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

这个项目的主要目的是考察文学的文化和伦理力量如何在1900年至1950年期间为英国、爱尔兰和美国的二十世纪早期读者提供思考死刑的机会。此外，在这一时期，精神分析科学的发展对文学和正义的概念都产生了深远的影响。在1926年的一篇文章《Todesstrafe的死亡》中，托马斯·曼引用了弗洛伊德的《图腾与禁忌》来支持他的观点，即死刑本质上是报应的。事实上，弗洛伊德发表了一篇简短的反对死刑的文章，名为《死刑的观点》；他的追随者西奥多·赖克、汉斯·萨克斯和玛丽·波拿巴将利用精神分析的论点，大力游说反对死刑。精神分析理论历史的这一方面一直没有得到充分的研究，但这是精神分析对文化进行重大干预的主要方式之一，因为除了特定的作者和特定的倡导团体外，支持死刑的人普遍达成共识。事实上，鉴于死刑不再是一种公共奇观，精神分析提供的关于死刑的文学表现对读者的影响怎么估计都不为过。我将考察死刑已经进入文化无意识的方式，它的现实只能通过想象力的努力才能获得，以及文学和精神分析对想象和重新想象死刑的努力如何对那个时期的公众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，这些论点是由精神分析的讨论提供信息的。例如，在英国，有两个不同的废奴主义运动：一个是霍华德联盟(Howard League)，它反对情绪化策略，至今仍在存在；另一个更独特，由维奥莱特·范德埃尔斯特(Violet Van Der Elst)创立，它使用模仿妇女参政运动的令人震惊的策略。该项目将考虑文学在这一背景下的力量如何在辩论中展示文学对活动家的不可抗拒的吸引力：尽管美国律师克拉伦斯·达罗和反死刑活动家维奥莱特·范德埃尔斯特都发表了推动他们事业的非虚构作品，但他们都不可避免地被小说作为媒介所吸引。1905年，达罗出版了一本现已被遗忘的关于死刑的小说，这本小说影响了德莱塞的《美国悲剧》。1937年，范德埃尔斯特出版了《绞刑架上》，同年，她出版了一本反映司法暴力的流行鬼故事集。因此，该项目将研究“性兴奋”与流行文化之间的联系，在事关死刑的情况下，它们之间的联系似乎尤其密不可分。这项研究特别关注1900-1950年间英国、爱尔兰和美国的以英语为母语的死刑表述：正如我在支持案例中所证明的那样，这将使该项目的原创性最大化。第一次世界大战和第二次世界大战期间的重大国际冲突将在专著的一个章节中加以阐述，这将进一步确保我能够用英语讨论死刑的跨国方面。简而言之，这个项目试图批判性地审视文学如何回应和参与20世纪上半叶关于死刑的精神分析辩论，并进一步反思这些辩论对当代世界的相关性，因为当今世界死刑仍然存在。因此，死刑、文学和精神分析之间的联系形成了一种全新的跨学科研究联系，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.