Modernists versus Medicine in Literature : Mann, Celine, Beckett, and the Challenge of Medicalization

This academic work explores the pivotal shift in Western thought when disease replaced sin as the fundamental framework for understanding human existence.

This academic work explores the pivotal shift in Western thought when 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. The book traces medicine's evolving relationship with literature across European history—from medieval skepticism through Renaissance ambivalence to Enlightenment enthusiasm. It argues that modernity emerged when humanity ceased viewing disease as divine punishment and began understanding it as natural physiochemical processes. Central to the analysis is how 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 early 20th-century eugenics movements. The author demonstrates how modernist writers paradoxically accepted medicine's dominance while questioning its authority. Through close readings of selected texts, the 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 arbiter of human ontology.