Are American authors homers? Do they devote too much of their attention to American concerns and settings? Is American literature as a whole different from other national literatures in its degree of self-interest? We attempt to answer these questions, and to address related issues of national literary identity, by examining the distribution of geo-graphic usage in more than 100,000 volumes of American, British, and other English-language fiction published between 1850 and 2009. We offer four principal findings: American literature consistently features greater domestic attention than does British literature; American literature is, nevertheless, significantly concerned with global loca-tions; politics and other international conflicts are meaningful drivers of changing literary attention in American and British fiction alike; and prize-nominated books are the only examined subclass of American fiction that has become significantly more international in the decades after World War II, a fact that may account for readers’ unfounded percep-tion of a similar overall shift in American literature.
{"title":"Too isolated, too insular: American Literature and the World","authors":"Matthew Wilkens","doi":"10.22148/001c.25273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.25273","url":null,"abstract":"Are American authors homers? Do they devote too much of their attention to American concerns and settings? Is American literature as a whole different from other national literatures in its degree of self-interest? We attempt to answer these questions, and to address related issues of national literary identity, by examining the distribution of geo-graphic usage in more than 100,000 volumes of American, British, and other English-language fiction published between 1850 and 2009. We offer four principal findings: American literature consistently features greater domestic attention than does British literature; American literature is, nevertheless, significantly concerned with global loca-tions; politics and other international conflicts are meaningful drivers of changing literary attention in American and British fiction alike; and prize-nominated books are the only examined subclass of American fiction that has become significantly more international in the decades after World War II, a fact that may account for readers’ unfounded percep-tion of a similar overall shift in American literature.","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42404100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Images that convert culture into physical space have a durable appeal, and numbers make it possible to literalize a spatial representation of culture by measuring the “distances” between cultural artifacts. But do cultural relationships really behave like physical distance? There are good reasons to think the analogy is imperfect, and a number of alternative geometries have been proposed—extending, in a few cases, to a systematic distinction between the mathematics of “embodied experience” and “epistemic experience” (Chang and DeDeo 2020). We test several proposed alternatives to spatial metrics against ground truth implicit in human behavior. While it is sometimes possible to improve on distance metrics, we do not yet find evidence that the information-theoretical measures recommended as appropriate for epistemic questions are generally preferable in the cultural domain.
{"title":"Can We Map Culture?","authors":"T. Underwood, R. So","doi":"10.22148/001C.24911","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001C.24911","url":null,"abstract":"Images that convert culture into physical space have a durable appeal, and numbers make it possible to literalize a spatial representation of culture by measuring the “distances” between cultural artifacts. But do cultural relationships really behave like physical distance? There are good reasons to think the analogy is imperfect, and a number of alternative geometries have been proposed—extending, in a few cases, to a systematic distinction between the mathematics of “embodied experience” and “epistemic experience” (Chang and DeDeo 2020). We test several proposed alternatives to spatial metrics against ground truth implicit in human behavior. While it is sometimes possible to improve on distance metrics, we do not yet find evidence that the information-theoretical measures recommended as appropriate for epistemic questions are generally preferable in the cultural domain.","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48400186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Compared to the large body of research into gender, race and class in children’s literature, there has been little awareness of the social construction of age in this discourse. Analysing age in contemporary fiction for young readers gives insight in how present-day society models (people of) different ages, and given the decisive role that books play in shaping children’s worldviews, such research contributes to our understanding of how age norms are passed on across generations. This article explores the construction of age in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter in relation to the age of the implied reader. This case study provides a unique opportunity to study age, because the main characters in every volume ‘grow up’ together with the implied readers. This article traces the correlation between the evolutions in form and content in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series on the one hand and an evolution in the age of its implied readership on the other. After scrutinising existing guidelines pertaining to the ideal age at which to read each book, we conduct our own digital analyses on the style and topics of the texts. As well as providing insight into the evolution of these features in the Harry Potter books, this article contributes to the ongoing discussions on the reliability of readability measures and the desirability of explicit age markers on books for young readers.
