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1 results

  • Chapter 13 - Darwin, the Sublime and the Chronology of Looking

  • from Part III - Humanism after Darwin
  • Edited by Devin Griffiths, University of Southern California, Deanna Kreisel, University of Mississippi
  • Book:
    After Darwin
    Published online:
    01 December 2022
    Print publication:
    15 December 2022, pp 165-177

  • Summary

    As Darwin recollects and writes his experience of teeming variety in the Brazilian rainforest, he conflates the roles of descrying natural historian and person of aesthetic sensibility. Thinking and feeling under the influence of eighteenth-century theories of the sublime and beautiful, Darwin writes his way into a dynamic that confounds object and subject and destabilizes the chronology of looking. Beginning with Darwin’s pretheoretical working through of the temporality of aesthetic experience, particularly the aesthetic experience of variety, this chapter illuminates the ways that Darwin’s theorization of variation, as a scene of distributed agency, was entangled with the processes of experiencing, reading and writing about variety—and impacted by the anticipation and reality of being read. The temporality of this multifaceted experience anticipates Darwin’s later conclusions about the place of anticipation itself in evolutionary processes that hinge on aesthetic phenomenology.