'Literature, Psychoanalysis and the Death Penalty, 1900-1950'

这个项目的主要目的是研究文学的文化和伦理力量如何为20世纪初的读者提供思考1900年至1950年期间英国，爱尔兰和美国死刑的机会。此外，在这一时期，文学和正义的概念都受到精神分析科学发展的深刻影响。托马斯·曼在1926年的一篇文章《杀死敌人》中引用了弗洛伊德的《图腾与禁忌》来支持他的观点，即死刑本质上是报复性的。事实上，弗洛伊德出版了一本简短的反死刑小册子，名为《死刑观》;他的追随者西奥多·雷克、汉斯·萨克斯和玛丽·波拿巴将用精神分析的观点有力地游说反对死刑。精神分析理论历史的这一方面没有得到充分的研究，但它是精神分析对文化进行重大干预的关键方式之一，因为除了特定的作家和特定的倡导团体外，人们普遍支持死刑。事实上，考虑到死刑不再是一种公共奇观，精神分析对死刑文学表现的读者的影响怎么估计都不为过。我将考察死刑是如何进入文化潜意识的，它的现实只能通过想象力的努力来实现，以及文学和精神分析如何想象和重新想象死刑对这一时期的公共辩论产生了强大的影响。此外，精神分析的影响也是政治性的，因为废奴主义运动在情感和同理心的价值上存在分歧，这些论点是通过精神分析的讨论而得到的。例如，在英国，有两个不同的废奴运动：一个是反对情绪化策略的霍华德联盟，至今仍然存在;另一个是由维奥莱特·货车·德·埃尔斯特创立的更为特殊的废奴运动，它采用了模仿妇女参政运动的休克策略。该项目将考虑在这种情况下，文学的力量是如何表现出来的，例如，文学对辩论中的活动家不可抗拒的吸引力：虽然美国律师克拉伦斯·达罗和反死刑活动家维奥莱特·货车·德·埃尔斯特都出版了非虚构作品，推动了他们的事业，但每个人都不可避免地被小说作为媒介所吸引。1905年，达罗出版了一本现在已经被遗忘的关于死刑的小说，影响了德莱塞的《美国悲剧》，而在1937年，货车德埃尔斯特出版《绞刑架上》的同一年，她出版了一本反映司法暴力的流行鬼故事。因此，该项目将研究在死刑受到威胁的情况下，“高雅”文化和流行文化之间的联系如何显得特别不可分割。这项研究的重点是专门在英国，爱尔兰和美国在1900年至1950年期间的死刑的英语表示：正如我在支持的情况下，这将最大限度地发挥项目的原创性。第一次世界大战和第二次世界大战期间的主要国际冲突将在专著的一章中讨论，这将进一步确保我能够在英语语言中解决死刑的跨国方面。简而言之，这个项目旨在批判性地研究文学如何回应和参与二十世纪上半叶围绕死刑的精神分析辩论，并进一步思考这些辩论对仍然存在死刑的当代世界的相关性。因此，死刑、文学和精神分析之间的联系呈现出一种跨学科研究的完全原创的联系，这种联系有可能改变现代主义研究，并使一系列地方、区域和国家的公众受众受益。

The key aim of this project is to examine how the cultural and ethical power of literature offered early twentieth-century readers opportunities for thinking through capital punishment in the UK, Ireland and the US in the period between 1900 and 1950. Further, during this period both literature and conceptions of justice were profoundly influenced by the developing science of psychoanalysis. In a 1926 article 'Über die Todesstrafe' Thomas Mann used Freud's 'Totem and Taboo' in support of his view that capital punishment was inherently retributive. And in fact, Freud published a short anti-death penalty tract called 'View on Capital Punishment'; his followers Theodor Reik, Hans Sachs and Marie Bonaparte would lobby powerfully against the death penalty using psychoanalytic arguments. This aspect of the history of psychoanalytic theory has been insufficiently studied, but it was one of the key ways in which psychoanalysis made a major intervention in culture, as there was a general consensus in support of the death penalty except for specific writers and specific advocacy groups. In fact, the impact on readers of literary representations of the death penalty informed by psychoanalysis cannot be overestimated, given that capital punishment was no longer a public spectacle. I will examine the way that the death penalty had gone into the cultural unconscious, its reality only accessible by means of imaginative effort, and how efforts by literature and psychoanalysis to imagine and reimagine the death penalty had a powerful effect on public debate in the period. Further, the impact of psychoanalysis was also political since abolitionist movements were divided about the value of affect and empathy and these arguments were informed by psychoanalytic discussions. For example, in the UK, there were two differing abolitionist movements: one, The Howard League, which rejected emotive tactics and which still exists today, and the other more idiosyncratic, founded by Violet van der Elst, which used shock tactics modeled on suffragette campaigns. The project will consider how the power of literature in this context is demonstrated in, for example, the irresistible appeal of literature to campaigners in the debate: while both the American lawyer Clarence Darrow and the anti-death penalty activist Violet van der Elst published nonfictional works that advanced their causes, each were also inescapably drawn to fiction as a medium. In 1905, Darrow published a now-forgotten novel about capital punishment that influenced Dreiser's 'An American Tragedy', while in 1937, the same year that van der Elst published 'On the Gallows', and with the same press, she published a volume of popular ghost stories that reflect on judicial violence. The project will therefore examine how connections between 'high' and popular culture seem particularly inextricable where the death penalty is at stake. This study is focused specifically upon Anglophone representations of the death penalty across the UK, Ireland and the USA in the period 1900-1950: as I have demonstrated in the Case for Support, this will maximise the project's originality. The major international conflicts of the period WWI and WWII, which will be addressed in a chapter of the monograph, will further ensure that I am able to address transnational aspects of the death penalty within the English language.In short, this project seeks to critically examine how literature responds to and participates in psychoanalytic debates around capital punishment in the first half of the twentieth century, and to further reflect on the relevance of these debates for a contemporary world where the death penalty still exists. Connections between the death penalty, literature and psychoanalysis therefore present an entirely original nexus of interdisciplinary study that has the potential to transform modernist studies and to benefit a range of local, regional and national public audiences.