
Site Reading
Fiction, Art, Social Form
David J. Alworth(Author)
Princeton University Press
Published on 17. November 2015
Book
Hardback
224 pages
978-0-691-16449-6 (ISBN)
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 supermarket for Don DeLillo and Andy Warhol; the dump for William Burroughs and Mierle Laderman Ukeles; the road for Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, and John Chamberlain; the ruin for Thomas Pynchon and Robert Smithson; and the asylum for Ralph Ellison, Gordon Parks, and Jeff Wall--and shows how this site mediates complex interactions among humans and nonhumans. The result is an interdisciplinary study of American culture that brings together literature, visual art, and social theory to develop a new sociology of literature that emphasizes the sociology in literature.
Each chapter identifies a particular site as a point of contact for writers and artists--the supermarket for Don DeLillo and Andy Warhol; the dump for William Burroughs and Mierle Laderman Ukeles; the road for Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, and John Chamberlain; the ruin for Thomas Pynchon and Robert Smithson; and the asylum for Ralph Ellison, Gordon Parks, and Jeff Wall--and shows how this site mediates complex interactions among humans and nonhumans. The result is an interdisciplinary study of American culture that brings together literature, visual art, and social theory to develop a new sociology of literature that emphasizes the sociology in literature.
Reviews / Votes
Winner of the 2016 Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Social Interaction, Media Ecology AssociationMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
New Jersey
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Trade binding
Illustrations
16 halftones.
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
397 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-691-16449-6 (9780691164496)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
01/2016
1st Edition
Princeton University Press
€30.49
Available for download
Person
David J. Alworth is assistant professor of English and of History and Literature at Harvard University.
Content
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