Table Of ContentData-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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
