Behaviorism and Literary Culture

This essay traces two strands of behaviorist psychology’s influence on literature, primarily in Anglo-American twentieth-century contexts. In the first, notable literary modernists, the new criticism, and literary theory have contended with the methodological constraints of psychological and philosophical behaviorism. In the second strand, science fiction authors have used novums based on behavioral control to explore the dystopian potentials of technocracy and totalitarian modes of governance. While the latter strand has largely been subject to camp treatment in the twenty-first century, many of the political and philosophical questions related to behaviorism also appear in literary treatments of robotics and artificial intelligence.