| This study of mid-twentieth century American literature identifies and explores the influence of a formative moment in American psychiatry and contemporary narrative. I contend not only that these developing fields were mutually constitutive, but that their textual productions worked in tandem to delineate a tenacious and culturally pervasive account of inner psychological processes. Through a detailed reading of Carson McCullers's Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend (1944), John Steinbeck's Cannery Row (1945), and the 1945 John Huston's documentary, Let There Be Light, my argument analyzes textual negotiations about the diagnosis and etiology of psychopathology, especially the repeatedly twinned "diseases" of alcoholism and homosexuality. In the course of reading these texts in new and historically relevant ways, the dissertation defamiliarizes a critical expectation that the "great American novel" demonstrates psychological "depth" and complexity by acknowledging that expectation as the legacy of 1940's canon formation. Ultimately, this project deploys a nuanced and multidisciplinary analysis of psychologized, narrativized, and quintessentially American assumptions about "pathological personality." Crystallized during the crucial years of the Second World War, these assumptions continue to enjoy an ideological currency in both our fictional and personal narratives today. |
