The town, the prison, and the collection: the case for a criminological modernism

This project began as an attempt to establish the ways that prison literature might be modernist, but ultimately became an argument for ways that modernist literature reflects the prison. Literary modernism’s fixation on the city offers us a negative image of its real obsession: the small town. A site of enclosure, surveillance, and scrutiny, the American small town is a metaphorical prison in much modern literature (most famously Main Street). I am interested, however, in tracing the ways criminological logic actually shapes modern literary experimentation, especially in relation to depictions of enclosed communities like the small town, the artistic coterie, and the urban neighborhood.

My dissertation argues that criminological models of cognition—best exemplified by the bureaucratic, classificatory work of Alphonse Bertillon—present a meaningful lens through which to understand modern alienation. Criminology is a system of thought that mediates the torn modern mind, which seeks/values both knowing others and distancing oneself from others; both individuality and detachment; both small-town intimacy and metropolitan alienation. Criminology is a way of holding humanity’s overwhelming variation in a manageable microcosm, imposing boundaries and order, while preserving individuality. It encourages intimacy while confirming the radical alterity of the individual.

My three chapters address the criminological mediation of these seemingly opposed ways of knowing other people: in great, teeming masses and in individual, granular detail. The preoccupation with sets, collections, portraits, galleries, and processions in Winesburg, Ohio, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The Tattooed Countess, and N***** Heaven demonstrate the ways turn-of-the-century criminology supplied words and images to the modern (literary) imagination, to help wrest legible order from the disorder of modern life.