Literary Culture, Meritocracy, and the Assessment of Intelligence in Britain and America, 1880-1920

这个项目调查了英美小说家在1880年到1920年间是如何理解、表现和质疑人类智力的概念的。在这四十年里，英国和美国对生物遗传机制进行了激烈的科学辩论，并建立了大规模的义务教育体系。这些发展的汇合激发了一种新的动力，即确立心理能力的本质是先天的和可测量的。智力测试和相关的智商概念的兴起备受争议，但它在这两个国家都取得了相当大的科学和文化合法性，并鼓励了用统计术语将智力概念化的趋势，作为一种现象，它可以预测地分布在人口的规范周围。这个项目比较了英国和美国的小说家是如何运用成长小说的形式——教育和个人发展的小说——来应对将智力作为一种客观可知现象的新动力所带来的影响。在这样的判断开始确立科学权威的时候，被划分为智力高、智力低或智力一般，这意味着什么？又是什么感觉？这一时期的小说家在多大程度上支持或反对智商模型？在根植于浪漫主义教育理论的成长小说中，可以发现哪些关于智力评估的替代观点？将智力视为大脑中可测试的单一实体的新努力，与19世纪末和20世纪初转向更具实验性的文学表现模式之间的关系是什么？该项目还将探讨在从19世纪现实主义小说到现代主义实验的过渡时期，关于心理能力本质的观念变化如何影响文学批评的话语和作者身份的概念。智商概念的兴起对人才、创造力和审美价值的现代观念有什么影响？最后，该项目将探讨这一时期的文学文化如何澄清和丰富我们当代关于竞争性考试、精英政治和基因决定论的辩论。

This project investigates how British and American novelists understood, represented, and problematised the concept of human intelligence between 1880 and 1920. These forty years saw intense scientific debates about the mechanisms underlying biological heredity as well as the establishment of mass compulsory education systems in both Britain and America. The convergence of these developments galvanised a new drive to establish the fundamentally innate and measureable nature of mental ability. The rise of intelligence testing and the associated concept of IQ was highly controversial, but it nonetheless achieved a considerable scientific and cultural legitimacy in both countries, and encouraged a tendency to conceptualise intelligence in statistical terms, as a phenomenon that distributes itself predictably around a norm in a population. This project compares how British and American novelists used the bildungsroman form - the novel of education and personal development - to grapple with the implications of the new drive to render intelligence an objectively knowable phenomenon. What did it mean, and how did it feel, to be classified as being above, below, or of average intelligence, at a moment when such judgments began to lay claim to scientific authority? To what extent did novelists in the period endorse or contest the IQ model of intelligence, and what alternative ideas about the evaluation of intelligence can be discovered in the bildungsroman, a form with roots in Romantic theories of education? What is the relationship between new efforts to conceive of intelligence as a testable and unitary entity in the brain and the shift toward more experimental modes of literary representation in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries? The project will also enquire into how shifting ideas about the nature of mental ability affected the discourses of literary criticism and conceptions of authorial identity in the period of transition from the nineteenth-century realist novel to the experiments of modernism. What impact did the rise of the notion of IQ have upon modern ideas of talent, creativity, and aesthetic value? Finally, the project will explore how literary culture in this period can both clarify and enrich our contemporary debates about competitive examinations, meritocracy, and genetic determinism.