Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2022.a898333
D. Tenen
Abstract:In this study, I propose to side-step the philosophical complexity surrounding free will, agency, or volition in favor of their linguistic proxy, syntax. Whatever the belief about willful subjects, the English language forces our thoughts into linear propositions, where subject verbs object. As such, nouns in the subject position become semantically the causes of action, and objects their passive effects: pilots fly planes, maintenance crews clean snow, terrorists detonate bombs. Such complex personifications don't need to be mapped out perfectly before observing that actors are those entities that act, and that action manifests itself through verbs. Assuming little more than that, one can ask: What sorts of nouns get to "do" stuff in the novel? Who are the most common syntactical actants? And who or what do they act upon? With this bit of shorthand we can discuss characterization not in terms of contested philosophical categories, such as name or being, but in relation to specific grammatical features. The syntactic points to the philosophical subject. I proceed, then, by developing a computational method for extracting a set of main characters from a novel (or any other collection of sentences in which agency might be implicated). Hailey's Airport bears the brunt of my analysis, where a few other more familiar novels supply comparison for an experiment in formal literary method.
{"title":"Distributed Agency in the Novel","authors":"D. Tenen","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.a898333","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.a898333","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this study, I propose to side-step the philosophical complexity surrounding free will, agency, or volition in favor of their linguistic proxy, syntax. Whatever the belief about willful subjects, the English language forces our thoughts into linear propositions, where subject verbs object. As such, nouns in the subject position become semantically the causes of action, and objects their passive effects: pilots fly planes, maintenance crews clean snow, terrorists detonate bombs. Such complex personifications don't need to be mapped out perfectly before observing that actors are those entities that act, and that action manifests itself through verbs. Assuming little more than that, one can ask: What sorts of nouns get to \"do\" stuff in the novel? Who are the most common syntactical actants? And who or what do they act upon? With this bit of shorthand we can discuss characterization not in terms of contested philosophical categories, such as name or being, but in relation to specific grammatical features. The syntactic points to the philosophical subject. I proceed, then, by developing a computational method for extracting a set of main characters from a novel (or any other collection of sentences in which agency might be implicated). Hailey's Airport bears the brunt of my analysis, where a few other more familiar novels supply comparison for an experiment in formal literary method.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"903 - 937"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41690904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2022.a898327
Hoyt Long
Abstract:Rapid advancements in technologies of text and image generation have increasingly put the perceived autonomy of human creativity under threat. Even before ChatGPT and other large-language models sent such anxieties into overdrive, literary critics were arguing for a hermeneutics of automatic writing and revisiting long-held assumptions about artistic originality. Few, however, gave much thought to these model's quirky cousins—a family branch that once ruled over the utopian dreams invested in AI: machine translation (MT). This essay reflects on why translation has been lost in all the recent talk about these models and offers a necessary corrective. It considers what a critical response to MT might look like when reframed around an understanding of current technologies and a vision of MT as potential collaborator rather than human replacement. First, it offers an overview of current neural-based MT and the theories of translation that underwrite it. It then uses literary texts as a limit case for surveying the technology's most visible gaps, providing a deep, qualitative analysis of Japanese literary texts machine translated into English. Finally, it takes a speculative turn and considers what "good enough" machine translation of a large corpus of world literature might be good for in a future of ubiquitous and ever more accessible MT. The results hint at more immediate ways that MT invites inquiry into the present conditions of world literature, but also to a future where the entanglement of human translation and agency with the material agency of the technology bring forth potentials in both.
