine workers and their families in Ludlow, Colorado. Eventually, the American socialist movement would shatter on the rocks ofthe Russian revolution, when it was finally confronted with the reality ofa socialist state, but that story comes later, after the Masses was run from the stage.
    [Show full text]
  • Thorstein Veblen and HG Wells
    020 brant (453-476) 1/30/08 9:14 AM Page 453 View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by IUScholarWorks PATRICK BRANTLINGER AND RICHARD HIGGINS Waste and Value: Thorstein Veblen and H. G. Wells Trashmass, trashmosh. On a large enough scale, trashmos. And— of course—macrotrashm! . Really, just think of it, macrotrashm! Stanislaw Lem, The Furturological Congress INTRODUCING FILTH: DIRT, DISGUST, and Modern Life, William Cohen declares: “polluting or filthy objects” can “become conceivably productive, the discarded sources in which riches may lie.”1 “Riches,” though, have often been construed as “waste.” The reversibility of the poles—wealth and waste, waste and wealth— became especially apparent with the advent of a so-called consumer society dur- ing the latter half of the nineteenth century. A number of the first analysts of that economistic way of understanding modernity, including Thorstein Veblen and H. G. Wells, made this reversibility central to their ideas.2 But such reversibility has a much longer history, involving a general shift from economic and social the- ories that seek to make clear distinctions between wealth and waste to modern ones where the distinctions blur, as in Veblen and Wells; in some versions of post- modernism the distinctions dissolve altogether. Cohen also writes: “As it breaches subject/object distinctions . filth . covers two radically different imaginary categories, which I designate polluting and reusable. The former—filth proper—is wholly unregenerate.”3 Given the reversibility of the poles (and various modes of the scrambling or hybridization of values), what is the meaning of “filth proper”? Proper filth? Filthy property? Is there any filth that is not potentially “reusable” and, hence, valuable? Shit is valu- able as fertilizer, and so on.
    [Show full text]
  • There Will Be Oil: the Celebration and Inevitability of Petroleum Through Upton Sinclair and Paul Thomas Anderson
    Rhode Island College Digital Commons @ RIC Honors Projects Overview Honors Projects 2018 There Will Be Oil: The eleC bration and Inevitability of Petroleum through Upton Sinclair and Paul Thomas Anderson Sarah Mae Fleming [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.ric.edu/honors_projects Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Other Film and Media Studies Commons Recommended Citation Fleming, Sarah Mae, "There Will Be Oil: The eC lebration and Inevitability of Petroleum through Upton Sinclair and Paul Thomas Anderson" (2018). Honors Projects Overview. 142. https://digitalcommons.ric.edu/honors_projects/142 This Honors is brought to you for free and open access by the Honors Projects at Digital Commons @ RIC. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Projects Overview by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ RIC. For more information, please contact [email protected]. There Will Be Oil: The Celebration and Inevitability of Petroleum through Upton Sinclair and Paul Thomas Anderson Sarah Mae Fleming English 492 Undergraduate Honors Thesis “Godspeed! Pope given a Lamborghini, replete in papal gold and white.”1 This BBC news feed and the attendant video went viral in a matter of moments providing a glimpse of the intricate relationship between western culture and petroleum. Pope Francis blesses the custom Lamborghini, before it is sent to a charity auction. Excess, consumption, capitalism, petroleum, religion, culture—all combined during a blessing of an expensive automobile by the pontiff. This short video gives witness to how oil quietly soaks our world. I started this project with the intention of conducting a Marxist study of the novel Oil! (Upton Sinclair, 1927) and the film There Will Be Blood, (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007) in the context of American Westerns and their relationship to capitalism.
    [Show full text]
  • Making Meaning Together: Information, Rumor, and Propaganda in British Fiction of the First World War
    ABSTRACT Title of Document: MAKING MEANING TOGETHER: INFORMATION, RUMOR, AND PROPAGANDA IN BRITISH FICTION OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR. Rebecca Borden, Ph.D., 2012 Directed By: Associate Professor Peter Mallios, Department of English. Through an examination of fiction by H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and John Buchan, this dissertation examines information as a category as it exists under conditions of modernity, and how the contours of and changes in definitions and understandings of modern information become more visible, and are likely accelerated by, the complex information challenges brought about by the disruptions of the First World War. Given that “information” is a key building-block in understanding systems of knowledge in modernity, this dissertation incorporates theoretical constructs describing information drawn from a variety of disciplines, all of which circle around the problems and concerns of the increasingly saturated, complex, and untethered nature of information as experienced by an individual in modern life. This project also highlights the role that rumor plays in modernity. The war years bring an expansion of government-directed information control, both in the form of actively produced propaganda and in the form of censorship, disrupting the conduits along which information travels under normal conditions. Rumor, generally considered a pre-modern form of communication, remains a part of modern information systems and provides a mechanism for making meaning when other sources of information begin to fail. This dissertation also considers how “wartime” fiction, as a category distinct from pre-war and post-war fiction, is a revealing domain of literature in its own right, and one that has been overlooked in scholarship on literature of the First World War.
    [Show full text]
  • HG Wells and Dystopian Science Fiction by Gareth Davies-Morris
    The Sleeper Stories: H. G. Wells and Dystopian Science Fiction by Gareth Davies-Morris • Project (book) timeline, Fall 2017 • Wells biography • Definitions: SF, structuralism, dystopia • “Days to Come” (models phys. opps.) • “Dream of Arm.” (models int. opps.) • When the Sleeper Wakes • Intertextuality: Sleeper vs. Zemiatin’s We • Chapter excerpt Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) The legendary Frank R. Paul rendered several H. G. Wells narratives as covers for Hugo Gernsback’s influential pulp magazine Amazing Stories, which reprinted many of Wells’s early SF works. Clockwise from top: “The Crystal Egg” (1926), “In the Abyss” (1926), The War of the Worlds (1927), and When the Sleeper Wakes (1928) Frank R. Paul, cover paintings for Amazing Stories, 1926-1928. “Socialism & the Irrational” -- Wells-Shaw Conference, London School of Economics Fall 2017 Keynote: Michael Cox Sci-Fi artwork exhibit at the Royal Albert Hall! Fabian stained -glass window in LSE “Pray devoutly, hammer stoutly” Gareth with Professor Patrick Parrinder of England’s U. of Reading • Studied at the Normal School (now Imperial College London) with T.H. Huxley. • Schoolteacher, minor journalist until publication of The Time Machine (1895). • By 1910, known worldwide for his “scientific romances” and sociological forecasting. • By the 1920s, syndicated journalist moving in the highest social circles in England and USA. • Met Lenin, Stalin, and several US Presidents. • Outline of History (1920) a massive best-seller. • World State his philosophical goal; Sankey Declaration/UN
    [Show full text]