Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Fredner, Erik

Titel

Averaging Americans: Literature, Statistics, and Inequality

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Averaging Americans: Literature, Statistics, and Inequality was sparked by a computational discovery I made in a corpus of more than 18,000 works of US fiction: statistical words such as average, normal, and typical distinguish postbellum fiction from its antecedents quantitatively and qualitatively. Averaging Americans explores how authors of the long nineteenth century used statistical thinking to rewrite American identity in ways that were both reactionary and radically egalitarian. This increasing dependence on statistical concepts at the same time that US fiction becomes polemically invested in realist representation is less a coincidence than an understudied fact of US literary history. I reveal how claims to representativeness take on aesthetic and political urgency amid struggles over citizenship, the biopolitics of population management, and the inequalities that define Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era. Critiquing claims to representativeness reveals how that concept is both central to yet undertheorized by literary studies. The average American may well be the long nineteenth century's most important fictional character.The dissertation’s four chapters identify and explicate US literary responses to the rise of statistical thinking. I begin by analyzing a changing notion of representativeness— which moves away from the exception and toward the mean—through both computational analyses and readings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s scientists, William Dean Howells’s grasshopper, and Oliver Wendell Holmes’s legal fiction of the reasonable average person. In the next chapter, I show how the average differs from the type by comparing Henry James’s use of character types in pursuit of “the real thing” with Hamlin Garland’s populist fictions that cast an asserted average American as their protagonist. Following that, Walt Whitman deploys the “divine average” as an idealized representative of a settler colonial nation, while his famed catalogs evince statistical thinking in both their enumerations and in their understudied summaries. Finally, while W.E.B. Du Bois initially framed his Talented Tenth as a counter to “the blind worshippers of the Average,” I show that his faith in the persuasive power of statistics erodes over his career, evinced in an increasingly ironic attitude toward the measurement of humanity. I contrast Du Bois’s attitude with George Schuyler’s satirical response to the measurement of Black life. Throughout, I show how ostensibly statistical judgments about people incautiously slip between the quantitative and the qualitative. At that juncture lies the average person, who occupies an indeterminate space between metaphor and fact.