The Force of Habit: Rhetoric, Repetition, and Identity From Darwin To Drugs
Open Access
- Author:
- Nicotra, Jodie A.
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 06, 2005
- Committee Members:
- Richard Doyle, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
John L Selzer, Committee Member
Susan Merrill Squier, Committee Member
Vincent M Colapietro, Committee Member - Keywords:
- rhetoric and composition
rhetoric of science
habit
subjectivity
identity - Abstract:
- The trope of habit in Western culture has had an important tradition as a pedagogical strategy, a way of accounting for human behavior, and even as an explanation for the workings of natural and physical laws. However, in its contemporary guise, habit has become what some scholars call a culturally dead metaphor: that is, while the word is still used, it conveys only a shade of its former cultural resonance and weight. This project attempts to invigorate the concept of habit by turning to nineteenth and early twentieth century discourses of evolutionary biology and psychology (and the responses to these discourses), in which the concept of habit was both more vital and more richly nuanced. Chapter One introduces the “problem” of habit, including its relation to the rhetorical concept of ethos, and, by extension, ethics. Chapter Two examines how Darwin treated habit as one of the forces that ordered the dizzying complexity of life; it also considers how Darwin himself predicts (via the concept of habit) some contemporary habits of reading Darwin, and provides Samuel Butler’s response to Darwin as a counterexample of ways in which Darwin’s work might be read. Chapter Three considers William James’s important use of habit and attends particularly to certain self-experiments by which James attempted to negotiate the force of habit. Chapter Four examines the ways in which habit became appropriated in John Broadus Watson’s behaviorism as a means to attempt control over experimental subjects and then consumers. Finally, Chapter Five demonstrates the material effects of the changing definition of the habitual user of drugs: from morphinomaniac to habitué to addict.