{"title":"Putting the Sorting Hat on J.K. Rowling’s Reader: A digital inquiry into the age of the implied readership of the Harry Potter series","authors":"Wouter Haverals, Lindsey Geybels","doi":"10.22148/001C.24077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001C.24077","url":null,"abstract":"Compared to the large body of research into gender, race and class in children’s literature, there has been little awareness of the social construction of age in this discourse. Analysing age in contemporary fiction for young readers gives insight in how present-day society models (people of) different ages, and given the decisive role that books play in shaping children’s worldviews, such research contributes to our understanding of how age norms are passed on across generations. This article explores the construction of age in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter in relation to the age of the implied reader. This case study provides a unique opportunity to study age, because the main characters in every volume ‘grow up’ together with the implied readers. This article traces the correlation between the evolutions in form and content in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series on the one hand and an evolution in the age of its implied readership on the other. After scrutinising existing guidelines pertaining to the ideal age at which to read each book, we conduct our own digital analyses on the style and topics of the texts. As well as providing insight into the evolution of these features in the Harry Potter books, this article contributes to the ongoing discussions on the reliability of readability measures and the desirability of explicit age markers on books for young readers.","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49540305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay examines how Goodreads users define, discuss, and debate “classic” literature by computa-tionally analyzing and close reading more than 120,000 user reviews. We begin by exploring how crowdsourced tagging systems like those found on Goodreads have influenced the evolution of genre among readers and amateur critics, and we highlight the contemporary value of the “classics” in particu-lar. We identify the most commonly tagged “classic” literary works and find that Goodreads users have curated a vision of literature that is less diverse, in terms of the race and ethnicity of authors, than many U.S. high school and college syllabi. Drawing on computational methods such as topic modeling, we point to some of the forces that influence readers’ perceptions, such as schooling and what we call the classic industry — industries that benefit from the reinforcement of works as classics in other mediums and domains like film, television, publishing, and e-commerce (e.g., Goodreads and Amazon). We also high-light themes that users commonly discuss in their reviews (e.g., boring characters) and writing styles that often stand out in them (e.g., conversational and slangy language). Throughout the essay, we make the case that computational methods and internet data, when combined, can help literary critics capture the creative explosion of reader responses and critique algorithmic culture’s effects on literary history.
{"title":"The Goodreads “Classics”: A Computational Study of Readers, Amazon, and Crowdsourced Amateur Criticism","authors":"Melanie Walsh, Maria Antoniak","doi":"10.22148/001C.22221","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001C.22221","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines how Goodreads users define, discuss, and debate “classic” literature by computa-tionally analyzing and close reading more than 120,000 user reviews. We begin by exploring how crowdsourced tagging systems like those found on Goodreads have influenced the evolution of genre among readers and amateur critics, and we highlight the contemporary value of the “classics” in particu-lar. We identify the most commonly tagged “classic” literary works and find that Goodreads users have curated a vision of literature that is less diverse, in terms of the race and ethnicity of authors, than many U.S. high school and college syllabi. Drawing on computational methods such as topic modeling, we point to some of the forces that influence readers’ perceptions, such as schooling and what we call the classic industry — industries that benefit from the reinforcement of works as classics in other mediums and domains like film, television, publishing, and e-commerce (e.g., Goodreads and Amazon). We also high-light themes that users commonly discuss in their reviews (e.g., boring characters) and writing styles that often stand out in them (e.g., conversational and slangy language). Throughout the essay, we make the case that computational methods and internet data, when combined, can help literary critics capture the creative explosion of reader responses and critique algorithmic culture’s effects on literary history.","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46327634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article we use computational methods to establish that the Program Era has altered the traditional understanding that a regionalist writer writes about the region in which they grew up. Using the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as an example, we prove that many writers now write about the region to which they moved to study and/or teach creative writing. Using a database of demographic information about faculty and students alongside computational analysis of place names in a curated corpus of work produced by prominent Iowa-affiliated writers, we map authorial career itineraries onto the geographic locations referenced in their fiction, visualizing the ways in which the relationship between writer and place has been inflected by the Midwestern location of the Workshop. We found that Iowa references are significantly higher than in a comparable corpus of postwar literature. They are also significantly higher in percentage terms than Iowa’s population as a proportion of the US population. Finally, we found that the works in our corpus most centrally focused on Iowa are, overwhelmingly, not authored by Iowa natives. Instead, we have identified a cohort of squatter regionalists, authors whose writings prominently feature the state in which they received their MFA, found faculty employment, or (frequently) both. This trend, we believe, may also be evident in works by authors from other MFA programs, which would confirm our larger hypothesis that the professional itineraries mandated by the Program Era have influenced the regional settings of postwar American fiction.
