1st Edition

Mocking Eugenics American Culture against Scientific Hatred

By Ewa Barbara Luczak Copyright 2021
186 Pages
by Routledge

186 Pages
by Routledge

186 Pages
by Routledge

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... Read more

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

Biography

Ewa Barbara Luczak is Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw and President of the Polish Association for American Studies. She is the author of How Their Living in Europe Affected Five African American Authors, Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination: Heredity Rules in the Twentieth Century and the co-editor of New Cosmopolitanism, Race and Ethnicity: Cultural Perspectives.