Data-Driven Modernism: Collecting Lives and Narrating Selves in Early 20th Century U.S. Literature by Elizabeth Sarah Rodrigues A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2015 Doctoral Committee Associate Professor Joshua L. Miller, Chair Professor Lisa Ann Nakamura Associate Professor Xiomara A. Santamarina Professor Sidonie A. Smith © Elizabeth Sarah Rodrigues, 2015 DEDICATION To my contemporaries ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe the deepest of thanks to my cohort and to my committee. Without their example, support, and brilliant thoughts generously shared, the work that I have been able to do would scarcely have been thinkable. The Rackham Graduate School of the University of Michigan provided substantial support for the research, writing, and conference travel required to produce this dissertation, for which I am profoundly grateful. To the many people and communities that have made it possible for me to both live and work, I will be forever indebted. These include, but are not limited to, the officers and staff of the Graduate Employees’ Organization, the congregants of the Church of the Good Shepherd, Sarah Rezzo and the staff of Meadowbrook Home Daycare, Jan Burgess, Senia Vasquez, Teresa Morgan, Robert R. DeLisle, Linda and Robert A. DeLisle, Esther Rodrigues, Félice Lê-Scherban and Greg Scherban, Diane Kachmar, Sandra Gunning, Deborah Laycock, Mark Scroggins, and Wenying Xu. Finally, thank you, Daniel and Mateo. You are my life. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii ABSTRACT vi INTRODUCTION 1 “More nearly a transcript of life”: Converging desires for data in the early twentieth-century United States Data as a representational form 16 Modernism’s data aesthetic 26 Outline of chapters 38 CHAPTER ONE 48 W.E.B. Du Bois, Data, and the Re-assemblage of Race and Self Du Boisian empiricism & data collection 52 The Philadelphia Negro: Homogenous mass to living community 58 The Souls of Black Folk: Self as “fugitive pieces” of data 66 Darkwater: Democracy as data collection 78 Dusk of Dawn: Self as collection, race as assemblage 84 Awareness of assemblage against narrative condemnation 91 CHAPTER TWO 95 The Educations of Henry Adams: Developmental Narrative to Data Collection Scientific history as data-driven discipline 99 The Education and the dissatisfactions of life as data collection 111 The Modesty of multiplicity 130 CHAPTER THREE 135 “Contiguous but widely separated” Selves: Im/migrant Life Narrative as Data-Driven Form “A passion for homogeneity”: Narratives of national identity and destiny 142 The Polish Peasant and the data of social becoming 152 Lifelets as data points, nation as data collection 163 Constantine Panunzio’s American consciousness 173 Toward a pedagogy of parallel selfhood 181 CHAPTER FOUR 185 To Tell a Story Wholly: Gertrude Stein, Melanctha, and Self as Data Collection “what was inside each one which made them that one”: Self as object of empirical inquiry 189 The collective and collecting form of Three Lives 203 Dueling data collectors: Melanctha and the narrator 210 iv To tell a story wholly: Melanctha’s narrative aesthetics of self 215 Melanctha’s pedagogy of selfhood 224 CONCLUSION 229 Numbers, Knowledge, Self: Data-Driven Methods of the Human WORKS CITED 238 v ABSTRACT Data-Driven Modernism argues that U.S. modernist life writers W.E.B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, Henry Adams, and Constantine Panunzio draw from their engagements with humanist empiricisms to formulate a critical data aesthetic. The introduction proposes a concept of data that is distinct from information, the database, and the digital. The following chapters demonstrate how data-driven modernists turn to data collection as a method for answering questions of identity. Drawing from professional engagements with disciplines in the midst of methodological reconfiguration around the work of data collection, these writers confront and leverage the paradox of data: while in theory its exhaustive collection is the key to revealing identity, in practice it ceaselessly surfaces the potential others within. In an era in which the question of who certain people, or groups of people, “really are” is central to public debate, questions of identity are politically as well as personally urgent for each. Chapter one shows how Du Bois uses data collection to intervene in fixed narratives of African American life. Chapter two links Adams’s desire for empiricist history to his perception that the education of the modern subject cannot be narrated. Chapter three theorizes immigration at the nexus of data, narrative, and nation through readings of Chicago School sociology’s collection of life histories to arrive at laws of “social becoming,” the “lifelets” collected as The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans, and Panunzio’s Soul of an Immigrant. Chapter four argues data is a formal underpinning of both Stein’s innovation and her re-iteration of racial othering. Seeing both Stein and Melanctha