Abstract

The Alcoholism of the Text addresses representations of alcoholism in American literature from the prohibition era through the 1960s. My dissertation analyzes how Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O'Neill, Anne Sexton and Jack Spicer articulate alcoholism in their work. My study also offers an interdisciplinary reading of alcoholism as an epistemology which manifests itself in poetry and fiction. ;Objectives: Move literary inquiries into alcohol and alcoholism out of the mode of biographical scandal and into the realm of epistemology and social thought. Examine the ways in which portrayals of masculinity and artistic transgression hinge on displays of drinking in modern American poetry and fiction. Reevaluate alcoholism as a disease-concept or entity, by considering it, instead, as a disease-metaphor or as an epistemology--a way of knowing the self in the world. ;Design. Chapter 1: An overview of the literature on alcoholism and writing and a rationale for reading alcoholism as an epistemology. Chapter 2: The Sun Also Rises: Ernest Hemingway's constructions of American masculinity based on episodes of drinking and an analysis of The Sun Also Rises in the context of the Prohibition era. Chapter 3: Long Day's Journey Into Night: Eugene O'Neill's representation of alcoholism as characterizing the psychological climate of Irish American family life and as identifying a writer's symbolic literary family or genealogy. Chapter 4: Anne Sexton's representations of alcoholism as "the father's" disease, and her performatory confessions of drug addiction, an analysis of the perceived therapeutic nature of confessional writing in the context of 1950s psychiatric practices and drug therapies. Chapter 5: Jack Spicer's poetry. Biographical erasures of Jack Spicer's alcoholism; post modern "camp" and drunkenness