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Ibecker Sociopoetics Final THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO SOCIO/POETICS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY INGRID DESTRAY BECKER CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2019 © Copyright by Ingrid Becker 2019 ALL Rights Reserved For Susan and Enno CONTENTS AcknowLedgements v Abstract vii Introduction CaLculable/IncaLculable 1 Chapter 1 Type/SeLf 42 Chapter 2 Statistic/ReLation 91 Chapter 3 Survey/Voice 142 Chapter 4 Case/Problem 199 Bibliography 238 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I submit this dissertation fulL of gratitude to aLL the people who have guided and supported me on the doctoraL journey. I want to express my thanks first and foremost to the members of my committee, Deborah NeLson, RacheL GaLvin, and Andrew Abbott, for their counseL and encouragement. A mentor since my first year in the PhD program, Debbie has done no less than heLp me discover and define myseLf as a thinker, writer, and teacher. RacheL’s enthusiasm and abundant insights, from substantiaL recommendations to Line-edits, were integraL to the gestation of this project and to my scholarly deveLopment. I could not have reaLized my interdiscipLinary aims without Andy, who guided me through the landscape of sociology, its complex histories and humanistic connections, with acuity and patience. I am grateful for the sense of community created by the staff of the English Department, especiaLLy Lex Nalley Drlica and AngeLine Dimambro, as weLL as by the students and faculty. Maud ELLman, Kenneth Warren, and Christopher Taylor were vaLuable interlocuters in the formative stages of my research. Ken, John Muse, James Sparrow, Nora Titone, SonaLi Thakkar, BiLL Brown, and Lisa RuddicK were not only pivotaL in my pedagogicaL deveLopment but aLso modeLs for inhabiting different modes of scholarship in research and in the cLassroom. I am grateful for the staff and professionaLization programming of UChicagoGRAD, and for the resources of the Humanities Division and the University of Chicago that made this project possible. I am indebted to my friends and colLeagues in countLess ways, and this dissertation bears the mark of their kindness and colLective inteLLect. Thanks to Hadji Bakara, OLiver Cussen, James Duesterberg, David Gutherz, Amanda Swain, my feLLow members of Debbie’s student workgroup, the Poetry and Poetics Workshop, the 20th/21st Century Workshop, and everyone that has taken the time to engage with my work and given me the chance to learn from theirs. To v Carmen Merport Quiñones and ELiza StarbucK-LittLe, who have heLped me put together multitudes of conceptuaL, editoriaL, and literaL puzzLes, and whose companionship sustained me throughout this project. To Hannah Brooks-MotL, my ongoing colLaborator in so many new endeavors, thoughts, spaces, and gestures. Thanks to Lucas Guimarães Pinheiro, whose discerning vision and rigor of thought were essentiaL in the evolution of this manuscript, and whose partnership across continents and languages has infused the years of dissertation writing with adventures and joys. I thank the staff of the Chicago Review for our explorations of the wide and sometimes wild world of contemporary poetry, Jennifer SprowL and my feLLow dancers at Duncan Dance Chicago for our ceLebrations of embodied knowLedge and art, and John Dove for showing me how to be a Life-Long learner in any professionaL environment. This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Susan and Enno Becker, who have aLways nourished my curiosity, imparted wisdoms, and embraced new ideas and pathways. I cherish and Learn from aLL our moments together. I am aLso indebted to ELLen and Coleman Kane, Katherine Beattie, Kim Brizzolara, and my other wonderful famiLy members and friends whose influence, generosity, and care have shaped me as a human being and enabled me to arrive where I am. vi ABSTRACT This dissertation eLucidates the neglected yet intimate history of literature and sociology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. “Sociopoetics” is the term I use to distinguish texts marked by a seLf-conscious, reciprocaL cross-polLination between literary and sociologicaL vocabularies, forms, and methods of inquiry. My approach to such objects involves a combination of historicaL and formaL anaLysis that accomplishes two major aims. First, in order to iLLustrate the widespread presence of sociopoetics, I assemble a diverse archive of works that places sociaL and literary theorists, researchers and literary authors in conversation for the first time. Second, drawing on thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, I. A. Richards, C. Wright MiLLs, and Kenneth Burke, I argue that sociopoetics is most productiveLy construed as a strategy. More specific than forms or genres, strategies