UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title A Sense of the Real: Experimental Writing and the Sciences, 1879-1946 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/16t8422v Author Cecire, Natalia Aki Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California A Sense of the Real: Experimental Writing and the Sciences, 1879-1946 by Natalia Aki Cecire A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor C. D. Blanton, chair Professor Lyn Hejinian Professor Mark Goble Professor Suzanne Guerlac Fall 2010 A Sense of the Real: Experimental Writing and the Sciences, 1879-1946 © 2010 by Natalia Aki Cecire 1 Abstract A Sense of the Real: Experimental Writing and the Sciences, 1879-1946 by Natalia Aki Cecire Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor C. D. Blanton, Chair This American literature dissertation offers an account of the critical category of “experimental literature,” arguing that, nebulous as the term appears to be, it is rooted in ideas of scientific experiment that were under debate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While experimental literature is often described in terms of “formal innovation,” this dissertation reads literary form not as an autonomous category in its own right but as an indicator of epistemological investments. Borrowing Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s concept of the “epistemic virtue,” this dissertation argues that experimental literature seeks to produce a “sense of the real,” not by thematically treating scientific ideas or even by emulating scientific methods, but rather by using literary form to negotiate the changing landscape of what constituted scientificity in the first place. Epistemic virtues are the investments, at once methodological and ethical, that define the experimental mode. Experimental authors, this dissertation argues, seek ways for literature to produce knowledge with strong epistemic guarantees. The dissertation begins by reading Émile Zola’s Nana as an early articulation of how literature might engage in research. Nana reveals the centrality of the epistemic virtue of objectivity to Zola’s project, as well as a surprising symbiosis between objectivity and spectacle. A chapter on Gertrude Stein’s undergraduate and graduate scientific research and early writings (through Three Lives) shows that a naturalist version of experimentalism feeds directly into Stein’s modernism. A chapter on the poetry of Marianne Moore argues that precision is the key epistemic virtue that Moore deploys, and that precision’s refusal of hierarchy and negotiation of “high” and “low” cultural forms has underwritten the ambivalent reception history of her work. The final chapter reads William Carlos Williams’s late poem Paterson together with Boasian anthropology to argue that Williams’s late poetic image operates as a means of guaranteeing presence. i Table of Contents List of Figures................................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... iii Chapter One. Introduction: Experimental .................................................................. 1 Chapter Two. A Long and Frightful Kitchen: Naturalism and the Pleasures of Science...................................................................... 15 Chapter Three. Seeing Clear: The Objectivity of “Melanctha”................................... 60 Chapter Four. Marianne Moore’s Precision ................................................................ 106 Chapter Five. Near and Far in Paterson ........................................................................ 141 Bibliography.................................................................................................................. 170 ii List of Figures Figure 1. “La Femme sans nom,” from Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1840).................. 72 Figure 2. From Florence Sabin, An Atlas of the Medulla and Midbrain . ............................... 84 Figure 3. Gertrude Stein to Dr. Lewellys Barker (n.d., but evidently 1902)........................ 87 Figure 4. An example of Frege’s notation. ........................................................................... 91 Figure 5. The turnstile, signifying assertion. ........................................................................ 91 Figure 6. From William Earl Dodge Scott, Bird Studies...................................................... 123 Figure 7. Robert Ridgway, Plate VI, from Baird, Brewer, and Ridgway, A History of North American Birds.............................................................................................................. 124 Figure 8. Robert Ridgway, “Poocætes gramineus [Grass Sparrow; Bay-Winged Bunting],” from Baird, Brewer, and Ridgway, A History of North American Birds (545)........................ 125 Figure 9. The AMNH’s Ostrich and Warthog Group, 1940............................................. 130 Figure 10. A “cyclorama group” pictured in Lucas’s “The Story of Museum Groups”..... 133 Figure 11. Fig. 1. The Geographic picture: the wives of a Mangbetu chief. ........................ 154 Figure 12. The iconic picture of Nobosodrou, from the book La Croisière Noire.............. 155 Figure 13. Advertisement for the Exposition Coloniale, 1931.......................................... 156 Figure 14. An ash-tray commemorating the Croisière Noire................................................ 157 Figure 15. Citroën hood ornament commemorating the Croisière Noire........................... 157 iii Acknowledgements In the process of writing this dissertation, I have taught a number of students under the auspices of the English Department, and in teaching them about writing, I have been led to reflect on my own writing processes in ways that, I am convinced, would have been impossible without the experience of teaching. Though it is a cliché to mention the ways in which the teacher is taught, I owe my formation as a teacher to those students, and through it, a crucial component of my formation as a scholar. Dorothy Hale and Kent Puckett were admirable teaching mentors when I assisted in their courses, and have since remained mentors, interlocutors, and providers of wonderful practical counsel. Bob Hass and Brenda Hillman changed my relationship to contemporary poetry, and therefore to modernist poetry. Several fellow graduate students gave me valuable feedback on individual chapters, especially Julia Bloch, Juliana Chow, Charles Légère, Annie McClanahan, and Katie Simon. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Abel, Moon Duchin, Ian Duncan, Eric Falci, David Landreth, Celeste Langan, Kate Lingley, Namwali Serpell, and Katie Snyder for insightful comments on individual components of the dissertation. Colleen Lye has been a mentor and a model throughout my graduate career; her support, encouragement, and incisive questions have been invaluable to this project and to me. Suzanne Guerlac first taught me to interrogate the relationship between the literary and the visual. I am grateful for Mark Goble’s intellectual and personal generosity; his methods have shaped mine. My sense of the arc of American poetics has been crucially influenced by Lyn Hejinian, whose open-mindedness, passionate engagement, and intellectual capaciousness remain models to which I aspire. Dan Blanton has helped me in innumerable ways, from lightning-quick, insightful feedback to practical advice and Prufrock jokes. His scholarship and his mentorship have been crucial to my work. Hillary Gravendyk has been a true friend and a true colleague; this dissertation would have been impossible to write without her companionship and intellectual engagement, for which I am deeply grateful. 1 Chapter One Introduction: Experimental There are numerous versions of these qualms about the efficacy of experimental thought, except in the sciences, where it’s seen as the nature of the enterprise. My inclination is to respond by identifying a certain poetics of responsibility with the courage of the swerve, the project of the wager—what I call a poethical attitude. —Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager1 This is a dissertation about American experimental writing. The wariness, confusion, and even aggression with which I have been asked, What do you mean by that?, speak to the deep feelings with which we as literary critics have invested literary experiment, and to the continued intellectual centrality of the idea that literature can be experimental—even as we are forced to acknowledge that we do not quite know what the word means. So, of course, What do you mean by that? is exactly the question. We have made this term, “experimental,” alternately very capacious and very literal, alternately broad and narrow. In our broader usage, “experimental” means any writing that is in some way “interesting,” especially formally. Its synonyms, in such usage, are “innovative” and (sometimes) “inventive,” the terms of industrialized technoscience. In this capacious variant, “experimental” is a term of approval; it means writing that is, in some basic if ill- defined sense, good. The counterpart to this capaciousness is a highly literal understanding of “experimental” as modeling the