Becoming artificial: H. G. Wells and the scientific discourses of modernism

My dissertation, “Becoming Artificial: H. G. Wells and the Scientific Discourses of Modernism,” examines how the constructed categories of “artificial” and “natural” function in three seemingly disparate discourses: evolutionary theory, early artificial intelligence and the literature of H. G. Wells. Surprisingly, each discourse depends upon a definition of “artificial” that is distinctly not the traditional one of being a “substitute for, or an imitation of, nature.” Indeed, the artificial often exists prior to the natural, illuminating newly emergent dynamics and sometimes even creating patterns and objects that we subsequently misidentify as objects of nature. The artificial, as Michel Foucault has defined it, is that which allows nature to speak for itself. Charles Darwin, for example, patterned his concept of natural selection after the artificial selection of pigeon and cattle breeders; artificial intelligence serves as a magnifying lens that delineates the dynamics of intelligence along a continuum from humans to insects; and H. G. Wells proclaimed that human evolution itself was an “artificial process,” arguing that humans could avoid extinction only by insulating themselves from the relentless forces of Darwinian natural selection.; H. G. Wells functions as the central touchstone of the dissertation not only because he chronologically bridges the other two discourses but because his literature stands as an important primary source revealing the rhetorical, ideological, political, technoscientific and historical underpinnings of the concept of artificiality. Wells's notion of artificiality depends fully upon creating an insulating buffer between the forces of nature that exert power upon the body and the artificial forces that engineer technology, culture and even the human mind. Rereading Wells in this manner shows him to be far less a Darwinist than many critics have claimed and it also serves to illuminate a century of Modernism that, from Wells's vantage point, spans backward to Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 as well as forward to the famous Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 1956. Thus, the dissertation contributes not only to Wellsiana and the growing discipline of science studies but also to the intellectual and literary history of that period we have come to call Modern.