Frequently Asked: Poetic Voice in the Survey Era

This presentation draws on an article-in-progress that examines some impacts of the rise of survey research in sociology—the process of eliciting data from human subjects through standardized sets of questions—on twentieth-century American literary history. Specifically, it explores the ways that poetic practices which have absorbed, interrogated, and reappropriated the forms and formats of surveys unsettle categories like “lyric” and “anti-lyric” poetry and forge new modes of self-expression through the constraints of “objective” lines of questioning.

Attendees are invited (though not required) to read short excerpts from the article manuscript in advance; please contact Ingrid Becker ([email protected]) for a copy.