About

Maren Linett specializes in transatlantic modernist fiction and disability studies. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1999. Her first book, Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness, was published in 2007 by Cambridge University Press and reissued in paperback in 2011. Her second book, Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature, was published in 2017 as part of the Corporealities series of the University of Michigan Press and has been selected to be made open access as part of Big Ten Open Books. In 2020, Linett published Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human with NYU Press as part of its series Crip: New Directions in Disability Studies. She has also edited Virginia Woolf: An MFS Reader and The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers, and has published articles on various modernist writers. Her forthcoming book, Making Us New: From Eugenics to Transhumanism in Modernist Culture, is scheduled for publication by Oxford University Press in 2026. Linett teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on transatlantic modernism, modernist women writers, narrative medicine, literature in the age of eugenics, and disability studies.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Social Science
• Environmental ethics
• Art
• Literature
• Social psychology
• Epistemology
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Wells and Bio-Utopianism

  2026-04-29

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  Abstract This chapter argues that Wells, aware that natural evolution held no guarantees of progress or even continuance for the human species, embraced varieties of bio-utopian thought ranging from eugenics to early transhumanism. After providing an overview of Wells’s engagement with eugenics and transhumanism, the chapter examines two strands within Wells’s bio-utopian thought: those regarding animality and disability. Wells popularized and to some extent initiated a strain of human-exceptionalist anxiety that lurked at the heart of eugenic thought; but in his transhumanist mode, he turned even to lowly insects as a potential resource for human advancement. Participating in the eugenic devaluation of disabled bodies and minds, Wells viewed disability as a sign of human imperfection writ large, something to be eradicated. But much as with animality, when he engaged with more transhumanist modes of thought, he was capable of seeking in anomalous embodiments resources for human biological advancement.

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• Disability Untheorized: Critiques of Eugenics, Then and Now

  CUSP: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Cultures · 2024-06-01 · 1 citations

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  Abstract: This essay argues that critiques of Anglo-American eugenics from the turn of the twentieth century through today demonstrate that the people swept up by the colossal eugenic broom were not biologically "unfit" without questioning either the notion of biological inferiority itself or the "menace" eugenicists saw in disability. They therefore imply that what was wrong with eugenics was its inaccuracy—that it was only ethically problematic because it did not correctly identify "unfit" people. Such critiques, while offering social models of race, poverty, criminality, and/or gender, leave disability untheorized and neglect the rights of disabled people.

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• All Winged Their Supermen: Mina Loy, Olive Moore, and the Transhumanist Imagination

  ELH · 2023-12-01

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  Abstract: Recent scholarship has demonstrated some of the ways modernism depends on eugenic thinking. Exploring similarities and differences between eugenics and early transhumanism, this article identifies in modernist literature a strand of more radical transhumanist desire. Looking in particular at Mina Loy's poems "Parturition" and "Songs to Joannes" and Olive Moore's novel Spleen , it argues that these texts turn the modernist call to "make it new" on human beings ourselves, as Loy and Moore imagine maternity as a means to advance evolution, if only it could transcend the disappointing reproducibility of the human being.

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• Mind the Gap

  Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies · 2023-10-31 · 3 citations

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  The article argues that eugenics was motivated, in part, by human exceptionalism. It first explores the ways in which eugenics understood nonwhite race, disability, and animality as forces capable of exerting a drag on the forward thrust of eugenic progress. Next, it traces the incoherent discourse about animality within eugenics, demonstrating that while eugenic breeding—eugenic methods—relied on human animality, the fundamental goal of eugenics was to improve human beings by distancing us from that animality. The final part of the article explores the imbrication of animality, race, and disability in Aldous Huxley’s 1948 novel Ape and Essence , arguing that the novel is a dysgenic vision that substantiates the eugenic call to increase the evolutionary distance between human beings and other animals, to cement human domination—conceived of as white human domination—of the planet.

