Site reading: fiction, art, social form

Description

Site Reading offers a new method of literary and cultural interpretation and a new theory of narrative setting by examining five sites—supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums—that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the mid- twentieth century. Against the traditional understanding of setting as a static background for narrative action and character development, David Alworth argues that sites figure in novels as social agents. Engaging a wide range of social and cultural theorists, especially Bruno Latour and Erving Goffman, Site Reading examines how the literary figuration of real, material environments reorients our sense of social relations. To read the sites of fiction, Alworth demonstrates, is to reveal literature as a profound sociological resource, one that simultaneously models and theorizes collective life. Each chapter identifies a particular site as a point of contact for writers and artists—the... List of Illustrations xi INTRODUCTION: THE SITE OF THE SOCIAL 1 1 SUPERMARKET SOCIOLOGY (Don DeLillo, Andy Warhol) 25 TEST SITES 49 2 DUMPS (William S. Burroughs, Mierle Laderman Ukeles) 51 3 ROADS (Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, John Chamberlain) 73 4 RUINS (Thomas Pynchon, Robert Smithson) 96 5 ASYLUMS (Ralph Ellison, Gordon Parks, Jeff Wall) 121 AFTERWORD: SITE UNSEEN 149 Acknowledgments 157 Notes 161 Bibliography 187 Index 201