Decoding distraction: Attention in American culture, 1871--1916 (John Dewey, Mark Twain)

This dissertation explores childhood attention from historical, psychological, and literary perspectives, in order to understand contemporary Attention Deficit Disorder as a cultural phenomenon. While acknowledging that many frequently cited causes of the disorder---including technological innovation and familial upheavals---explain to some degree its widespread incidence, I examine less frequently cited causes, such as the longtime association of children with animals. Inattention itself has often been seen as a symptom of rapid societal change. In this project, however, I argue that it also is a response to aspects of humanity that seem to resist change.; In Part I of this study, I argue that psychologists in the United States in the late nineteenth century frequently experimented with animals to gain insight into children, as they incorporated Darwinian theories of species change into their descriptions of human development. Because of cultural circumstances related to the colonial history of the North America, American Exceptionalist strains of child psychology and educational philosophy emerged. In this Exceptionalist context, I analyze the research of G. Stanley Hall, Edward Lee Thorndike, and James Mark Baldwin in conjunction with popular school fiction, focusing on conceptualizations and dramatizations of inattention. During this period, the idea of "attention" organizes human relationships with the environment and other animals and encourages particular definitions of development.; The use of animals to explain childhood attention, though attractive to the scientists I mention above, troubles other researchers, for it attributes an entrenched class hierarchy to natural causes. John Dewey, for example, was sensitive to the regressive and elitist underpinnings of this way of looking at childhood attention. In Part II, therefore, I examine John Dewey's writings on attention, arguing that Dewey displaced explanations of childhood attention based implicitly on animal psychology with explanations that represented children as experimenters. Then I interpret school fictions of the early twentieth century as exemplars of this new model of childhood attention. In the conclusion, I discuss this trajectory from child-as-animal to child-as-experimenter, highlighting the persistence of both metaphorical associations in contemporary American culture, specifically in the ways people discuss Attention Deficit Disorder.