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Utopian Connectivity to Paranoid Collapse: Complex Networks and Global Social Ecologies in 20Th-Century Fiction

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Utopian Connectivity to Paranoid Collapse: Complex Networks and Global Social Ecologies in 20Th-Century Fiction UTOPIAN CONNECTIVITY TO PARANOID COLLAPSE: COMPLEX NETWORKS AND GLOBAL SOCIAL ECOLOGIES IN 20TH-CENTURY FICTION BY SHAWN C. BALLARD DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Kirkpatrick Professor Vicki Mahaffey, Chair Professor Ted Underwood, Co-Chair Associate Professor Eleanor Courtemanche Assistant Professor Andrew Gaedtke Abstract This project treats complex systems, specifically global social and ecological networks, as central to understanding modern explorations and experiences of utopian connectivity and stability alongside dystopian paranoia and precarity. Through an examination of the fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, James Joyce, and David Mitchell, I analyze strengths and vulnerabilities of such systems. Gilman’s perfectly controlled and aggressively managed ecosystems are undercut by potentially catastrophic losses in biodiversity. Joyce’s celebratory view of networks and links across cosmic scales requires an acknowledgement and acceptance of humanity’s relative powerlessness in the face of such universal connections, which dwarf global economic and social networks. Mitchell illustrates how subtle social linkings across time and space can add up to create powerful technological, ecological, and social effects. However, the power in Mitchell’s dense global network is also its weakness; in Ghostwritten, efficiency in information transfer can be used for positive outcomes as well as to effect total apocalypse. Alongside and enmeshed with my analysis of Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, I present a comparison of manual and automatic methods I created for extracting social networks from literary texts as a first step toward developing a broadly applicable network extraction method. My proof of concept indicates that, with further iterations and refinements, it should be possible to establish a practical, reliable, and effective method for extracting and understanding social networks in novels, with the aim of using these models to understand more deeply the texts themselves and what they suggest about human experience, policy, and futurity. ii Acknowledgements None of this would have been possible without Vicki Mahaffey, though I ultimately completed this project for myself, as she so wisely advised me. Vicki, thank you for pushing me to stick with it and for nurturing my love of James Joyce. To my co-chair, Ted Underwood, thank you for introducing me to the wonders of digital humanities and for helping me make my robot dreams a reality. To my committee members, Eleanor Courtemanche and Andy Gaedtke, thank you for your advice and your time. I appreciate all of you taking this journey with me. The research and writing for this project was generously sponsored by UIUC’s Graduate College through their Distinguished Fellowship and by the English Department through numerous travel grants and teaching-release fellowships. Substantial swaths of this project were born, grown, and tested in the Finnegans Wake reading group and the British Modernities Group. John Moore, Heather McLeer, Wendy Truran, Michelle Martinez, Valerie O’Brien, and Brandon Jones, thank you all for your generous insights, input, and collaboration. This project is better, and so am I, because of you. I dedicate this project to my favorite human, my husband, Josiah Walton. To my parents, who always encouraged me to challenge myself and to work through the most difficult problems. To my brother, my cheerleader and friend these many years. And to the nearest and dearest in my own social network, Barbara Stekas, Elizabeth Tavares, Esther Dettmar, and Zack Dell. You’re the best; thank you all for your unending love and support. iii Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: Cultivating Utopia through Systems Management and Feminist Environmentalism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland ................................................... 26 Chapter 3: “seeking spoor through the deep timefield”: Human (In)Significance in Joyce’s Networked Spacetime ................................................................................................................. 58 Chapter 4: Entity Detection and the Foundations of Social Networks in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten ................................................................................................................................. 91 Chapter 5: Links Determination and the Global Ecological Implications of Social Networks in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten ............................................................................................. 135 Chapter 6: Moving Forward from 20th-Century Texts to 21st-Century Multimedia ......... 181 Appendix A: Program to Import Texts and Save As a Data Frame .................................... 192 Appendix B: Program to Tag Parts of Speech (POS), Select Proper Nouns, and Produce List of Keywords in Context (KWIC) ..................................................................................... 196 Appendix C: Data Tables for Chapter 4: Entity Detection and the Foundations of Social Networks in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten ............................................................................ 202 Appendix D: Program to Extract Links from Texts .............................................................. 215 Appendix E: Network Diagrams and Data for Chapter 5: Links Determination and the Global Ecological Implications of Social Networks in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten ....... 220 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 245 iv Chapter 1: Introduction This project takes complex systems theory as its theoretical foundation and subject. I will present literary case studies that explore the potential effects of the mutual intersections and disruptions of large-scale ecosystems and social networks. I treat texts as literary laboratories, testing grounds that offer windows into the possible futures of global policy and practice. An important feature of complex networks is their underlying similarity in behavior. For example, mechanical networks like the power grid follow the same rules as human social networks, and indeed this quality underpins my fundamental assumption that fictional social networks should function like real social networks, thus providing this laboratory setting. Global social networks and ecosystems, like those I will analyze, necessarily traverse large spans of space and time and produce multi-national outcomes. As such, this project ranges from early 20th-century American environmentalism and modernist European cosmopolitanism to contemporary technology-driven globalization. My exemplars come primarily from the works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, James Joyce, and David Mitchell.1 Ultimately, I am interested in the tensions arising from the porous boundaries between humans and nature, and the unpredictably productive results arising from systemic interactions. To explore such potentialities more deeply, I have developed and will present a digital method for studying literary social networks as part of my analysis of Mitchell’s works. A relatively uncomplicated narrative about globalization and networks during the long twentieth century might go something like this: from the late 1800s, advances in science and technology enabled more efficient international transportation and communication. Following 1 Additional authors of interest for future iterations of this work include Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, and Zadie Smith, among others. 1 Henri Poincaré’s work on the standardization of time zones,2 trains run on time; advances in automotive technology and later air travel facilitate global-scale transportation; developments in communications systems from the telegraph, telephone, and radio to the Internet provide for the instantaneous global transfer of information. Taken as part of a narrative of progress, where an optimistic consumer might be persuaded that everything is getting better all the time, these innovations offer up a celebratory view of human creative potential. On the other hand, imagine the old guard shaking their heads at these newfangled contraptions. Now imagine what even the most skeptical consumer of the early twentieth century likely could not have imagined3—all this glorious technology has left us vulnerable to worldwide epidemics in the twenty-first century, viruses both physical and virtual infect populations at an alarming rate; your information is not safe, and there is nowhere to hide. Both narratives are equally true, or perhaps I should say equally false. The shifts in thinking about global networking capabilities from Charlotte Perkins Gilman to James Joyce and later to David Mitchell are not straight-forward moves from celebratory to fearful, or, as I’ll label the spectrum, utopian to paranoid. Approaches to navigating global social and ecological networks are spatially and temporally inflected, in addition to the complexities inherent in such systems themselves. As I will argue in my next chapter, Gilman seems to view ecosystems with paranoia so long as they remain in their wild state. In Herland (1915), Gilman presents a rigorous program of control by which unregulated systems can
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