Madeleine Chalmers – Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge
"Forged in the crucible: science and progress in Didier de Chousy’s Ignis (1883)"
Energy crises, artificial intelligence, and globalisation may seem to be twenty-first century concerns, yet in Ignis (1883) Didier de Chousy draws on nineteenth-century French culture and thought to imagine precisely these developments. Beyond speculation about its enigmatic author, this proto-science fiction novel has remained unexplored. Lauded by Alfred Jarry, it offers a rich seam for re-examining nineteenth-century attitudes towards labour, the environment, and technology.
In this black satire, British magnates decide to exploit the feu central at the earth’s core to power the world. Successive workforces are exhausted in strikes and accidents. This paper takes the feu central as a potent metaphor, reading the novel as a crucible for late nineteenth-century scientific theories and political concepts. De Chousy's narrative melts down and recasts interconnected reflections on capitalism, thermodynamics, evolution, pseudoscientific racism, natural resources, and social control, with caustic humour. As the quest to abolish work annihilates successive workforces, these take new shapes in a quasi-evolutionary thought experiment, culminating in the creation of the Atmophytes and a razor-sharp analysis of unbridled technological innovation.
De Chousy uses the resources of the novel to test the implications of the logics governing nineteenth-century society for the environment and technological progress. In this fictional play, he imagines scenarios which today seem distinct possibilities.
Luke King-Salter, University of Edinburgh
"Caprice in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground"
The narrator of Notes from Underground, the so-called Underground Man, is afflicted with a capricious need for personal freedom, which, in his narration, lashes out against the perceived constraints of reason, morality, science, philosophical determinism, and neatly ordered social arrangements. Scholars typically point to the inherent undesirability of some of these “constraints” as a means of explaining his caprice, which is perceived as a defensive reaction against them: he is capricious because he feels, e.g., the encroachment of materialistic philosophy and social regimentation upon the freedom of his will. Such interpretations tend to overlook the narrator’s repeated indictments of the “sublime and beautiful” as the catalyst for his whole psychological affliction. He is clearly referring to the romantic aesthetics which prevailed in Russia during his formative years.
The phrase points in particular to Friedrich Schiller, whose enormous influence on Dostoevsky is well known and in Schiller’s famous Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man a clear explanation for the Underground Man’s caprice is found. This caprice is a result of his unbalanced romantic idealism and inflamed imagination, rather than a response to any external threat to his freedom, such as social regimentation.
[PERCHANCE Nineteenth-Century Research Seminars]