{"title":"Learning to Live with Machine Translation","authors":"Hoyt Long","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.a898327","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.a898327","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Rapid advancements in technologies of text and image generation have increasingly put the perceived autonomy of human creativity under threat. Even before ChatGPT and other large-language models sent such anxieties into overdrive, literary critics were arguing for a hermeneutics of automatic writing and revisiting long-held assumptions about artistic originality. Few, however, gave much thought to these model's quirky cousins—a family branch that once ruled over the utopian dreams invested in AI: machine translation (MT). This essay reflects on why translation has been lost in all the recent talk about these models and offers a necessary corrective. It considers what a critical response to MT might look like when reframed around an understanding of current technologies and a vision of MT as potential collaborator rather than human replacement. First, it offers an overview of current neural-based MT and the theories of translation that underwrite it. It then uses literary texts as a limit case for surveying the technology's most visible gaps, providing a deep, qualitative analysis of Japanese literary texts machine translated into English. Finally, it takes a speculative turn and considers what \"good enough\" machine translation of a large corpus of world literature might be good for in a future of ubiquitous and ever more accessible MT. The results hint at more immediate ways that MT invites inquiry into the present conditions of world literature, but also to a future where the entanglement of human translation and agency with the material agency of the technology bring forth potentials in both.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"721 - 753"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43346811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2022.a898334
M. Warner
Abstract:The relationship of queer studies to literary text mining has been vexed by the latter's formative interest in large scales, clear categories and general trends, all at odds with queer investment in particulars, details, and persons and objects who resist normative patterns and labels. The history of queer bibliography, especially as embodied by early work such as Jeanette Foster's Sex Variant Women in Literature (1956) and Roger Austen's Playing the Game: the Homosexual Novel in America (1977), however, presents a compelling model for a kind of queer enumeration which is community-oriented rather than externally imposed, centered first and foremost on the task of guiding readers to new queer texts, and which is affectively invested in the task of counting itself: a kind of literary engagement that shows the queer potential of the question "how many?" Using a small corpus of queer novels derived from modern lists of book recommendations—a contemporary form of queer bibliography—I show that, while many kinds of textual queerness elude currently existing computational methods, these methods are nonetheless capable of identifying a variety of queer textual traces, both in queer fiction identified as such, and in presumptively straight novels. While future work in this area will ultimately require more sophisticated methods, these already extant tools offer scholars of queer literature an intriguing focus on surface-level features such as explicit terms of sexual identity—and the work of bibliographers such as Foster and Austen offers the theoretical foundations that new methods must be based upon.
{"title":"A Queer Way of Counting: Bibliography and Computational Approaches to the Queer Novel","authors":"M. Warner","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.a898334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.a898334","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The relationship of queer studies to literary text mining has been vexed by the latter's formative interest in large scales, clear categories and general trends, all at odds with queer investment in particulars, details, and persons and objects who resist normative patterns and labels. The history of queer bibliography, especially as embodied by early work such as Jeanette Foster's Sex Variant Women in Literature (1956) and Roger Austen's Playing the Game: the Homosexual Novel in America (1977), however, presents a compelling model for a kind of queer enumeration which is community-oriented rather than externally imposed, centered first and foremost on the task of guiding readers to new queer texts, and which is affectively invested in the task of counting itself: a kind of literary engagement that shows the queer potential of the question \"how many?\" Using a small corpus of queer novels derived from modern lists of book recommendations—a contemporary form of queer bibliography—I show that, while many kinds of textual queerness elude currently existing computational methods, these methods are nonetheless capable of identifying a variety of queer textual traces, both in queer fiction identified as such, and in presumptively straight novels. While future work in this area will ultimately require more sophisticated methods, these already extant tools offer scholars of queer literature an intriguing focus on surface-level features such as explicit terms of sexual identity—and the work of bibliographers such as Foster and Austen offers the theoretical foundations that new methods must be based upon.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"939 - 966"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45718590","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2022.a898319
T. Underwood, Laura B. McGrath, R. So, Chad Wellmon
{"title":"Culture, Theory, Data: An Introduction","authors":"T. Underwood, Laura B. McGrath, R. So, Chad Wellmon","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.a898319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.a898319","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"519 - 530"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42097887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2022.a898322
Sarah Bruno, J. Johnson
Abstract:As a part of the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, TEA (directed by Bruno and Johnson) is concerned with Black Puerto Rican data and those impacted by it. The projects, as discussed later in this paper, deal with and mitigate the limitations of diasporic archives while also riding the tension of the methodology of curating digital data sets and archives. Together, as two Black Puerto Rican women, we engage the practices Black Puerto Ricans, particularly Black femmes and other queer-identified Black Puerto Ricans on the island and in the diaspora, have used to forge a self-conscious, Black and African-descended (Afrodescendiente) community. Black Puerto Ricans have fought against the systematic erasure of Blackness from Puerto Rico's archive, as well as against the erasure of histories of Puerto Rican slavery from mainstream Puerto Rican, US, and even Caribbean popular memory. This paper explores the troubling and troubled water that spills forth when computational humanities meets the edges of empire and when Black diasporic life is centered in data analysis. What does it mean to confront people in data as we continue to lean into it? And where can that confrontation lead us and leave us? This paper is an exercise and calls to reexamine the digital with a Black digital-humanist lens to grapple with individuals and communities who might appear as binary code or, in the archive, as equations, parts, or marks. How can we look beyond the restraints we sometimes put on our data and ourselves and allow ourselves to be called into deeper intimacy with our materials? Black feminists have given us a choreography to build from if we are brave enough to fall into step with them.
