Mocking Eugenics - American Culture Against Scientific Hatred

Mocking Eugenics explores the opposition to eugenic discourse mounted by twentieth-century American artists seeking to challenge and destabilise what they viewed as a dangerous body of thought.

List of contents

Introduction 1. “I am for the little man”: Charlie Chaplin’s comedies and the eugenic American 2. Is the “strenuous life” a pleasant life? Euthenic efficiency, racial duty, and the phenomenon of Anita Loos 3. Eugenic marriages and psychometrics in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi! and The Vegetable 4. Cosmopolitanism vs. eugenic racial nationalism: Ernest Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring and Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race 5. For “the betterment of the human family”? California sterilizations, Wallace Thurman, and Tomorrow’s Children Conclusions: Could it have happened here? The borderline existence of anti-eugenic satire

Summary

Mocking Eugenics explores the opposition to eugenic discourse mounted by twentieth-century American artists seeking to challenge and destabilize what they viewed as a dangerous body of thought. Focusing on their wielding of humor to attack the contemporaneous science of heredity and the totalitarian impulse informing it, this book confronts the conflict between eugenic theories presented as grounded in scientific and metaphysical truth and the satirical treatment of eugenics as not only absurdly illogical but also antithetical to democratic ideals and inimical to humanistic values. Through analyses of the films of Charlie Chaplin and the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Anita Loos, and Wallace Thurman, Mocking Eugenics examines their use of laughter to dismantle the rhetoric of perfectionism, white supremacy, and nativism that shaped mainstream expressions of American patriotism and normative white masculinity. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural studies, literature, cinema, sociology, humor, and American studies.

Product details

• Authors: Ewa Barbara Luczak, Ewa Barbara (University of Warsaw Luczak, Luczak Ewa Barbara
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.05.2023
• EAN: 9781032000909
• ISBN: 978-1-0-3200090-9
• No. of pages: 178
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Geosciences > Geography; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; Popular Culture, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General, Society & culture: general, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Society and culture: general, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000