Data-Driven Modernism: Collecting Lives and Narrating Selves in Early 20th Century U.S. Literature.

modernism;data;information science;multiethnic U.S. literatures;autobiography;life writing;W.E.B. Du Bois;Henry Adams;Gertrude Stein;Constantine Panunzio;English Language and Literature;Humanities;English Language and Literature

Rodrigues, Elizabeth SarahSantamarina, Ixomara ;

University of Michigan

关键词: modernism;    data;    information science;    multiethnic U.S. literatures;    autobiography;    life writing;    W.E.B. Du Bois;    Henry Adams;    Gertrude Stein;    Constantine Panunzio;    English Language and Literature;    Humanities;    English Language and Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/116767/esrod_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

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 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.