Books of Life: Post-DNA Life Science in 1960s American Fiction

Following the discovery of the DNA double helix in 1953, concepts of genetic code and program emerged to redefine life. A range of complementary assumptions—about the cryptographic behavior of language, the transcriptional nature of creative writing, and the mechanistic constitution of the human organism—buttressed this new, textual explanation for living beings. In this dissertation, I analyze how the 1960s novels of three writers—Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy, and the detective novels of Chester Himes—respond to this epistemic shift within the life sciences. While the loudly-heralded “genomic book of life” written in the double helix appeared to co-opt the novel’s age-old endeavor to describe life, it also proved a compelling invitation to writers who could reconceive these molecular metaphors as compositional resources. Drawing on intellectual histories of the post-WWII life sciences to establish the heavily rhetorical character of this episode in biology, I demonstrate how Kesey, Barth, and Himes mobilized biological metaphors to dual purpose. By employing these new concepts to parody the anachronistic organic logics of literary criticism, they challenged received notions of literary form. Simultaneously, they harnessed the truth-value of scientific metaphors in a complex speculative impulse, which, by taking the new biology’s claims literally, satirized the rhetorical bombast of scientific discourse while flaunting the period’s nostalgic literary-critical investments in the “Great American Novel.” Each text pursues post-DNA biological theory as theme and formal architecture, but ultimately arrives at a more fundamental reckoning with the poetics of literality that, at this historical juncture, worked to elide the distance between life and text. These analyses contribute to critical conversations around the Anthropocene, posthumanism, scale critique, biopolitics, and comparative methods for the interdisciplinary study of science and literature. They also promise to complicate dominant accounts of the postwar novel that have tended to minimize the contributions of 1960s writers, and to augment our understanding of the postwar novel’s debts to contemporaneous scientific discourse.Doctor of Philosoph