Towards National Identity: Addiction, Subjectivity, and American Literary Culture
Borst, Allan G.
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/81451
Description
Title
Towards National Identity: Addiction, Subjectivity, and American Literary Culture
Author(s)
Borst, Allan G.
Issue Date
2009
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Nelson, Cary
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Literature, American
Language
eng
Abstract
This project examines literary and cultural narratives of addiction in order to show how addict-subjects have been defined according to American beliefs about willpower, productivity, morality, racial and economic disparity, and social health. In the contemporary world of American consumerism and late capitalist expenditure, addiction signifies everyday life and normative American identity as much as it names the criminality, self-destruction, or disease associated with drug addicts and alcoholics. Historically speaking, literary and cultural representations of alcoholics and drug users from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries produce distinct photonegatives of normative American values. The addict-subject thereby demonstrates the limits of permissible behavior to the rest of society. This study covers a broad range of literature, including Temperance-era speeches and sermons, Harlem Renaissance novels depicting underground jazz and nightclub culture, memoirs and autobiographical fiction that promise an insider's view of addiction and its impact on everyday life, and novels of the 1980s that illumine potent connections between contemporary drug use and capitalist consumerism. The American addict-subject has been a romanticist, a naturalist, a modernist, and a postmodernist, and thus offers invaluable ways of approaching the problems of representation and traditional narrative forms like the bildungsroman, the fallen woman narrative, and the first-person confessional. Ultimately, addiction has left as many indelible marks on American literary history as it has on American culture and American identity.
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