Desire And Alienation In An American Tragedy

As one of the most representative literary works of Theodore Dreiser,An American Tragedy has been long branded with naturalism and realism.However,this thesis emphasizes on An American Tragedy through a study on the desire of the characters in the novel by the quest of mimetic desire theory and the concept of desire subject from a contemporary French philosopher named Rene Girard.This study contributes to the discovery of the modernist characteristics of An American Tragedy from the perspective of desire and alienation.This thesis is divided into five chapters.The first chapter is the introduction divided into research background,significance of study and general organization.The research background contains the general comments on An American Tragedy and points out that the major theme of this novel is material desire.The second chapter is the introduction to the theory used in this paper.It introduces the connotation of mimetic desire theory.At the same time,it introduces the relationship among mimetic desire theory,alienation and modernity.The second chapter,which is the main body of the thesis,adopts the theory of mimetic desire to elaborate the novel.In the third and fourth chapter,the thesis discusses and analyzes the literary work in the perspective of alienation and mimetic desire theory from Rene Girard in the three vectors:the subject of desire,the object of desire and the mediator of desire.In the third chapter,the thesis discusses the consequences caused by the expansion of desire from three aspects according to the mimetic desire theory.Meanwhile,the fourth chapter discusses the alienation and its origin driven by expansion of desire in An American Tragedy.It is mainly the alienation of the relationship between people and material,and discusses the origin of the theme of desire in the novel from two aspects of the author’s life experience and his creative ideas,so as to provide ideological support for this thesis.The fifth chapter,namely the conclusion,is to discover the essence of interpersonal relationship through the interpretation of internal drive of desire,and then lead to human alienation.In this way,the thesis can find the connotation of modernist characteristics in this novel.This thesis mainly studies the internal drive and operation process of the protagonist’s desire so as to find the influence of the operation of desire in the protagonist’s psychology on existence of people,leading to people’s interactive crisis,and then find its ideological connotation.In short,it is to discover the crisis of human existence from the perspective of desire,and to further explore the theme of desire in An American Tragedy.