Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance. JasonPuskar. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Abstract

Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance Jason Puskar. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.In Accident Society, a study of the role of literature in the of chance, Jason Puskar argues that writers at the turn of the twentieth century craft through narratives of spontaneous violence. By doing so, these writers influence a wide audience's conception of certain injuries as accidents free from fault and blame.Puskar's work is situated within a larger context of literature on the culture of chance, but previous scholarship focuses primarily on gambling. Accident Society takes the reader into territory, including an examination of what Puskar calls collectivity, which opens up new opportunities for fashioning systems of social and material interdependence for a divided country (3). The chapters are organized into case studies that explore the connections between American fiction and assorted cultures of spanning the time period between Reconstruction and the New Deal. Puskar analyzes fiction that shaped the modern understanding of accidents and advanced reform.The definitions of key terms that Puskar establishes are strong points of the book because they explore the etymology of words like chance, accident, mishap, hapless, and haphazard, which emphasize the decoupling of action from agency. These definitions serve as a connecting force between the various types of accidents and the literary examples that the book considers. Puskar also clearly explains how creates dynamic instabilities and how realist fiction, in particular, conceals or obscures causal relations (8). In the introduction, Puskar uses the Chicago fire of 1871 and the resulting legend of the O'Leary cow accident as an example of America's first narrative of collectivity to show how it complicates and obscures issues of responsibility and offered a rationale for social solidarity in the aftermath of the deliberate violence of the Civil War (14). The term production of chance comes from John Dewey's analysis of and language, which Puskar builds upon by categorizing as an abstract concept that is crafted through language. Accident Society therefore focuses on the popular consciousness of chance rather than mathematical or statistical methods (25).Chapter 1 examines the ways in which William Dean Howells endorses in his fiction, through the institution of modern insurance, as a mode of interdependence. Puskar skillfully grounds his literary analysis in a discussion of the history of insurance and its links to periodicals and publishing which contributed to the creation of a culture of accidents. …