• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.655-678
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• 2012

Doris Lessing, who considers science and technology as instruments of capitalism, deals with the theme of 'biological evolution' in The Sirian Experiments, the third book in the Canopus in Argos: Archives series. One of her themes that repeats throughout is that of 'spiritual evolution,' and in The Four-Gated City she even used 'biological evolution' as its metaphor. This paper analyzes The Sirian Experiments using scientific knowledge such as the concept of 'biological evolution' from Charles Darwin's evolution theory and Edward O. Wilson's sociobiology. Lessing concludes that while 'biological evolution' not accompanied with 'spiritual evolution' puts humans in existential problems and mental breakdown, the one in equilibrium with the other can bring social and political revolution. Lessing's concept of 'spiritual evolution' is basically a product of her holistic view and her own philosophical view that human evolution is a necessary process following the Universal Order, which shows that she is influenced by Sufism. The basic tenet in Sufi philosophy is to achieve equilibrium between the rational and non-rational modes of consciousness. Lessing incorporates her rational and irrational ideas into The Sirian Experiments to make a field for confluence where the biological, the sociological, and the spiritual thinking converge.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.131-158
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• 2008

With the intention of revealing that biological determinism is not the truth verified as scientific facts but ideology which conceals or reproduces the white male-centered social order of western capitalism, this article considered the peculiarities of human being from a perspective of cultural anthropology and examined the social contexts of biological determinism. From these studies, it found that the human is not born, but rather become, that biological determinism, from phrenology and social evolutionism to social biology and IQ determinism, emerged for the breakthrough of crisis in which a number of disclosed social contradictions drove the established ruling order into a collapse, and that it cannot but function as dominant ideology rationalizing racial, ethnic, class and gender discriminations. Hence, bioscience must overcome biological determinism in order to be the hope of both all people and all sort of life. But it is without the transformation of unequal structures that the problem of biological determinism cannot be surmountable at all.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.483-509
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• 2008

For the last decades, criticism on Frankenstein has tried to make a link between Victor's Creature and Rousseaurean "man in a state of nature." Like the Rousseaurean savage in a state of animal, the monster has only basic instincts least needed for his survival, i.e. self-preservation, but turns into a civilized man after learning language. Most critics argue that, despite the monster's acquisition of language, his failure in entry into a cultural and linguistic community is the outcome of a lack of sympathy for him by others, which displays the stark existence of epistemological barriers between them. That is to say, the monster imagines his being the same as others in the pre-linguistic stage but, in the linguistic stage, he realizes that he is different from others. Interpreting the Rousseaurean idea of language, which appears in his writings, as much more focused on emotion than many critics think, I read the dispute between Victor and his Creature as a variation of parent-offspring conflict. Shelley criticizes Rousseau's parental negligence in putting his children into a foundling hospital and leaving them dying there. The monster's revenge on uncaring Victor parallels the likely retaliation Rousseau's displaced children would perform against Rousseau, which Shelley imaginatively reproduces in her novel. The conflict between the monster and Victor is due to a disrupted attachment between parent and child in terms of Darwinian developmental psychology. Affective asynchrony between parent and child, which refers to a state of lack of mutual favorable feelings, accounts for numerous dysfunctional families. This paper shifts a focus from a semiotics-oriented perspective on the monster's social isolation to a Darwinian perspective, drawing attention to emotional problems transpiring in familial interactions. In doing so, it finds that language is a means of communicating one's internal emotions to others along with other means such as facial expressions and body movements. It also demonstrates that how to promote emotional well-being in either familial or social relationships entirely depends on the way in which one employs language that can entail either pleasure or anger on hearers' part.