Socio/Poetics

Abstract

The intersection of literature, literary studies, and sociology has long been a key site of experimentation. This article contributes to recent debates about applying sociological methods to literary objects and literary modes of interpretation to the objects of sociology through a historical approach. I introduce the term “sociopoetics” to demarcate the characteristics of what I suggest is a literary-historical category of hybrid works that ask to be read both as sociological studies and literary texts at once. Drawing on C. Wright Mills and Kenneth Burke, I define sociopoetics as what Burke has called a “strategy,” a rhetorical gesture that names recurrent yet incompletely articulated social situations. I then trace the development of sociopoetics as a strategy by reading two illustrative texts: Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown community studies (1929, 1937), the first best-selling American sociological monographs, and James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s documentary photo-essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). I argue that these works grapple with situations of disciplinary impasse while addressing specific social problems that impact human welfare; in particular, they engage with the promise and inadequacy of representing “typical” individuals and social scenarios in the 1930s, a period of crystallization among the disciplines and widespread strife in the US.