A Survey of the Literature

Abstract

AbstractDatafication has a literary history. This essay takes up that history to repair to the apparent novelty of contemporary mass personalized politics the history of the novel as one cultural technology for personifying the masses. The machinery of mass personalization was set in motion long ago. However discrepant its emergent scenes may now seem, they have been multiply fused along the way, issuing from a common substrate of survey culture. Section 1 considers a magazine humor column linking the Elmira Community Study of voting and the Kinsey Reports on sex on the basis of their shared statistical methods. Section 2 considers the American Statistical Association’s proposition that statisticians are exemplars of democracy and its warning against the popular mistrust of their cultural prominence. Section 3 recasts the “death of the novel” as a name for the disruptive force of survey culture on literary value and the displacement of the classical genre system by the mass cultural genre system. Taking up mathematical formalism in the service of social realism, popular genres—science fiction, crime fiction, and erotica—and minority literatures ascendant in the mid-century US—gay, Black, and ethnic literatures—developed modes of narrative representation for an age of statistical aggregation.