Dark Degenerations: Life, Light, and Transformation beneath the Earth, 1840-circa 1900
Dark Degenerations: Life, Light, and Transformation beneath the Earth, 1840-circa 1900
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黑暗退化：地球下的生命、光和转变，1840 年至 1900 年左右
作者：
Flack A
本文重点关注肯塔基州巨大且举世闻名的猛犸洞，考虑了整个 19 世纪的背景，其中地下黑暗被认为是生物转变的驱动力。事实上，这个洞穴是几个有关“黑暗堕落”的联合话语的舞台，这些话语让人联想到生成性和破坏性可变性的图像，从没有眼睛的动物的产生到某些人类身体和思想因暴露在黑暗中而明显瓦解。在阐明黑暗退化的几个平行论述时，这篇文章为多个学术机构做出了独特的贡献，它强调了十九世纪对自然过程的关注日益加强的一个重要的、迄今为止被忽视的表现，以及对可塑物体与其更广泛的环境的明显凝聚力的变革意义的日益增长的认识。同时，它证明了猛犸洞对十九世纪末关于退化的争论的影响，并展示了占主导地位的感官等级如何构建对深邃黑暗中生命的流行和科学理解。
Focusing on Kentucky’s immense and world-famous Mammoth Cave, this essay considers contexts from across the nineteenth century in which subterranean darkness was envisaged as a driving force in the transformation of living things. In fact, the cave was the stage for several allied discourses of “dark degeneracy” that conjured images of both generative and destructive mutability, from the generation of animals without eyes to the apparent disintegration of some kinds of human bodies and minds through exposure to the darkness. In elucidating several parallel discourses of dark degeneracy, the essay offers a distinct contribution to several bodies of scholarship by highlighting an important and hitherto neglected manifestation of an intensifying nineteenth-century focus on thehowof natural processes and a growing sense of the transformative significance of the apparent cohesion of malleable bodies with their wider environments. At the same time, it evidences the influence of Mammoth Cave in forging and contributing to late nineteenth-century debates about degeneration and shows how dominant sensory hierarchies framed both popular and scientific understandings of life in the deep darkness.