Overview
- First book to argue that drug addiction and alcoholism are evidence of individual moral flaws
- Draws on the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as the basis for a morality completely severed from Christianity
- Explores the language and rhetoric of addiction discourse, especially its use of simile, metaphor and euphemism
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
Narratives of Addiction: Savage Usury is the first book to argue, in the face of more than a century’s received wisdom, that drug addiction and alcoholism are undoubtedly evidence of individual moral flaws. However, the sense of morality that underlies this book is completely severed from Christianity. Instead, it is influenced in particular by the writings of the nineteenth-century German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Frederick Nietzsche, both of whom insisted that a genuine morality was actually incompatible with Christianity. The sequence of chapters moves from addictions on the streets, into rehab clinics, and finally into the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. This is the first book to argue that the search for pleasure drives alcoholism and drug addiction and not the “numbing of pain”. Throughout the book I reject the claims of the medical profession, as embodied by the American Medical Association, that drug addiction and alcoholism are diseases, and further argue that they do not have the authority to tell hundreds of millions of Americans that addiction is not a moral failing. I also query throughout the book the claims of neuroscience, psychology, and the social sciences that addictions to alcohol and drugs are attributable to causes that their specific disciplines are best suited to understand. I argue that there is nothing complex about addiction: it is a simple behavioural disorder. The language routinely employed to discuss addiction is similarly not complex, just confused, and so it is also the rhetoric of addiction discourse, especially its use of simile, metaphor and euphemism, that this book evaluates.
Reviews
Kathy E. Ferguson, Professor, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, USA. Most recent book is Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets , 2011.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Dr Kevin McCarron is the author of two previous monographs: William Golding, and The Coincidence of Opposites, and a co-author of Frightening Fiction. He worked as a stand-up comedian for many years. He has published forty chapters in edited collections and nineteen peer-reviewed journal articles on a range of subjects including The Dead Sea Scrolls, university teaching and stand-up comedy, blasphemy, prison narratives, tattooing, prostitution, alcoholism and heroin addiction, begging and homelessness, and the Marquis de Sade.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Narratives of Addiction
Book Subtitle: Savage Usury
Authors: Kevin McCarron
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88461-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-88460-4Published: 04 January 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-88463-5Published: 14 June 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-88461-1Published: 03 January 2022
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXVI, 222
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Contemporary Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, British and Irish Literature, British Culture, Medical Sociology