{"title":"\"Que Recogan Este Memoria\": Black Puerto Rican Data","authors":"Sarah Bruno, J. Johnson","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.a898322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.a898322","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:As a part of the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, TEA (directed by Bruno and Johnson) is concerned with Black Puerto Rican data and those impacted by it. The projects, as discussed later in this paper, deal with and mitigate the limitations of diasporic archives while also riding the tension of the methodology of curating digital data sets and archives. Together, as two Black Puerto Rican women, we engage the practices Black Puerto Ricans, particularly Black femmes and other queer-identified Black Puerto Ricans on the island and in the diaspora, have used to forge a self-conscious, Black and African-descended (Afrodescendiente) community. Black Puerto Ricans have fought against the systematic erasure of Blackness from Puerto Rico's archive, as well as against the erasure of histories of Puerto Rican slavery from mainstream Puerto Rican, US, and even Caribbean popular memory. This paper explores the troubling and troubled water that spills forth when computational humanities meets the edges of empire and when Black diasporic life is centered in data analysis. What does it mean to confront people in data as we continue to lean into it? And where can that confrontation lead us and leave us? This paper is an exercise and calls to reexamine the digital with a Black digital-humanist lens to grapple with individuals and communities who might appear as binary code or, in the archive, as equations, parts, or marks. How can we look beyond the restraints we sometimes put on our data and ourselves and allow ourselves to be called into deeper intimacy with our materials? Black feminists have given us a choreography to build from if we are brave enough to fall into step with them.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"583 - 611"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47844757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2022.a898331
Laura K. Nelson
Abstract:We have entered a new era of scholarship: the computational era. As digitized data and computational methods revolutionize the way we understand ourselves, society, and our place in society, these methods have revived questions about the role of science and objectivity in understanding society. For some, this moment has reanimated the ideal of science as disembodied objectivity, a totalizing ideology long critiqued by feminist and other critical theorists. For others, computational methods have the potential to make transparent the necessary interplay between subject and object in producing knowledge, enhancing the ideal of embodied objectivity. Starting from the premise that objectivity in knowledge creation is a worthy—even utopian—pursuit, this essay argues four things. First, applying computational methods toward the goal of disembodied objectivity profoundly misunderstands the nature of the methods and undermines the revolutionary potential of the current moment for the social sciences and humanities. Second, computational methods are instead perfectly aligned with, and can be used to enhance, the embodied vision of objectivity. Third, embodied objectivity enables us to better leverage computational tools to produce more accurate accounts of the world. Fourth, I borrow from the theory of situated knowledges and partial perspectives to provide four principles to guide this new era of scholarship.
