Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 
 

Files

File List


Adam Stier, Ties That Bind.pdf (5.16 MB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Ties That Bind: American Fiction and the Origins of Social Network Analysis

Stier, Adam C.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1367418508

Abstract Details

2013, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
Under the auspices of the digital humanities, scholars have recently raised the question of how current research on social networks might inform the study of fictional texts, even using computational methods to "quantify" the relationships among characters in a given work. However, by focusing on only the most recent developments in social network research, such criticism has so far neglected to consider how the historical development of social network analysis--a methodology that attempts to identify the rule-bound processes and structures underlying interpersonal relationships--converges with literary history. Innovated by sociologists and social psychologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Georg Simmel (chapter 1), Charles Horton Cooley (chapter 2), Jacob Moreno (chapter 3), and theorists of the "small world" phenomenon (chapter 4), social network analysis emerged concurrently with the development of American literary modernism.

Over the course of four chapters, this dissertation demonstrates that American modernist fiction coincided with a nascent "science" of social networks, such that we can discern striking parallels between emergent network-analytic procedures and the particular configurations by which American authors of this period structured (and more generally imagined) the social worlds of their stories. For instance, Henry James's works of psychological realism dramatize early theories about the dynamics of mutual acquaintanceship. Frank Norris's naturalist Epic of the Wheat novels invoke period discourses of a densely networked "mind of the world." John Dos Passos's panoramic U.S.A. trilogy models sociometric systems for quantifying the fleeting contacts of modern life. Finally, the hard-boiled crime stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler engage imaginatively with network-analytic procedures by representing detection itself as a form of social network analysis.

An important but understudied facet of modern American fiction, this convergence--between assemblages of characters in fictional narratives, on one hand, and foundational network concepts, on the other--suggests that literary and social-scientific treatments of social networks are more closely interrelated than scholars have so far assumed. Outlining a genealogy that reveals some of these interrelations, my project argues that the study of character groupings in fictional texts and research on the early developments of social network theory can be brought into a productive, mutually informing dialogue with one another. In this way, I sketch an approach that integrates formal with historical and cultural methods of inquiry, probing how attention to character configurations in modern American fiction can shed light on some of the basic questions motivating network science, and not just vice versa.
David Herman (Advisor)
Brian McHale (Committee Member)
James Phelan (Committee Member)
304 p.
American Literature; Literature

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Stier, A. C. (2013). Ties That Bind: American Fiction and the Origins of Social Network Analysis [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1367418508

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Stier, Adam. Ties That Bind: American Fiction and the Origins of Social Network Analysis. 2013. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1367418508.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Stier, Adam. "Ties That Bind: American Fiction and the Origins of Social Network Analysis." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1367418508

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1367418508
796
© 2013, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.