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

该项目调查了1880年至1920年间英国和美国小说家如何理解，代表和质疑人类智力的概念。在这40年里，人们对生物遗传的机制进行了激烈的科学辩论，并在英国和美国建立了大规模的义务教育制度。这些发展的融合激发了一种新的动力，即建立心理能力的基本先天性和可测量性。智力测试的兴起和与之相关的智商概念备受争议，但它在这两个国家都取得了相当大的科学和文化合法性，并鼓励了一种倾向，即用统计学术语将智力概念化，将其视为一种可预测地分布在人群中的正常现象。 这个项目比较了英国和美国小说家如何使用成长小说的形式-教育和个人发展的小说-努力与新的驱动器，使智能客观可知的现象的影响。在这样的判断开始成为科学权威的时候，被划分为高于、低于或属于平均智力意味着什么？这一时期的小说家在多大程度上支持或质疑智商模型？在成长小说（一种植根于浪漫主义教育理论的小说形式）中，可以发现哪些关于智力评估的替代观点？19世纪末和20世纪初，将智力视为大脑中一个可测试的、单一的实体的新努力，与向更具实验性的文学表现模式的转变之间有什么关系？ 该项目还将探讨如何转变思想的性质，心理能力影响了文学批评的话语和作者身份的概念，在从19世纪的现实主义小说过渡到现代主义的实验时期。智商概念的兴起对现代人的天赋、创造力和审美价值有什么影响？ 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，精英统治和遗传决定论的争论。

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.