George Levine
George Levine is Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University, and Distinguished Scholar in Residence,
New York University. He was founding director of the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis and
edited the interdisciplinary journal, Victorian Studies. Among his books are The Realistic
Imagination (Chicago, 1981), Dying to Know: Scientific Narrative and Epistemology in Victorian
England (Chicago, 2002), and two books on Darwin, Darwin and the Novelists (Harvard, 1988),
and Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World (Princeton, 2006),
translated into Italian in 2009 for Aboca Edizioni.
28 May / DARWIN LOVES YOU
In this lecture, I will be tracing the way Darwin’s prose resists some of the inferences usually made
from it – most obviously, that his theory of descent by modification through natural selection drains
the world of meaning and leaves it cold and indifferent. Without denying the force of the negative
inferences, I will try to show how Darwin dramatizes a deep sympathy with the natural world and
finds in it endless possibilities of meaning. I will begin by looking at some of the writing in his
Journal of Researches (Voyage of the Beagle), and trace the development of his approach to
nature into the prose of On the Origin of Species and will finally look briefly at The Descent of
Man to show how for Darwin the ethical is built into a natural process so often taken by others as
alienating humans not only from God but from the material world they occupy. The key to Darwin’s
way of looking at the world is in the writing, not in the abstraction of his ideas from it.
For the occasion the artist Roberto Kusterle presented his beautiful graphic works "Profili".
To the gallery
D I S C U S S A N T S
Alison Pearn is Assistant Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project, based at the
University of Cambridge, which she joined in 1996. She has a BA in history from Oxford and a PhD
from Cambridge, where she is an Affiliated Scholar of the Department of History and Philosophy of
Science. She is a co-editor for seven of the seventeen volumes of The Correspondence of Charles
Darwin so far published, and co-editor of a volume of selected letters (Evolution: selected letters of
Charles Darwin 1860-1870, CUP 2008).
Paolo Fabbri teaches Semiotics and the Semiotics of Art at the Istituto Universitario
di Architettura in Venice, where he also directs the Laboratorio Internazionale di Semiotica. He has
written and translated many articles and essays on the problems of language and communication.
He is a member of the scientific boards of numerous Italian and international publications and
institutions.