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• Making Us New: From Eugenics to Transhumanism in Modernist Culture

  Modernism/modernity · 2023-01-01 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Making Us New:From Eugenics to Transhumanism in Modernist Culture Maren Linett (bio) My title, "Making Us New," alludes to the rallying cry of modernist art, "Make it New," put forward by Ezra Pound—a slogan that "summed up the aspirations of more than one generation of modernists."1 This desire for the new, as Michael North points out, flowed in both revolutionary and reactionary directions, and applied to myriad aspects of art and culture.2 At around the same time modernist artists sought to make art new, and as part of the same cultural infatuation with novelty, a wide array of thinkers from all points on the ideological spectrum and various disciplines in the social and biological sciences sought to make humans new, to improve "the race."3 In exploring the origin of Pound's phrase, North points out that the Chinese saying from which Pound adapted the motto more accurately suggests that one renovate oneself (North, Novelty, 163–64). The idea of renovation highlights the ambiguity inherent in the word "new": where is the line between renovating an existing entity and replacing it with something else? Such a question indicates the spectrum of thinking about newness occupied at each end by eugenics and transhumanism, two related but distinct ways of promoting human improvement in the early twentieth century.4 For the most part, eugenics aimed to make humans new in the sense of raising the average to the level of what its practitioners considered the most extraordinary, while transhumanism, even in its earliest forms, looked past existing "best" types in search of more radical change. Both of these possibilities were contained in the term "superman," borrowed from Nietzsche and used very loosely in eugenic [End Page 177] and transhumanist discourse.5 For example, in The Conquest of Life (1928), French surgeon Serge Voronoff asked, "Why not try creating a race of super-men, endowed with physical and intellectual attributes very superior to ours?"6 The phrase "very superior" leaves open the question whether Voronoff was envisioning the combination of attributes seen in exceptional living individuals, or attributes superior to what had ever been seen. Similarly, Nietzsche scholar Maximilian Mügge wrote in the Eugenics Review that eugenics aims at a "race of supermen, as superior to the present mankind … as man is superior to the worm" (quoted in Stone, Breeding Superman 62).7 Given the difference between a human being and a worm, this degree of newness suggests changes greater than most readers of the Eugenics Review sought or imagined. On the other hand, American Nobel prize-winning geneticist Hermann Muller hoped "it would be possible for the majority of the population to become of the innate quality of such men as Lenin, Newton, Leonardo, Pasteur, Beethoven, Omar Khayyam, Pushkin, Sun Yat Sen, Marx (I purposely mention men of different fields and races), or even to possess their varied faculties combined."8 The question was, then, whether the superman would be, say, as brilliant as Albert Einstein and as fast as Jesse Owens, or whether he (the superman was nearly always conceived as male) would be more brilliant and athletic than all existing human beings, superior to a degree that could hardly be imagined?9 Without using the term "trans-humanism," Peter Bowler articulates this difference when he describes the interest of early twentieth-century scientists J. D. Bernal and J. B. S. Haldane in profound change: "The enthusiasts no longer wanted to perfect the traditional human form—they sought to define what the future form of the race would be" (Bowler, History of the Future, 193). And Bernal adds his own description of the differing views when he wonders if humanity will end up splitting into two groups, "one section developing a fully-balanced humanity, the other groping unsteadily beyond it."10 In this essay I trace some of the underlying intellectual and political differences that distinguish the eugenic philosophy of Anthony Ludovici, as conveyed in his 1925 speculative essay Lysistrata; or, Woman's Future and Future Woman, from the early transhumanism of Bernal, as expressed in his 1929 scientific speculation, The World, the Flesh and the Devil.11 Both eugenics and early transhumanism aimed to improve...

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• [Untitled]

  University Press of Florida eBooks · 2022-02-22

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• Abbreviations

  University Press of Florida eBooks · 2022-02-22

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• Foreword

  University Press of Florida eBooks · 2022-02-14

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• Foreword

  University Press of Florida eBooks · 2022-02-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Extract Joyce Writing Disability demonstrates the considerable extent to which ideas about nonnormative bodies and minds shape James Joyce’s work. Indeed, modernism more broadly was acutely sensitive to the varieties of bodies and minds that move through the world. The expansive outlook of much modernist writing meant that these myriad types would be welcomed into fictional worlds as well. As Bernard boasts in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, he plans to write a book that will “run to many volumes embracing every known variety of man and woman.”1 This humorous nod to the encyclopedic sweep of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, and Joyce’s Ulysses demonstrates modernism’s capacious, perhaps even accepting, awareness of bodily and mental variety. Modernism is a literature of “broken sequence[s]”2 and broken norms—of nonnormative bodies and minds that serve as interesting fictional material not merely, and not always, as foils but also as rounded characters with whom we can align ourselves as readers. Moreover, on a formal level, as Janet Lyon puts it, modernist aesthetics are “tied to the generative powers” of bodily and mental “disproportion.”3

