부산대학교 도서관

Summary: I draw upon an array of materials such as ethnographies, fiction, guides, magazines, letters, samples, and surveys in order to frustrate the customary divide between the literary and the bureaucratic: Sherwood Anderson's Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), US Department of Agriculture sampling methods (1863-1933), Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown studies (1929 and 1937), Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse (1937), James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), and the Works Progress Administration's American Guide Series (1935-1943). Writers and researchers struggled with the question of how their studies responded to prevailing governmental priorities to establish normativity and representativeness. By examining how the notion of "representativeness" organized knowledge production around the idea of neutrality, I argue that writers and researchers also produced the seeds of critique, taking as a point of controversy the category of the "representative" and the criteria it is used to express.