『シスター・キャリー』と初期シカゴ学派

Abstract

Robert Park, the leading figure in the Chicago school of urban sociology during its heyday in the 1920s and early 1930s, is said to have openly encouraged his students to read not only the literature of sociology, but also the works of such authors as Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. Taking Park's advice as a cue, this paper investigates the relationship between the Chicago school of urban sociology and the naturalist movement in American literature, focussing in particular on Dreiser's Sister Carrie. Rolf Lindner has already shown how, in its choice of research subjects and techniques, the Chicago school of urban sociology was greatly influenced by American journalism at the turn of the century. However, Lindner hardly mentions literature. Dreiser's first novel, Sister Carrie (1900) , is set in Chicago and New York at the end of the nineteenth century. It tells the story of a young girl from a rural Midwest town who finds success as an actress in the big city, while her middle-aged lover comes to ruin. The city is vividly portrayed as a place where a person's social standing rises and falls, where both the bright and dark sides of the emerging consumer culture intermingle. This take on the city is shared by the representative urban monographs of the Chicago school, such as The Hobo, The Ghetto, The Gold Coast and the Slum, and The Taxi-Dance Hall. Sister Carrie is also said to be a counter-narrative to the middle class values of the times (what Santayana called the "genteel tradition") which placed great importance on respectability. Here again we can see correspondences with the Chicago school, which, by investigating the undersides of the metropolis, cultivated an "unrespectable view of society" (P. L. Berger). In this way the Chicago school of sociology was connected to literature, in the broad sense encompassing journalism, especially the literature "after the genteel tradition" of Dreiser, Lewis and others. They were part of the same cultural current. Park emphasized that sociology was a science, but at the same time he advocated that, in regards to the understanding of human nature, sociologists should learn from literature. To conclude this paper, I propose that the Chicago school be reevaluated from the perspective of Wolf Lepenies, who situates sociology between science and literature.