Dissertation (Body)

UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Sanitized City and Other Urban Myths: Fantasies of Risk and Illness in the Twentieth Century Metropolis Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4pf6k0gd Author Youssef, David Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles The Sanitized City and Other Urban Myths: Fantasies of Risk and Illness in the Twentieth Century Metropolis A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by David Matthew Youssef 2012 © Copyright by David Matthew Youssef 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Sanitized City and Other Urban Myths: Fantasies of Risk and Illness in the Twentieth Century Metropolis by David Matthew Youssef Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Los Angeles, 2012 Professor N. Katherine Hayles, Co-Chair Professor Todd Presner, Co-Chair This project is oriented around a comparative analysis of cultural production concerning the metropolitan regions of Los Angeles and Berlin in the twentieth century. While combining approaches toward the history of science and medicine with film and literary studies, this dissertation analyzes the relationship between the increase in invisible risks within large urban centers, and the emergence of illnesses characterized by having undecidable causes (a confusion as to whether they originate from external causes or internal, potentially psychogenic ones.) The body of literature and film addressed in this project, ranging from the turn-of-the-century poetic prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, into 1920’s expressionist film and literature in Weimar Berlin, to ii film noir and Frankfurt School philosophy during the World War II period in Los Angeles and finally to late twentieth century science fiction, explores the cultural effects and implications of the paradigm shift to bacteriology in modern medicine and disease pathology at the end of the nineteenth century. By tracing the experience of undecidable illness within film and literature, this project demonstrates how the paradigm of positivistic disease causation, which resulted from the discovery of the microbe, may have actually generated a radical insecurity within modern society, characterized by anxieties and fears of infection, to the point where many different kinds of psychosomatic, mimetic and psychogenic illnesses also became more widespread. Narrative accounts of undefined illness that were not yet understood scientifically often portrayed experiences of urban community as a collection of anxious impressions of the larger networks of metropolitan infrastructure and the increasing interconnections between multiple individuals which it facilitates, including an invisible dimension of microbiology. These narratives emphasize how urban infrastructure can convey the ineffable presence of “spectral” dangers. iii The dissertation of David Matthew Youssef is approved. Eleanor Kaufman Kathleen Komar N. Katherine Hayles, Committee Co-Chair Todd Presner, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2012 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures vii Acknowledgments viii Vita ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Emergence of Biosocial Intimacy in the Metropolis: Hygiene and History in early Twentieth Century Paris and Berlin 25 Rilke in Paris: Intimacy with the Unfamiliar and the Sacred Metaphysics of the Metropolis 31 Towards a Dialectic of Shock and Insulation 51 Biosocial Intimacy vs Biopower: The Myth of Rationalized Techno-Science in Berlin 62 Biosocial Intimacy and Abstract Space in Fritz Lang’s M 77 Chapter 2: Insurance, Expressionism and the Mythic Realism of “Risk Fantasy” in Weimar Berlin 86 Trauma within the Paradigm: Nervous Illness within a Bacteriologically-Defined Scientific Culture 92 Infrastructural Anxiety and Risk-Fantasy in Kafka’s “Der Bau” 116 Expressionism and the Biological Uncanny 126 Chapter 3: Urban Vitalism: The Milieu Intérieur, the Man-Machine and the Microbiology of Otherness 138 The Construction of the Internal Environment 143 Race-Thinking and Real-Estate in the Desert or the Birth of Los Angeles 165 The Microbiology of Otherness and the Role of Chinatown 173 v Contagious Crowds and the Primitive Mechanism 182 Chapter 4: The Work of Art, the Fictional Event and the Fraudulent Disease: Adorno, Mann and Film Noir in Los Angeles 191 Adorno, Mimesis and the Noir Aesthetics of Normal Corruption 196 Mythic Realism and Statistical Truth in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity 219 The Fraudulent Disease and the Disenchantment of Disenchantment 236 Chapter 5: The Transmutation of Self into Other: Specters of Contagion in Southern California Science Fiction 256 Catastrophe and the Pitfalls of Insularity in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower 265 Infrastructural Apocalypse and Embodiment in Philip K. Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth 288 Spectral Contagion 301 Bibliography 313 vi LIST OF FIGURES 1) Photo of the reading room of the Bibliothèque National in Paris.............................................40 2) Sketch of La Salpêtrière à Paris.................................................................................................42 3) Film still of beggar’s cigarette collection from Fritz Lang’s M................................................81 4) Film still from the Moloch scene in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis....................................................95 5) Film still from the Moloch scene in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis....................................................96 6) Film still from the ghost scene in Fritz Lang’s Das Testament Dr Mabuses..........................132 7) Film still from the ghost scene in Fritz Lang’s Das Testament Dr Mabuses..........................134 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The completion of this dissertation could not have happened without generous assistance along the way from various institutions and individuals who provided me with the resources, both intellectually and financially, to carry out this project. I would first and foremost like to thank the UCLA Department of Comparative Literature and its faculty, staff and students for all the wonderful guidance, intellectual exchange, education, teaching opportunities and financial support during my tenure there as a graduate student. I would also like to thank Eric Sundquist and the Center for Jewish Studies for a generous dissertation research grant in 2008, which allowed me to generate some of the major theoretical foundations of this dissertation. I would also like to thank the DAAD for subsidizing my work in Germany with a research grant in 2010-2011 that helped me bring two chapters to completion. Thanks also to the UCLA Graduate Division for consistent summer research funding. I would also like to thank all my committee members, N. Katherine Hayles, Todd Presner, Eleanor Kaufman, and Kathleen Komar, for all of their helpful advice on and critical engagement with my work over the years. Thanks also to Aamir Mufti and Stathis Gourgouris for advice and critical feedback on the direction of my project at crucial stages. Thanks also to Fran Youssef for helpful editorial work in the end stages. Otherwise, there are too many people to thank who helped me to bring this project to completion. Friends, family and colleagues, you know who you are, and my deepest thanks goes out to you all for your abiding support throughout these years. viii VITA After getting his Bachelor’s Degree in World Literature and Cultural Studies, David Youssef’s research has focused on interdisciplinary approaches toward metropolitan literature in both the European and North American contexts, particularly emphasizing urban studies, history of science and medicine, cinema studies, and critical theory. His dissertation research has focused on the comparative cultural contexts of Berlin and Los Angeles at various stages of their development in order to emphasize the literary dimensions of the metropolis and urban public health in the twentieth century. After receiving a generous dissertation fellowship from Eric Sundquist and the Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA in 2008, he successfully completed his final examinations and advanced to candidacy in 2009. Fluent in German, Youssef also spent a significant amount of time in Germany during the latter stages of his dissertation research and writing, and in 2010-2011, he received a Research Grant from the DAAD to continue his work on comparative literary urbanism in Berlin. During his tenure at UCLA, he had the opportunity to teach a wide variety of undergraduate courses, primarily within the departments of German Studies and Comparative Literature as a teaching assistant, which ranged from classes such as “Hypermedia Berlin,” “The Holocaust in Film and Literature,” to “The Dialectics of Colonial Sovereignty.” Youssef also gave presentations in both the ACLA Conference in Puebla, Mexico and the Figures of Comparison Conference at Columbia University in 2007 in panels focusing respectively on historical memory and psychoanalysis. He also published an article, entitled ix respectively on historical memory and psychoanalysis. He also published an article, entitled “Electronic Ruins: Virtual Landscapes Out of History,” in a website compendium to N. Katherine Hayles’ book Electronic Literature: Playing, Interpreting, Teaching in 2007. During each of the summers of 2006, 2007 and 2008, Youssef also received a Summer Research Grant to develop

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