The age of the crisis of man: Thought and fiction at mid-century, 1939--1966

This dissertation reconstructs the "crisis of man," a forgotten discourse that shaped United States intellectual and literary life from 1939 to 1966. The rise of totalitarian control of the peoples of Europe led to anxiety in Anglo-America that human nature was changing. Fear of the barbarization of humanity affected theologians, New York Intellectuals, anti-Nazi European emigres, Chicago conservatives, and an older, native-born intelligentsia. They sought a new grounding for the moral status of "man."; Part One traces the discourse of man through three stages: from early battles between scientific pragmatists and religious thinkers, to the emergence of French existentialism as a mediating position, to a final formulation of the crisis by Hannah Arendt in terms of the failed Rights of Man. The philosophical debate often seemed productively empty, developing a "regulative idea" to force others to fix concrete results. This led intellectuals to demand practical solutions in two realms: universal human rights legislation, and the representational power of literature.; The conclusion of Part One shows why and how intellectuals placed their hopes in the American novel to reconstitute a lost tradition of humanism. Critics' predictions of the death of the novel challenged writers to invest bloodless questions of "man" with flesh and detail.; Part Two examines the success of four fiction writers in testing the intellectuals' discourse against the realities of daily life. Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison rewrote the crisis of man through the contradictions of race, arriving at distinct solutions dependent upon the fates of Jews and blacks in postwar America. Flannery O'Connor tried to reject the crisis through an orthodox vision of faith, but became enmeshed in complexities of liberalism and race. Thomas Pynchon showed how the unity of man was shattered not by complex science, but by the intrusion of mundane technologies into everyday life.; The dissertation concludes by asking why the 1960s repudiated universal "man." It considers whether elements of the earlier discourse prepared the ground for internal critiques of U.S. misdeeds, poststructuralist theory, and the black freedom, feminist, and anti-Vietnam War movements.