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Project

Troping hope: A discursive and rhetorical-tropological analysis of the politics of humanity in the fiction and nonfiction of H. G. Wells.

This dissertation takes as its primary research object the early science fiction work of H. G. Wells and compares it to the scientific journalism of the same author during the beginning decade or so of his career (1890-1903), seeking a confrontation on the level of theme, argument, and rhetorical investment between the different modes of writing. Together with the work of other writers, including William James, Thomas Henry Huxley, and Matthew Arnold, Wells’s work is placed within the broader context of the debates on evolutionary theory among the intelligentsia of the time. They felt challenged by Darwin’s dangerous theories to formulate an alternative social, political, and ethical understanding of the cooperative impulse (or lack thereof) within the human animal. The thesis shows how Wells used his scientific journalism to inform  his audience about the changed conception of the biological principles of life following evolutionary theory. In addition, he sought to think through the social and political ramifications of this scientific revolution in an attempt to render evolution real for his readers. This negotiation of revolutionary biological insights into new ideological programs was advanced even further in Wells’s scientific romances, including The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The War of the Worlds (1898), and The First Men in the Moon (1901). As this study demonstrates, these stories of monstrous animals, alien life forms, and techno-fantastic speculations, contained for Wells an opportunity to mold the imagination of his audience, allowing them to explore heretofore unimaginable possibilities through the creative transformation of evolutionary ideas into fanciful and oftentimes playful stories. Contrary to expectations, these fiction texts, despite being regarded to some extent as vehicles for a particular scientific and political interpretation of evolutionary theory, also undermined the very fundamental principles of that theory in favor of the hopeful inscription of human meaning onto the seemingly endless cruelty of the natural world. The human species, for Wells, became humanity, an imagined entity of seemingly generous inclusion yet marred with ideological arteries and exclusionary procedures that look to affirm lesser morally digestible notions such as white supremacy and gender inequality than those of conventional humanist formulations. In its most naive sense, the idea of humanity is able to unite the entire species (or perhaps even more) as a whole that is held together by cooperative and affective ties, yet in Wells’s practice as a writer, it served as a rhetorical device that is used to announce the future as the self-actualization of a particular brand of humanity – in Wells’s words ‘the men of the New Republic’ – which is seen not just as the embodiment of an ideal type, but also of the ideology of progress as the inevitable result of the forces of nature; at the cost of the (non-)violent exclusion of those who do not fit. The conclusion of this study suggests that Wells’s work was a far more complicated negotiation than previously accepted, displaying various moments of inner tension, contradiction, irony, and play. By unpacking these moments and suggesting new ways of reading their complications, this dissertation contributes to the understanding of science fiction writing as the imaginative effort to transform truth into feeling and the performative effort to transform feeling into truth.

Date:1 Oct 2012 →  30 Sep 2016
Keywords:Science, Utopia, Media, Wells, Rhetoric, Technology, Aesthetics, Politics
Disciplines:Language studies, Literary studies, Theory and methodology of language studies, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Theory and methodology of literary studies, Other languages and literary studies
Project type:PhD project