Modernists versus Medicine in Literature

Mann, Céline, Beckett, and the Challenge of Medicalization

Allen Thiher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781041248415
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040884713
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This academic work explores the pivotal shift in Western thought whereby disease replaced sin as the fundamental framework for understanding human existence. This volume examines how this transformation shaped literary modernism through three exemplary writers who confronted the growing medicalization of human life. This book presupposes medicine's evolving relationship with literature across European history—from medieval skepticism through Renaissance ambivalence to Enlightenment enthusiasm. It argues that modernity then emerged when humanity ceased viewing disease as divine punishment and began understanding it as a natural physicochemical process. Central to the analysis is the way medicine assumed powers once held by the Church, overseeing birth, life, and death while explaining human suffering. This medicalization granted authority to medical practitioners, creating both benefits and potential abuses—particularly evident in the early twentieth?century eugenics movement. The author demonstrates how modernist writers paradoxically accepted medicine's dominance while questioning its authority. Through close readings of selected texts, this book reveals how these writers navigated the tension between medical determinism and humanistic concerns, often employing irony and satire to express their ambivalence toward medicine's expanding role in defining human experience. This study illuminates a defining characteristic of literary modernism: the creative response to medicine's replacement of religion as the arbiter of human ontology.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Background
• 2 Thomas Mann: The Diagnostic Manual as Fate
• 3 L.-F. Céline and the Nihilistic Vision of Pathology
• 4 Samuel Beckett: Physiological Farce
• Concluding Unscientific Postscript
• Appendix: Scientific Racism, Eugenics, and Genetics
• Index