Imported from France: American adaptations of existentialist ideas and literature (Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, John Updike).
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文摘
This dissertation is a cultural-historical study of the exchange of ideas between America and France that coincided with the rise and decline of French existentialism. In the 1930s and 1940s, American novels and film became popular in France, among writers and throughout the society. Convinced that the analytical novel with which all in France were familiar did not fulfill the psychological needs of the time, Sartre was drawn to certain American novelists, whose methods seemed uniquely suited to the modern era. Drawing on the techniques of these writers, Sartre and Camus created philosophies that tended to exalt unreflecting action. For a time after the Liberation of France, French existentialism was, in turn, popularly received in the United States, where it was typically associated—implicitly or explicitly—with World War II, the Resistance, and the Holocaust. In intellectual journals and mainstream publications, existentialist ideas were widely debated and subjected to diverse explanations. A number of American writers were drawn to the philosophy, which they modified and adapted to the crises and controversies of their own time.;This exchange of ideas has been examined in a number of books and articles, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than being an influence study that assesses the particularly existential qualities of postwar American literature, this dissertation approaches the reception of existentialism as a historical phenomenon, seeking to determine how the literature manifests the era in which it was written. It considers the prewar French response to American culture, as well as the postwar reception of existentialism in the United States, examining at length the work of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, and John Updike. To address the pervasive questions of the Cold War era, these authors turned not only to the work of twentieth-century French intellectuals propelled to popularity by their association with the Resistance, but also to the nineteenth-century critiques of rationalism undertaken by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Wright, Mailer, and Updike adapt existentialism for different purposes, but they share a common interest in examining the motives for human behavior, especially those underlying cruelty and violence, by reconsidering the nature of the human condition.