TY - JOUR
AU - Sridhar, Anirudh
AB - ANIRUDH SRIDHAR ‘THOU SHALT NOT SIT / With statisticians nor commit / A social science’ (‘Under Which Lyre’, ll. 160-2). A striking in- junction, made at Harvard to the future ruling classes of America, no less; but the lines have received next to no critical attention. Indeed, Auden’s increasing concerns about the social sciences following his move to America in 1939 have generally been lost to the more familiar themes of Auden criticism. In ‘Auden in America’, Nicholas Jenkins says: for Auden, the future was being determined not by collec- tive loyalties but by [the] supra-national impact of technol- ogy, hypostasised as ‘The Machine’, which had created a quite new historical complex, ‘The Machine Age’. This idea became an obsession in Auden’s early years in America. The moniker ‘machine age’ had been circulating for decades be- fore the 1940s, but it misses the mark on what unsettled him most about technological civilisation. It has nonetheless remained a dominant rubric for understanding the later Auden. James Purdon’s Modernist Informatics, which explores issues central to Auden’s critique of the social sciences – cybernetics and mass data-collection – when discussing Auden, reverts to the tried ‘pylons’, ‘instantaneous communication’, and ‘electri- cal modernity’. 
TI - Auden and the Infernal Sciences
JO - Essays in Criticism
DO - 10.1093/escrit/cgab022
DA - 2022-03-18
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/auden-and-the-infernal-sciences-Hmnn1vz7SE
SP - 431
EP - 453
VL - 71
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -