Doctoring culture: Literary intellectuals, psychology and mass culture in the twentieth-century United States

This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach to literature and culture, looking at sites of unexpected interchanges among twentieth-century U.S. literature, science and mass culture that build each of these arenas. Concerned centrally with the mid-century establishment of academic authority in the fields of literature and psychology, I look at how writers secure authority for projects of social reform which center on the reshaping of "deviant" bodies through new models of "normal" interiority. These arguments about normalcy suffuse literature, mass culture and science, and foreground an historical interdisciplinarity among U.S. intellectuals. This interdisciplinarity has been missed in literary studies of the "fractious" relationship between intellectuals and mass culture.;After the introduction, Chapter Two clusters three kinds of texts: a 1940s piece of serial fiction, WONDER WOMAN; the science of her Harvard-educated psychologist creator, William Moulton Marston; and the reactions to the comic from literary critics Cleanth Brooks, Robert Heilman and Walter Ong with psychoanalyst Fredric Wertham. The analysis of these intellectuals emphasizes the crossing in conflict of different, newly qualifed cultural experts who conduct a debate about the future of "American" culture through figures of womanhood.;Chapter Three follows WONDER WOMAN's critic, Dr. Fredric Wertham, to open an often mentioned but never fully explored connection between Wertham and famed writer Richard Wright. Looking at these two writers I show the closeness of psychoanalysis and literary techniques for both. Framed within contemporary discussions of race and the use of psychoanalysis in literary criticism, I show an instance of a literary psychoanalysis engaged with issues of race and class in the post war U.S.;Chapter Four concludes the dissertation by theorizing present-day theory and culture inflected by the presence of psychoanalysis, including writing by Teresa De Lauretis and Judith Butler. This discussion is strategically intended to underline what I see as a need to treat and instrumentally use contemporary theory within a larger trajectory of intellectual and cultural history. I emphasize that an interdisciplinary history of psychology is crucial for the advancement of literary and feminist psychoanalytic theory as well as the field of Queer Theory.