My first book project, Socio/Poetics, brings to light a range of borrowings, affinities and entanglements between literature and sociology since the early twentieth century that manifest in a hybrid mode of writing I call “sociopoetics.” I argue that sociopoetics signals a widespread yet neglected project to reimagine the forms and roles of literature in a world irrevocably changed by the rise of social science as a means of comprehending human life. Authors as varied as Muriel Rukeyser, W. H. Auden, Richard Wright, and Bhanu Kapil incorporate questionnaire data, invoke or challenge the logics of statistical inference, and rearrange social types. Sociologists like W. E. B. Du Bois, Robert and Helen Lynd, C. Wright Mills, and Laurel Richardson elaborate social patterns through narrative and articulate the results of their studies in verse. In four conceptual chapters, I present convergences between such figures to showcase a new cultural history, illustrating that sociological frameworks have been fundamental to twentieth and twenty-first century literary practices.

My article “Socio/Poetics,” forthcoming in New Literary History 53.3, articulates some of the key interpretive and historical claims that I pursue in this book project.