The autonomic American.
Item
-
Title
-
The autonomic American.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9946182
-
identifier
-
9946182
-
Creator
-
Kaufman, Frederick Leonard.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: David Reynolds
-
Date
-
1999
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, American | Biography | History of Science
-
Abstract
-
The advent of Federalism coincided with a watershed in clinical history and thus demarcated a crisis moment for the idea of the human body. Moreover, Federalism witnessed the phenomenon of America's first professional novelist, Charles Brockden Brown, whose closest friends were doctors who dabbled in literature, and whose major work featured his obsessions with such bizarre clinical anomalies as spontaneous combustion, sleepwalking, epidemic disease such as yellow fever and the malady of writing itself, which Brown dubbed cacoethes scribendi. My dissertation contends that Brown's fascination with literary aporia and metatextuality can be linked on a number of levels to the contemporaneous annihilation of what had been since the seventeenth century the regnant approach to scientific problems, an approach grounded in theoretical impositions of taxonomic orders. My methodology employs models of human physiology gleaned from "cutting-edge" scientific and medical texts of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century, then crosses disciplines in order to apply the medical structures of "sympathy," "excitement," and "retrograde motion" as critical tools of interpretation for the poems, novels, short stories and essays of this period. "The Autonomic American" includes a preface on Benjamin Franklin and the clinical sciences of circulation, five chapters on Brockden Brown and his coterie of less well-known, genre-crossing medical/literary figures (such as Elihu Smith and Samuel Latham Mitchill), and an epilogue that discusses Nathaniel Hawthorne in the context of America's burgeoning culture of gastrosophical pseudo-science. Throughout, the study focusses most closely on structures underlying theories of the human nervous system, particularly the nervous science of involuntary ("autonomic") response, which I subsequently posit as a privileged aspect of American literature---not the labored successions of logic and reason, but, as it were, gut reactions.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
