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Darwin and the Narrative of Human Origins

Darwin and the Narrative of Human Origins. Effect. Not about direct authorial influence

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Darwin and the Narrative of Human Origins

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  1. Darwin and the Narrative of Human Origins

  2. Effect • Not about direct authorial influence • But the operation of a radical new narrative of human origins and story of human development upon cultural consciousness (and unconsciousness) the evidence of which we can see in a range of cultural products and by-products of the human imagination in the late 19th century and early 20th. • Perhaps the greatest “effect” of Darwin is Modernism itself, the Great experimental period in western art from 1890-1940. • Effect, After-effect, Side-effect

  3. Perspective • Major, seismic shift in perspective • Exampled in Cézanne, where physical perspective no longer obtains; upheaval in the basic principles of the world. • “Copernican” in scope

  4. Paul Cézanne, Bibemus Quarry, 1895

  5. Gaugin’s Questions • Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? 1897

  6. Gaugin’s Questions • Where does humanity come from? What is humanity? How does humanity proceed?

  7. Where does humanity come from? • A more remote origin in an expanding recessive (geological) timeline. • A look further back to a more anterior origin. • The myth of Victorian progress punctuated as a reverse story of regress. • A fresh and startling glimpse into the animal/bestial origins of humanity. We come from animals.

  8. What is humanity? • Not advanced but “Primitive,” Savage, Disgusting; not singled out and superior to animals but continuous with them. • Darwin, Descent of Man (1871): “There can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.” • Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899) • Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899); animal drives, the irrational

  9. Kurtz

  10. Edvard Munch, Scream (1893)

  11. Pablo Picasso, Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

  12. Man Ray, Noire et Blanche (1926)

  13. What is humanity? • A function of natural laws, processes, mechanisms. • Reduction to physiology and materiality. • Human consciouness a development of the function of animals; natural mechanisms. • Not the nature of the Romantic English landscape

  14. Romantic Nature

  15. Victorian Nature • “nature red in tooth and claw” Tennyson

  16. What is humanity? • Constant battle for survival; survival replaces purpose • Not fully formed by God but cobbled together by accident

  17. Man (Woman) not fully formed • Picasso, Head of a Woman (1936)

  18. What is humanity? • Man/Woman in Process • Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912)

  19. Where are we going? • A creature looking before and after into an infinite unfolding of time with an acute sense of loneliness, alienation: no guide • Anxiety, ennui, despair, absurdity, accident • Purposeless proc ess? Loss of human agency? Waiting? • “The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come.” Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse • Becket, Waiting for Godot

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