Today I read Laura Doyle's fascinating study. She has a very good technique of crossreading
history and literature. CH.1 is a detailed analysis of social discourse concerning eugenics in the US and its influence on culture at large. As anyone knows, Nazis used the discourse of eugenics in order to make a totalitarian government. But Doyle insists that the US preceded Germany on this point, at least before 1933 when Nazis made a law of racial hierarchy. In the US, the discourse of eugenics were quickly associated with the politics of race and served for the national project of integration. Surprising. Ch, 2 is about Wordsworth and Scott, but I was just skimming through it (since it is not my "area" right now). Ch.3 is excellent. She traces the tradition of social Darwinism, and what is unique is that she juxtaposes Darwinian concept of organic interaction with
Merleau-Ponty's notion of intersubjective body (the technical terms might be wrong, but something like those). The remaining chapters are about individual works by Toomer, Woolf, Morrison ... These are close readings of texts and clearly distinct from early chapters in style. I will come to these chapters later with some refreshed knowledge of these works.
