Genetics and French Culture

L'Esprit Créateur (Summer 2012, Vol. 52, No. 2), guest edited by Louise Lyle and Douglas Morrey, on 'Genetics and French Culture'.

Bringing togeether the history of science, scientific popularization, and French literary and cultural studies, this issue explores the cultural history of French discourses of genetics. The issue identifies strands of thematic continuity across a range of genetic discourses, from sociology, philosophy, literature and visual culture. It focuses on approaches to the representations of genetics or to its influence that characterize French-language culture.

Table of Contents

1 Louise Lyle — Introduction: Genetics and French Culture

10 Valérie Narayana — Zola et le génétique : torts de Comte et comptes de Tort

25 Daniel Larangé— L’Hérédo — expression génét(h)ique de la culture :
enjeux et dangers d’une métaphore de Léon Daudet

42 Fae Brauer — “L’Art eugénique”: Biopower and the Biocultures of Neo- Lamarckian Eugenics

59 Catriona MacLeod — L’Eugénisme pour les enfants: Heroes, Villains and Racial Purity in Le Téméraire

75 John Marks — Jacques Monod, François Jacob, and the Lysenko Affair:
Boundary Work

89 Charlotte Baker — “Réhabiliter l’humanité de ‘ceux qui voient la
nuit’”:
Albinism in Didier Destremau’s Nègre blanc

99 Guy Austin — Biological Dystopias: The Body in Contemporary French Horror Cinema

114 Douglas Morrey — Natural and Anti-natural Evolution: Genetics and Schizophrenia in Maurice G. Dantec’s Babylon Babies

127 Delphine Grass — Domesticating Hierarchies, Eugenic Hygiene and Exclusion Zones: The Dogs and Clones of Houellebecq’s La Possibilité d’une île