This millennial turn saw a resurgence of interest in Degeneration, an emergent concept in the previous century, mostly invalidated by the mid-20^th century, whose impact continues to be detected into the 21^st. Stemming from the biological and social sciences, degeneration theory produced and underwrote the race and sexual sciences of the fin de siècle; studies track the mobility of its discourses across a number of borders— disciplinary, geographical, generic. Recent examinations of Degeneration’s influence include criminal forensics and photography, visual culture and representations of the body, literary disability studies. The subject of Degeneration corresponds well to this year’s MLA theme of “Being Human,” in its role, for better and worse, in defining the human, and given the theories’ impact on developments within literature, visual culture, and political discourse that continue to register and be explored.

Three approaches will be represented by the panelists here: critical race studies, energy humanities, and disability studies, with inevitable overlap. The panel participants represent a range of career positions, fields, and approaches to the topic. All have contributed in significant ways to the burgeoning discussions of Degeneration, spanning the Victorian, Modernist and early 21^st century periods. Each participant will speak for 15 minutes; the presider will make a brief introduction and time will be allotted for discussion in the last part of the session.

Enda Duffy’s prize-winning work on modernist energy is on display here. Sir Edwin Ray Lankester (1847-1929), one-time Oxford Professor and later head of the Natural History Museum in London, invertebrate zoologist and science popularizer who became known as 'Huxley's bulldog,' contributed importantly to the scientific underpinnings of the degeneration hypothesis in Degeneration: a chapter in Darwinism (1880), in which he wrote about key features of organisms exhibiting what he considered signs of what he termed 'retrogressive metamorphoses': parasitism, a tendency towards what might be called abstraction, and immobility. This paper considers the relation between immobility, entropy and the judgement of degeneration in the zoological sciences of this era, reading it alongside novelistic texts of the same era--Henry James's first novel, Roderick Hudson, a Conan Doyle story, a poem by Eva Gore-Booth--in which the ratio of mobility and stasis, of agitation and languor, is apportioned differently to racially marked others and to upper-class western subjects. An altering and more jagged textual tempo, this paper claims, becomes the index of a species logic in a new global energy economy of work and leisure, energy conservation and expenditure, and fuel and money, at the moment of the decline of the age of empire

Professor Novak, who has written compellingly on the topic of his talk and on related topics, in particular, photography and race science in Victorian literature, here discusses the persistent figure of the Cagots, known as the “accursed race,” an ethnic group subject to almost every form of superstitious hatred and persecution from the middle-ages through the end of the nineteenth century. Some nineteenth-century British writing on the Cagots represented them as degenerated and monstrous figures and survivals from an atavistic past—“the utmost excess of bodily degradation.” However, the majority of the literature on the Cagots focuses on the injustice of their treatment, and a critique of the racial logic that imagined a white, European, and Catholic people as a cursed, outcast, and despised race. Fiction has recently returned to the Cagots in the very moment when nationalist impulses in Europe are not only directed against refugees from places like Syria, but also from other European countries; witness the backlash in Britain against the free movement of labor from EU countries, especially Eastern European countries. In the second half of this talk, Professor Novak addresses Tom Knox’s novel Marks of Cain (2010). If nineteenth-century writers used the Cagots as an occasion to challenge racial thinking, for Knox, the Cagots become ground zero not only for essentialist, biological models of race, but for a theory of race as degeneration and even as speciation. In this alternate history, the mystery of the Cagots turns out to be an elaborate international plot put in motion by the Nazis and the Catholic Church.

Marion Quirici has already made a significant intervention into the intersections of ableist rhetoric and modernism within Irish studies. Her talk explores intersecting nationalist ideologies of race, gender, ability, and social class in pre-independence Ireland by analyzing the early sports journalism of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). Founded by athlete and newspaperman Michael Cusack in the 1880s, the GAA aimed to revive native Irish sports and pastimes, such as hurling and Gaelic football, and to diminish the influence of foreign games. The Association had a profound and lasting impact on the project of the Irish Revival, not least because its production of athletes and ideals of athleticism proved useful for the recruitment of soldiers into the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). The GAA maintained a print culture that has been largely overlooked. including Cusack’s own Celtic Times newspaper, the Gaelic Athletic Annual journal, and a number of books. The organization’s journalism and promotional literature reveal GAA’s fears of racial degeneration, and expose its articulation of a eugenic body politic. GAA nationalists made a conscious effort to invert stereotypes of Irish weakness, unruliness, drunkenness, laziness, and uncleanliness with a specific code of conduct for Irish men, and to a lesser extent, Irish women. They imagined their task—building up the nation’s “inherited manliness”—to be a matter of racial preservation. The degeneration paranoia endemic to Irish nationalism influenced not only the creative responses of modernist authors, but also the biopolitical regime in Ireland after independence.