{"title":"Situated Knowledges and Partial Perspectives: A Framework for Radical Objectivity in Computational Social Science and Computational Humanities","authors":"Laura K. Nelson","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.a898331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.a898331","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:We have entered a new era of scholarship: the computational era. As digitized data and computational methods revolutionize the way we understand ourselves, society, and our place in society, these methods have revived questions about the role of science and objectivity in understanding society. For some, this moment has reanimated the ideal of science as disembodied objectivity, a totalizing ideology long critiqued by feminist and other critical theorists. For others, computational methods have the potential to make transparent the necessary interplay between subject and object in producing knowledge, enhancing the ideal of embodied objectivity. Starting from the premise that objectivity in knowledge creation is a worthy—even utopian—pursuit, this essay argues four things. First, applying computational methods toward the goal of disembodied objectivity profoundly misunderstands the nature of the methods and undermines the revolutionary potential of the current moment for the social sciences and humanities. Second, computational methods are instead perfectly aligned with, and can be used to enhance, the embodied vision of objectivity. Third, embodied objectivity enables us to better leverage computational tools to produce more accurate accounts of the world. Fourth, I borrow from the theory of situated knowledges and partial perspectives to provide four principles to guide this new era of scholarship.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"853 - 877"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49293427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2022.a898325
Long Le-Khac, Maria Antoniak, R. So
Abstract:Working with Twitter data, this paper offers new findings on the #BlackLivesMatter movement and "racial awakening" of summer 2020. Framing methods to address this important moment, this paper contends that cultural studies and critical race studies can be enriched through an engagement with new computational approaches. We analyze how white and racial minority voices talked about race and track their fraught contestation for leadership of racial discourse over the summer of 2020. We uncover a surprising story of white colorblindness even in the midst of a "racial awakening," a story that questions claims that the Trump presidency and the summer of 2020 ushered in a new era of US racial consciousness. And we show how a Black and minority discourse with transformative potential surged and receded. For cultural studies, our data and analysis revise Raymond Williams's influential model of cultural evolution by introducing a new concept: the insurgent, a long-building minority cultural strain that surges to contest the dominant culture in a moment of crisis. For critical race studies, our findings revise prominent theorizations of colorblindness, racial ideology, and hegemony. By revealing the messy and unconscious feelings characterizing colorblindness, our data contest theorizations of colorblindness as an ideology and counter the focus on articulate beliefs in theories of racial hegemony. Ultimately, this paper shows that bringing data methods focused on moments of cultural contestation and mass communication into dialogue with field-specific theory and qualitative analyses can expand our models of how race, discourse, and culture operate.
{"title":"#BLM Insurgent Discourse, White Structures of Feeling and the Fate of the 2020 \"Racial Awakening\"","authors":"Long Le-Khac, Maria Antoniak, R. So","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.a898325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.a898325","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Working with Twitter data, this paper offers new findings on the #BlackLivesMatter movement and \"racial awakening\" of summer 2020. Framing methods to address this important moment, this paper contends that cultural studies and critical race studies can be enriched through an engagement with new computational approaches. We analyze how white and racial minority voices talked about race and track their fraught contestation for leadership of racial discourse over the summer of 2020. We uncover a surprising story of white colorblindness even in the midst of a \"racial awakening,\" a story that questions claims that the Trump presidency and the summer of 2020 ushered in a new era of US racial consciousness. And we show how a Black and minority discourse with transformative potential surged and receded. For cultural studies, our data and analysis revise Raymond Williams's influential model of cultural evolution by introducing a new concept: the insurgent, a long-building minority cultural strain that surges to contest the dominant culture in a moment of crisis. For critical race studies, our findings revise prominent theorizations of colorblindness, racial ideology, and hegemony. By revealing the messy and unconscious feelings characterizing colorblindness, our data contest theorizations of colorblindness as an ideology and counter the focus on articulate beliefs in theories of racial hegemony. Ultimately, this paper shows that bringing data methods focused on moments of cultural contestation and mass communication into dialogue with field-specific theory and qualitative analyses can expand our models of how race, discourse, and culture operate.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"667 - 692"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45607913","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2022.a898323
M. Gavin
Abstract:To consider why distant reading works is already to invite a certain kind of misunderstanding. Readers of this essay are likely to infer from its title that I mean to discuss the theories of Franco Moretti or to defend research in cultural analytics against criticism from skeptics. Neither of those is my focus. The argument of this essay is in some ways narrower, in that I largely set aside polemical debates over "digital humanities" or the role of computation in criticism, but it is also broader, in that I hope to draw readers' attention to a set of issues and concerns with a very wide application. My goal is to articulate a guiding theory that explains why and under what conditions distant reading works as a viable method for making true statements about the cultural past.