name and navigate typicaL, recurrent situations in the world that correspond to the particularities of sociaL structures. Conceived of as a strategy, on my definition sociopoetics adopts an interactive, problem-solving attitude to sociaL issues like raciaL and economic inequaLities as weLL as to more abstract questions around disciplinary modes of inquiry, authority, and representation. In bridging aesthetic and sociaL structures, sociopoetics animates meaningful yet underexplored connections between literary and sociologicaL ways of apprehending human actions, interactions, and culturaL products. My archive demonstrates that the tensions between “the evident rhythm of human action” and “the evident incaLculabiLity in human action,” as Du Bois put it in 1902, has implications for debates about the distinctiveness of aesthetic objects, the association of literature with the “incaLculable” aspects of experience, and our contested practices of cLose reading. I buiLd upon “sociologicaL turns” in literary criticism—such as digital humanities, surface and flat reading, thick description, and actor-network-theory—that have vii applied interpretative methods with roots in sociaL science, but have yet to notice and assess the substantiaL range of interdisciplinary experiments on which I eLaborate. Through four conceptuaL chapters, I examine how writers and sociologists negotiated emergent paradigms for thinking about human beings both empiricaLLy and imaginativeLy, as a matter of colLective fact and individuaL feeLing. In Chapter one, I tracK emergent sociopoetic practices through the 1930s, when sociologicaL studies of “typicaL” people and communities as weLL as documentary-Literary works were proliferating. Robert and HeLen Lynd’s Middletown studies, James Agee and WaLker Evans’ documentary photo-book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and MurieL Rukeyser’s poem sequence The Book of the Dead each chaLLenge a newLy visible conflation of sociaL type and subjective seLf. I show that their accounts of a typicaL Midwestern city, an average famiLy of tenant farmers, and a representative incident of industriaL atrocity deploy objective, empiricaL approaches infused with humanizing, individuating poetic tropes and devices. Chapter two shifts away from the issue of totaLizing types and towards a series of post- WWII experiments concerned with the statistical enumeration and fragmentation of individuaLs as weLL as with Literature’s capacity to express sociaL facts at scaLe. DeLving into the technicaL procedures of quantitative methodologies, I use the attitude studies of sociaL psychologist L. L. Thurstone to reveaL the reLationaL, provisionaL character of probabiListic inference and highlight the statistical “rotation” of patterns and correLations in literary form. Attending to a broader cross-section works by mid-twentieth and early twenty-first century poets, from W. H. Auden and Langston Hughes to Evie ShocKLey and C. D. Wright, I draw connections between statistical vocabularies and Literary devices like enjambment, anaphora and parataxis as they function to divine knowLedge about radicaLLy indeterminate subjects. viii My third chapter arranges the growing archive of sociopoetics around the themes of seLf- reflection, seLf-fashioning, and self-expression in response to the specific forms of address constituted by the inquiries of survey anaLysis. I read works, like John Ashbery’s “Proust Questionnaire,” that engage with surveys as ubiquitous culturaL sites at which negotiations between the coded worldviews of individuaLs, colLectives, and institutions take place. WhiLe Ashbery’s poem performs an act of answering, Charles Bernstein’s “Questionnaire” and Ron SiLLiman’s Sunset Debris are composed soleLy of questions; stylisticaLLy varied, these works disturb the unequaL power hierarchies of interrogation and forge new encounters between officiaL and personaL registers of language. I aLso turn to projects by poet Bhanu KapiL and sociologists such as LaureL Richardson that remediate actuaL responses to surveys and interviews, recovering the voices of respondents otherwise rendered into trends in quantitative studies. The finaL chapter deveLops its inquiry aLong the lines of the recaLcitrant sociaL and conceptuaL problem of singularity through a case study on Richard Wright. I reframe his well- known engagement with sociology in terms of the tension between “personaLity” and “environment” rehearsed throughout his oeuvre on the shifting stage of globaL race politics. Focusing on 12 Million Black Voices and The Color Curtain, I explore narrative shifts between abstracted sociaL forces and mass agency to the particularized emotions and experiences of people of color. I concLude by offering a meditation on the haiku Wright composed seriaLLy
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