ABSTRACT

This paper argues that Mark Twain’s under-studied final work No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger – left incomplete upon his death – is an exploration of the author’s engagement with the question of the relationship between individual intelligence, brain science, and the emerging, Progressive Era discourse of ‘merit’. I show how Twain’s novel critiques ‘merit’ and the political structures of ‘meritocracy’ by presenting the reader with two characters who are in fact the same person (August and Forty-Four) to expose different facets of the meritocratic personality. These facets (a belief in innate ability and a commitment to impressibility and growth) might seem contradictory, but Twain’s novel demonstrates how in a moment of advanced capitalism and industrialism that predicts our own both are deployed consciously by the meritocrat in the transfer of power from the collective to the bourgeois individual. With No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, Twain refines his vision of American social values into a critique of the Enlightenment more broadly, abandoning his earlier reformist impulses to imagine more radical challenges to American power.

摘要

本文认为，马克吐温的未充分研究的最终作品第 44 号《神秘的陌生人》 ——在他死后未完成——是对作者参与个人智力、脑科学与新兴的进步之间关系问题的探索。 “功德”的时代话语。我通过向读者展示两个实际上是同一个人的人物（八月和四十四）来揭示精英人格的不同方面，展示了吐温的小说如何批评“功绩”和“精英政治”的政治结构。这些方面（对先天能力的信念和对易感性和增长的承诺）似乎是矛盾的，但吐温的小说展示了在一个先进的资本主义和工业主义的时代，预测我们自己的两者在权力从集体到资产阶级个人的转移中被精英有意识地部署。在第 44 号《神秘的陌生人》中，吐温将他对美国社会价值观的看法提炼为更广泛地对启蒙运动的批判，摒弃了他早先的改革主义冲动，即想象对美国权力进行更激进的挑战。