Heartland cosmopolitanism: the Midwest and literary modernism in the work of Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1922 Carl Van Doren noticed that a revolt from the village was taking place in modern American writing, especially when it came to the midwestern United States. According to Van Doren, where James Whitcomb Riley and Booth Tarkington’s local color humor made the small-town Midwest the celebrated center of American values in the late nineteenth century, writers like Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis used modern literary techniques like realism and symbolism to make the region a peripheral site of resistance to the forces of urban-industrialization and globalization that were reshaping U.S. culture and society in the early twentieth century. Since the 1920s, this assessment of the Midwest’s cultural parochialism has reinforced conceptions of the region’s political provincialism, which emerged thanks to regional politicians’ like Minnesota governor Joseph Burnquist and senator Frank B. Kellogg’s efforts to privilege domestic issues and local concerns over foreign affairs. As a result of this parochial reputation, the region has been largely overlooked in studies of U.S. literary modernism, which is typically associated with metropolitan centers and transnational exchange. By attending to Cather and Lewis’s representations of the transnational communities and economies that structured the Midwest’s growth in the Progressive era, this dissertation rejects assumptions about the region’s perennial parochialism to emphasize its historical cosmopolitanism. In doing so, it shows how Cather and Lewis mobilized the region’s history of migration, settlement, and urbanization to critique the failures of U.S. political progressivism, and asserts the midwestern hinterland’s participation in the development of U.S. literary modernism. Specifically, I argue that by representing the relationships between immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens in the modern Midwest’s social and cultural institutions, Cather and Lewis subvert the progressive themes and consensus-building impulses of literary realism to critique the rise of U.S. commercial capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".