Site Unseen

This chapter argues that to perform a site reading of Cormac McCarthy's The Road is to appreciate how the text functions as a novel of purpose that aims to vivify the planet as what Latour would call a “matter of concern.” Still, The Road reads less as a critique of contemporary social problems than as a “thought-experiment,” a sort of literary climate model, forecasting a chillingly plausible correlation between a ruined site and a grisly social order. By imagining this correlation through narrative form, McCarthy offers his own striking contribution to environmental and sociological thought, a contribution that starts to become apparent the moment we ask how his setting functions as an actant, both in the novel itself and beyond.

Roads

This chapter focuses Jack Kerouac and Joan Didion, arguing that the postwar American road narrative produces a sophisticated account of the nonhuman social actor through its treatment of the automobile, an entity that is both a material thing and a social site. In Kerouac's On the Road, a semiautobiographical account of his road trips in the late 1940s, the car plays no less potent a role in facilitating male bonding and in constituting the social world of the novel. To capture the distinctiveness of that world, the chapter contrasts it with the representation of two other automotive subcultures—the hot-rodders and the Merry Pranksters—in seminal works by Tom Wolfe that appeared in the wake of On the Road. Then, the chapter turns to the writing of Joan Didion, arguing that Play It as It Lays functions as a self-conscious response both to Kerouac's novel and to the mythology of road-tripping that it fostered.

The Site of the Social

This introductory chapter strives to demonstrate the novel as an acute instrument of sociological thought, or, more specifically, that the “terra incognita” of setting contains vivid and valuable insights about the experience of collectivity. This does not mean overlooking the formal qualities of narrative prose fiction but looking at them in a certain way: with an eye toward how they effect something like a radically literary sociology. If the novel's delineation of consciousness has long instructed us about both individual personhood and the human mind, and if its treatment of physical things has prompted us more recently to pose fresh questions about matter and materiality, then perhaps its figuration of sites, vibrant assemblages of persons, and things might occasion a new inquiry into the nature of sociality.

Ruins

This chapter aligns artist Robert Smithson with Thomas Pynchon, a novelist whose treatment of ruins mediates his preoccupation with time, as well as his celebrated critique of conventional historiography. Both were considered key figures in the emergence of postmodernism within their respective disciplines, and shared many preoccupations during the 1960s and 1970s, such as entropy and the paradox of representation without resemblance. Moreover, while Smithson is best known for his site-specific projects in visual and plastic media, he was also a prolific writer of narrative and essayistic prose. Pynchon is most readily appreciated for his experimentation with narrative form, he was equally interested in material sites, or what he calls “nonverbal reality”.

Supermarket Sociology

Taking Latour's engagement with the literary as a point of departure, this chapter offers a new model for thinking between the disciplines of literary studies and sociology. At the crux of this model is a site, the supermarket, that dramatizes nonhuman agency as a mundane yet complex fact of social experience—a fact that Latour theorizes throughout his writings and that a host of literary authors, above all Don DeLillo, have sought to explore in different ways. It offers a reading of the novel in terms of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and demonstrates how a site that is crucial to both the novelist and the sociologist can facilitate a new interdisciplinary conversation, a mode of inquiry that would divert from a more traditional sociology of literature whose objective would be to identify the deep significance of literary form in the social forces that subtend aesthetic production.

Asylums

This chapter considers Ralph Ellison's career-long interest in asylums—sites where “individuals” are, as Goffman writes, “cut off from the wider society”—suggests a new way of defining his relationship to the discipline of sociology. Ellison's treatment of asylums reveals his affinity with sociologist Erving Goffman, whose own writing on such sites still stands among the most influential. The chapter tracks the overlap in their respective approaches to this site in order to develop a new sense of Ellison's sociological imagination: his attempt to apprehend social reality through an engagement with a particular locale. It situates Ellison's writings on the asylum within an intellectual and cultural history that contains Goffman. The chapter concludes by adapting some of the sociologist's key concepts in an effort to rethink the invisible man's “hole,” his distinctive underground lair, itself an asylum and quite possibly the most beguiling site in all of American literature.

Dumps

This chapter considers the work and life of William S. Burroughs, and proposes that Naked Lunch (1959) constructs something like a nightmare image of Latourian sociality: a collective of human subjects and nonhuman objects governed by the logic of putrefaction, or “translation” run amok. The novel not only visualizes a welter of “literal garbage” decomposing in a dumpsite, which Burroughs names the “junk world,” but also assumes the formal structure of a landfill, a site governed by the logic of putrefaction. In other words, rather than simply representing the dump, Burroughs enacts a mimetic relation to it, thereby converting spatial into literary form.