The Rhetoric of Realism: American Psychology and American Literature, 1860-1910
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University of New Hampshire University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository Doctoral Dissertations Student Scholarship Spring 1994 The rhetoric of realism: American psychology and American literature, 1860-1910 Sandra Webster University of New Hampshire, Durham Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation Recommended Citation Webster, Sandra, "The rhetoric of realism: American psychology and American literature, 1860-1910" (1994). Doctoral Dissertations. 1797. https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/1797 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. 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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE RHETORIC OP REALISM: AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY AND AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1860-1910 BY SANDRA WEBSTER BA Cleveland State University, 1986 MA Cleveland State University, 1988 MA University of New Hampshire, 1990 DISSERTATION Submitted to the University of New Hampshire in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology May, 1994 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED C 1994 Sandra Webster Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This dissertation has been examined and approved. •r? U v v t ; - A . Dissertation Director, Victor A. Benassi Professor of Psychology i7r> a ■■ - ■ "i ■ i I, Brigittee’Bailey, Associate Professor of English David Devonis, Assistant Professor of Psychology Teikyo-Marycrest University JohivLimber, Associate Professor of Psychology \ iibc^gri"'oJK ___________________ Deborah Johnson, Assistant Professor of Psychology Universitv of Southern Maine y y y ? / < ■ ^ ^ t/ William Wren Stine, Associate Professor of Psychology Date 71 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This volume is dedicated in gratitude and respect to Dr. Stephen R. Coleman iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks go to my committee members, Dr. Victor Benassi, Chair; Dr. Brigitte Bailey, Dr. David Devonis, Dr. Deborah Johnson, Dr. John Limber, and Dr. William W. Stine, for their patience, many helpful suggestions, and continued support throughout this long process. On a personal note, I would like to thank Dr. Peter Femald for bearing with me through many difficult times; Dr. Mark Henn, Tricia Irwin, Dr. Saul Rosenthal, Agnes Rysinska, and Yu Ping Zhang, for their friendship when it was most needed as well as for making the difficult years of graduate school bearable. To Dr.Stephen R. Coleman, I owe an intellectual debt that can never be repaid: He has been mentor, adviser, explainer of the world, model and friend from my first days as a graduate student and it is from him that I acquired a passion for ideas, historical "truth," and the confidence to believe I might find a place in the marginal field of the history of psychology. Finally, I would like to thank my children, Eric and Jennifer Hicks, for their patience and support during the difficult years of being both student and mother. No parent could be prouder. v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. PREFACE In this study, I assume that the written word provides a valid source of information about the ideas and issues of central importance to a particular culture at a particular historical moment. I have further assumed that the verbal meaning of a text is determinable and stable and that, accordingly, the act of textual interpretation is comparable to the acts of observation that express the methodology of natural and social sciences. These assumptions are not as radical as they might appear on first reading. In the late nineteenth century, textual interpretation received support by the work of the influential philosopher and social scientist, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), who proposed a science of hermeneutics that would serve as the basis for interpreting all forms of writing in the human sciences, including literature, the humanities and the social sciences.1 In Dilthey's formulation, the determinate meaning of a text consists of an interaction between the meaning of the text as a whole (made explicit by reference to the general norms of the language of the culture, time, or discipline; the author's cultural milieu and personal characteristics and biases) and the meaning of the text's constituent parts (the meaning of particular words and sentences; the use of particular metaphors and analogies to convey ideas). According to Dilthey, it was possible to achieve a valid interpretation of a text by a sustained, mutually qualifying interplay between the reader's evolving sense of the whole and retrospective vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. understanding of its component parts. I submit, in this regard, that the procedures employed by scientists are similar in kind: In both the natural and social sciences there exists a sustaining and mutually qualifying interplay between a whole (defined as theory or hypothesis derived from theory) and the scientist's retrospective understanding of the low-level observations and measurements that constitute the theory's "component parts."2 In the sciences and in textual interpretation, hypotheses can be confirmed or disconfirmed by continued reference to the data: in the humanities, by reference to the text; in the sciences, by reference to original or replicated observations. If the alternative hypothesis is disconfirmed, it can be replaced by an alternative hypothesis which conforms more closely to all the components of the text or to all relevant observations. The most that can be achieved in either textual interpretation or in scientific observation is to arrive at the most probable interpretation. In textual interpretation, according to Abrams, "this logic of highest probability...is adequate to yield objective knowledge, confirmable by other competent readers concerning the meanings of both of the component passages and of the artistic whole in a work of literature."3 The central objective of this study is to compare expressions of the concept of consciousness in nineteenth- century psychological and literary texts. The success of this endeavor relies on the validity of the interpretation of passages drawn from these texts. These passages serve as the vii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "data" from which I draw conclusions about similarities, differences, and changes in the way consciousness was conceptualized in nineteenth-century American discourse. The purpose of this study is to determine the extent to which discipline-specific methodological commitments (in psychology, to objectivity; in literature, to the recreation of subjective experience) determined the way in which consciousness was conceived. Accordingly, my conclusions are valid only to the degree that the passages I have selected