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Heredity's Aesthetic Infrastructures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2024

Amy R. Wong Open the ORCID record for Amy R. Wong [Opens in a new window]
Amy R. Wong*
Affiliation:
Dominican University of California, United States
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Abstract

This essay traces a disjointed aesthetics of hereditary units in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) and Chinese filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai's So Long, My Son (2019) and argues that shared social and economic conditions of Victorian Britain and postsocialist China prompt similar ruptures of social realism's totalizing aspirations. The novel and the film are mutually concerned with tragedies of biopolitical management and doomed lineages, but at the same time they both employ an aesthetics of leapings and projections—also featured in Hardy's 1917 poem “Heredity”—that argues for the value of an individual life based on a radical divestment from personhood itself, in favor of the gene's mindless jumps through unmapped space and time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 52 , Special Issue 2: Infrastructure , Summer 2024 , pp. 387 - 392
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Works Cited

Dikötter, Frank. Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects and Eugenics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
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Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. 1895. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016.Google Scholar
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Wong, Amy R. “Reading Enclosure and the Global Commons in Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin (2013).” Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group 34, no. 2 (2021): 71–78.Google Scholar