{"title":"Why Distant Reading Works","authors":"M. Gavin","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.a898323","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.a898323","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:To consider why distant reading works is already to invite a certain kind of misunderstanding. Readers of this essay are likely to infer from its title that I mean to discuss the theories of Franco Moretti or to defend research in cultural analytics against criticism from skeptics. Neither of those is my focus. The argument of this essay is in some ways narrower, in that I largely set aside polemical debates over \"digital humanities\" or the role of computation in criticism, but it is also broader, in that I hope to draw readers' attention to a set of issues and concerns with a very wide application. My goal is to articulate a guiding theory that explains why and under what conditions distant reading works as a viable method for making true statements about the cultural past.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"613 - 633"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43227901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2022.a898329
Laura B. McGrath
Abstract:This essay focuses on the the American commercial publishing industry's contribution to the ongoing process of racial formation in the 21st century. Responding to laudatory claims about publishing's increased diversification and drawing on a corpus of book deal announcements, this essay considers the racial discourse circulating through the institutions that produce and promote contemporary literature: how are race and ethnicity represented by an industry whose controlling interests and presumed customers are predominantly white? Which stories, by which writers, make it through the bottleneck of acquisition—what traits do they share, what narratives do they promote, and what, by extension, are the "authorized" stories of race and racism in the United States? Even as more books by or about people of color are considered commercially viable, presumptions about audience demographics (including race, socioeconomic status, and gender) have led to the perpetuation of stereotypical narratives about race and ethnicity.
{"title":"\"Books About Race\": Commercial Publishing and Racial Formation in the 21st Century","authors":"Laura B. McGrath","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.a898329","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.a898329","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay focuses on the the American commercial publishing industry's contribution to the ongoing process of racial formation in the 21st century. Responding to laudatory claims about publishing's increased diversification and drawing on a corpus of book deal announcements, this essay considers the racial discourse circulating through the institutions that produce and promote contemporary literature: how are race and ethnicity represented by an industry whose controlling interests and presumed customers are predominantly white? Which stories, by which writers, make it through the bottleneck of acquisition—what traits do they share, what narratives do they promote, and what, by extension, are the \"authorized\" stories of race and racism in the United States? Even as more books by or about people of color are considered commercially viable, presumptions about audience demographics (including race, socioeconomic status, and gender) have led to the perpetuation of stereotypical narratives about race and ethnicity.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"771 - 794"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41785047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2022.a898326
C. Levine
Abstract:Literary studies has repeatedly justified a diciplinary focus on the small scale. Both our most conventional objects—the novel and the lyric poem—and our most conventional methods—close reading, historical analysis, and an attention to surprises and exceptions—lead us away from a focus on large scales of collective life. This essay argues for a different starting point, making a case for a metadisciplinary formalism that can join literary studies and many other fields in the work of responding to global poverty and climate change. Reading Henry Mayhew and Rodrigo Nunes, Levine makes a case for the hinge as a crucial aesthetic and political form.
{"title":"Literary Studies and Collective Life","authors":"C. Levine","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.a898326","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.a898326","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Literary studies has repeatedly justified a diciplinary focus on the small scale. Both our most conventional objects—the novel and the lyric poem—and our most conventional methods—close reading, historical analysis, and an attention to surprises and exceptions—lead us away from a focus on large scales of collective life. This essay argues for a different starting point, making a case for a metadisciplinary formalism that can join literary studies and many other fields in the work of responding to global poverty and climate change. Reading Henry Mayhew and Rodrigo Nunes, Levine makes a case for the hinge as a crucial aesthetic and political form.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"693 - 720"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45941969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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