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• Embodied Modernism

  Modernism/modernity · 2021-01-01

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  Embodied Modernism Maren Linett Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books. Peter Fifield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 272. $80.00 (cloth); $79.99 (eBook). Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic. Michael Davidson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 224. $82.00 (cloth); $79.99 (eBook). The COVID-19 pandemic provides unsettling context for reading Peter Fifield's Modernism and Physical Illness and Michael Davidson's Invalid Modernism. Fifield's study asks us to think about how it feels to be sick, what it means to observe sickness in others, and how illness shifts relations of care. Davidson's book shows us how disability and chronic illness make us vulnerable not only to the conditions themselves but to dismissal and disavowal and to biopolitical control. Both books focus on literary dealings with bodies, but such dealings of course reflect eugenically-inflected conceptualizations of health and wellness, disability and bodily norms, fragmentation and wholeness, that circulated in the modernist period and linger in our own. These conceptualizations and norms are explored in depth by Davidson as he considers the ways modernist literature and aesthetics are entangled with bodies in general and disability in particular. This effort leads Davidson to engage not only with disability studies but also with the aesthetic turn in recent literary studies, with affect theory, queer theory, and postcolonial and critical race studies. His book is incredibly wide ranging, treating literature from a long modernist period that encompasses Oscar Wilde and Henry James, avant-garde movements such as futurism and Dada, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, and Samuel Beckett, and contemporary global experimental literature and video by writers and thinkers such as Indra Sinha, M. NourbeSe Philip, Rachel Zolf, and Mel Baggs. Davidson also explores visual art and opera, theories of degeneration, and histories of eugenics. And he [End Page 791] ends with a reflection, by setting Emily Dickinson's musings on hearing and sight alongside his own experiences, on what it means to be late deafened, proposing a recuperation of loss within the politics of deaf gain. Davidson's erudition and range are impressive, and in each chapter he offers intriguing analytical vignettes that I wish he took more time to develop. His overarching argument draws on the work of Tobin Siebers, who reminded us that aesthetics is never bodiless, that, on the contrary, "[a]esthetics studies the way that some bodies make other bodies feel."1 Davidson extends this argument by exploring the role of embodiment in modernist art, coming at this conjunction from various angles such as ideas of detachable bodies, contingency, dependency, male pregnancy/biofuturity, and bodies rendered illegible or made to disappear through multiple structures of violence. To my mind, the most thought-provoking chapter is the one on pregnant men, where Davidson reads Woolf's Orlando and Barnes's Nightwood to show how they displace reproduction from the female body to other spaces, including the novel. He "see[s] this displacement as both a queering and cripping of normative attitudes toward reproductive health and the futures that such embodiment implies" (105). In another chapter Davidson offers a similarly valuable reading of Freud's uncanny, where he points out that "[e]very attempt to define the uncanny is accompanied by reference to embodied otherness—madness, blindness, amputation, epilepsy—that for Freud unsettles the domestic security and threatens bodily norms" (127). And Davidson's brief reading of shifting biopolitical identities in Animal's People is a worthy contribution to discussions of debility, although it does not use the term or cite Jasbir Puar's theorization of that state. Davidson does, however, read the novel as a sort of companion piece to Mel Chen's Animacies, an influential 2012 study of how conceptions and hierarchies of the animate and inanimate shape cultural understandings of sexuality, race, and disability.2 Fifield's study lacks theoretical exploration of illness and embodiment, and instead offers historically inflected and well-researched thematic readings of illness in D. H. Lawrence, Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and Winifred Holtby. Fifield is thorough, almost comprehensive, in his exploration of how these different authors deal with illness. For Lawrence and Woolf, he demonstrates, much of this dealing...

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Frequent coauthors

• Natalya Lusty

  5 shared

• Cinzia Sartini Blum

  University of Iowa

  2 shared

• Rónán McDonald

  University of Melbourne

  1 shared

• Jessica Burstein

  1 shared

• Peter Nicholls

  1 shared

• David Marriott

  1 shared

• Julian Murphet

  1 shared

• Melissa Jane Hardie

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, English

  University of Michigan

  1999

• AB

  University of Chicago

  1991