The years following World War II symbolized a new beginning for the United
States. While at the height of global power, Americans founds that they were able to
experience a leisurely existence where items, desired instead of necessary, could be
purchased by almost anyone. This increased prosperity, however, also caused a rise in
the number of addicts that included not only the hard-core drug users, but "junkies" who
were addicted to filling the emptiness within through the use of illegal drugs to
television to sex in order to do so. This dissertation examines the phenomenon of the
rise of addicts following World War II, using the literature of addiction in order to
elucidate the reasoning behind this surge.
Contemporary American authors formed a new genre of writing, "junkie
literature," which chronicles the rise of addiction and juxtaposes questions of identity
and the use of "junk." Burroughs's Junky and Trocchi's Cain's Book are among the first
to represent the shift in the postwar years between earlier narratives of addiction and the
rise of junkie literature through an erasure of previously held beliefs that addiction was
the result of a moral vice rather than a disease. Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries, Ann Marlowe's How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z, and Linda Yablonsky's The
Story of Junk continue this trend of semi-autobiographical writing in an effort to show
the junkie's identity in society, as well as the way addiction mirrors capitalism and
consumerism as a whole. Finally, Hubert Selby's Requiem for a Dream, Bret Easton
Ellis's Less than Zero, and John Updike's Rabbit at Rest explore a different kind of junk
addiction, focusing on the use of television, diet pills, sex, cocaine, and food to fill an
ineffable void inside that the characters of the novels find themselves unable to
articulate. Using Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, as well as various socio-historical
critics, this dissertation investigates the rise of addiction narratives in the postwar years,
linking the questions of identity to consumerism in contemporary American culture.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2009-12-7309 |
| Date | 2009 December 1900 |
| Creators | Bowers, Abigail Leigh |
| Contributors | Robinson, Sally |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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