Ian Afflerbach is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of North Georgia, where he researches and teaches in modern American fiction, African American studies, intellectual history, and American periodical culture. His first book, Making Liberalism New: American Intellectuals, Modern Literature, and the Rewriting of a Political Tradition, was published by Johns Hopkins UP in 2021. His essays have appeared in PMLA, ELH, African American Review, Modernism/modernity, and Modern Fiction Studies. His current book project examines the widespread anxieties about “selling out” that have shaped modern American culture. He was a Fellow at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies in 2019.
Ian Afflerbach
Contributions
Time: The Present. Selected Stories by Tess Slesinger
In 1932, Tess Slesinger published her most famous story, “Missis Flinders,” a bracingly candid look into the mind of a woman in New York City returning home from her abortion. Slesinger’s story—inspired by her own decision to terminate her pregnancy that year—does not fit neatly into the rhetoric that surrounds our ongoing political and legal debate over women’s reproductive rights. During the Great Depression, economic scarcity meant that abortion, if still illegal, was not policed or stigmatized as bitterly as it would be in earlier or later decades. Neither simply “pro” nor “anti,” Slesinger’s tale instead explores the psychological afterlives of this experience for one woman, trying to reconcile her decision with the feelings that linger after, with her identity as an intellectual, and with her husband’s own intellectual insecurities.
Surveying American Late Modernism: Partisan Review and the Cultural Politics of the Questionnaire
From 1920 to 1932, the Literary Digest—a weekly American magazine—accurately predicted the winner of each presidential election in the United States by conducting massive straw polls. In 1936, however, the magazine fell into irreparable ignominy when, after distributing over ten million questionnaires, the editors predicted a landslide victory for Republican candidate Alf Landon, only to have Franklin Roosevelt win handily, securing sixty-one percent of the popular vote. George Gallup’s American Institute of Public Opinion, founded just the year before, gained widespread notoriety for not only correctly predicting the election’s outcome using only 50,000 respondents, but also estimating the Digest poll’s error in advance of their publication, with a sample of just 3,000.[1] Gallup took the technique of the questionnaire, made politically potent by mass print culture, yet still employed as a blunt instrument, and infused it with a newfound statistical rigor.[2] Gallup’s confrontation with the Digest at once exemplified and accelerated the growing influence that questionnaires had in American culture in the 1930s, and particularly highlighted how modern periodicals might thrive—or wither—by using this technique to actively engage national political debates.[3] The Literary Digest, founded in 1890, endured its shame only briefly, being sold in 1938 and shortly thereafter dissolved into Henry Luce’s Time.[4] Gallup’s Institute, meanwhile, became a leading authority in evaluating public opinion, his name soon treated as metonymic for the use of modern, quantitative polling.