26.02.2026 | Center for Gender and Diversity Research (ZGD)

Spontaneous Generation: Parentless Children and the Politics of Nonreproductive Futurity

Keynote lecture at the conference "Queer Ecology and the Temporal Imagination"

Within the environmental humanities, generational time has often meant intergenerational time: the long timescales at which the environmental crisis of climate change unfolds. Such an understanding turns on the predominance of heteronormative temporalities, especially an investment in reproductive futurity and its hope for a better future. But another meaning of generational time haunts our conceptualizations of climate change: spontaneous generation. Originating in premodern life sciences and threaded into the early experimental history of what would become biology, spontaneous generation - or the theory that life can generate without reproduction - offers up a foreshortened version of generational time. Paired with intergenerational time, spontaneous generatio's theory of rapid change as the reorganization of materials in a new form can offer up one way of grappling with the temporality of climate crisis, in which long-developing environmental change manifests in the immediacy of catastrophe: larger wildfires, more powerful storms, fast-moving floods.

In this talk, Sylvan Goldberg turns to a set of mid-nineteenth-century U.S. novels whose child-characters seem to have come into being without parentage - who seem to be, in other words, spontaneous generations. Centering on a reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, he considers Pearl and these other children for their representation of radical futurity - a future that refuses to reproduce its past. Spontaneous generation, as an alternative theory of both the generation of life and of change, offers up a future reconstructed from the constituent parts of the past, but without the ties to the past implied by genetic inheritance.

Sylvan Goldberg is associate professor and associate chair of the English department at Colorado College, where he teaches and writes on U.S. literature of the long nineteenth century, western American literature, and the environmental humanities. He has published essays on environmental affect, the cultural influence of nineteenth-century science, resource extraction and its links to masculinity, and these and other essays can be found in, among other places, American Literary History, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, ESQ, and The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story. He is completing a book manuscript on spontaneous generation in nineteenth-century U.S. culture, for which he has received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society and the Linda Hall Library.