as data collectors bent on knowing the self by assembling an exhaustive data collection, I chart the differential social vi effects of representing life as a data collection. Comparatively situating works from a range of modernist canons in the data episteme—a cultural surround in which data and its collection are presumed to offer unprecedented access to reality, truth, and power—I argue for the recognition of the data point as a modernist aesthetic, the long conceptual history of data as a technology of selfhood, and data representation’s intersection with material histories of power. vii INTRODUCTION “More nearly a transcript of life”: Converging desires for data in the early twentieth-century United States “For that which is deserving of existence is deserving of knowledge, the image of existence.” —Francis Bacon, Novum Organum In the April 13, 1905, issue of The Independent, chemist and literary critic Edwin Slosson proposes the recognition of a “new literary type,” one that has been pioneered in the pages of that very magazine through its project of collecting “short autobiographies of undistinguished people.” He calls this new form the “lifelet.” His explanation for its emergence plots a complex interaction between a cultural surround of pervasive empiricism and readerly desire. “Most people—perhaps all,” he claims, are now “more impressed by the concrete than the abstract” (2) and “prefer to come into closer touch with reality” (1). Accordingly, they seek different aesthetic forms. Uninterested in the “generalized types of humanity as expressed by the artist in painting and sculpture,” Slosson suggests that “romances and poems do not interest them so much as do individuals.” This explains why “the cleft between the realistic and romantic novels is widening” with the former “becoming more nearly a transcript of life” (2). “Individuals” and “transcript” are aligned with realism and opposed to “generalized types” employed by “romances and poems.” He and his readers imagine representations of reality as closest to the real, then, when composed of single, actual instances collected with as little authorial intervention as possible. 1 The preference for and epistemological value attributed to the collection of observations rather than the construction of narrative is also on the ascendant in scientific practice, Slosson continues to point out, which seems increasingly focused on collecting observations for future analysis rather than the proposal of overarching theories. Slosson writes, “Formerly, botanists used to talk a great deal about species and types; later they turned their attention to varieties, and now the men who are making the most progress are experimenting with one plant and a single flower of that one” (3). Biology as typology has given way to biology as exacting observation. Indeed, the “candidate for the Ph.D. watches a single amoeba under a microscope and writes his thesis on one day’s doings of its somewhat monotonous life.” Slosson’s image of the Ph.D. candidate making a “thesis” of simply recording an amoeba’s activities during a single day offers a tantalizing anticipation of the aesthetic innovation for which the literature of the early twentieth century would soon be known. Works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway make a novel out of one day’s doings of the life of an ordinary person, taking up the same chronologically constrained and transcription-like method to rethink the relationship between literary narrative and the reality of lived experience. Whereas species and types used to offer an overarching vision into which each individual would fit, the epistemology of data holds that each individual must first be encountered and then be accounted for in a theory that emerges organically only after long observation. Slosson continues to describe the lifelet in ways that blur the boundaries between sociological research and aesthetic innovation. He writes, “To these two forces tending to develop new forms of literature, the love of truth and the interest in the concrete, we must add another one, the spirit of democracy, the discovery of the importance of the average 2 man. This, after all, is the most profitable branch of nature study, the study of Homo sapiens” (3). To this end, the magazine’s editor, Hamilton Holt, “has for several years devoted himself to procuring such narratives with the object of ultimately presenting in this way a complete picture of American life in all its strata…a mosaic picture composed of living tesserae” (4) intended to “have both a present and a future value as a study in sociology” (5). As the “average man” is the concrete particular of democracy, the collection of lifelets also serves as an empirical inquiry into the future of the nation: “In all countries the question of national destiny is always ultimately settled by…the undistinguished people who move the world…the non-vocal part of the population, the silent partners who have the controlling vote in the governmental firm” (5).