{"title":"Squatter Regionalism: Postwar Fiction, Geography, and the Program Era","authors":"N. Kelly, Nicole White, L. Glass","doi":"10.22148/001C.22332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001C.22332","url":null,"abstract":"In this article we use computational methods to establish that the Program Era has altered the traditional understanding that a regionalist writer writes about the region in which they grew up. Using the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as an example, we prove that many writers now write about the region to which they moved to study and/or teach creative writing. Using a database of demographic information about faculty and students alongside computational analysis of place names in a curated corpus of work produced by prominent Iowa-affiliated writers, we map authorial career itineraries onto the geographic locations referenced in their fiction, visualizing the ways in which the relationship between writer and place has been inflected by the Midwestern location of the Workshop. We found that Iowa references are significantly higher than in a comparable corpus of postwar literature. They are also significantly higher in percentage terms than Iowa’s population as a proportion of the US population. Finally, we found that the works in our corpus most centrally focused on Iowa are, overwhelmingly, not authored by Iowa natives. Instead, we have identified a cohort of squatter regionalists, authors whose writings prominently feature the state in which they received their MFA, found faculty employment, or (frequently) both. This trend, we believe, may also be evident in works by authors from other MFA programs, which would confirm our larger hypothesis that the professional itineraries mandated by the Program Era have influenced the regional settings of postwar American fiction.","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48862865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
From the New American Poetry to New Formalism, publishing networks such as literary magazines and social scenes such as poetry reading series have served as a capacious mod-el for understanding the varied poetic formations in the postwar period. As audio archives of poetry readings have been digitized in large volumes, Charles Bernstein has suggested that open access to digital archives allows readers of American poetry to create mixtapes in different configurations. Digital archives of poetry readings “offer an intriguing and powerful alternative” to organizing practices such as networks and scenes. Placing Bern-stein’s definition of the digital audio archive into contact with more conventional under-standings of poetic community gives us a composite vision of organizing principles in postwar American poetry. To accomplish this, we compared poetry reading venues as well as audio archives — alongside more familiar print networks constituted by poetry an-thologies and magazines — as important and distinct sites of reception for American poet-ry. We used network analysis to visualize the relationships of individual poets to venues where they have read, archives where their readings are stored, and text anthologies where their poetry has been printed. Examining several types of poetic archives offers us a new perspective in how we perceive the relationships between poets and their “networks and scenes,” understood both in terms of print and audio culture, as well as trends and chang-es in the formation of these poetic communities and affiliations. We suggest that this ap-proach may offer new ways of imagining the multiple dimensions contributing to the so-cial formation of contemporary American poetry.
{"title":"A Network Analysis of Postwar American Poetry in the Age of Digital Audio Archives","authors":"Ankit S. Basnet, James Lee","doi":"10.22148/001C.22223","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001C.22223","url":null,"abstract":"From the New American Poetry to New Formalism, publishing networks such as literary magazines and social scenes such as poetry reading series have served as a capacious mod-el for understanding the varied poetic formations in the postwar period. As audio archives of poetry readings have been digitized in large volumes, Charles Bernstein has suggested that open access to digital archives allows readers of American poetry to create mixtapes in different configurations. Digital archives of poetry readings “offer an intriguing and powerful alternative” to organizing practices such as networks and scenes. Placing Bern-stein’s definition of the digital audio archive into contact with more conventional under-standings of poetic community gives us a composite vision of organizing principles in postwar American poetry. To accomplish this, we compared poetry reading venues as well as audio archives — alongside more familiar print networks constituted by poetry an-thologies and magazines — as important and distinct sites of reception for American poet-ry. We used network analysis to visualize the relationships of individual poets to venues where they have read, archives where their readings are stored, and text anthologies where their poetry has been printed. Examining several types of poetic archives offers us a new perspective in how we perceive the relationships between poets and their “networks and scenes,” understood both in terms of print and audio culture, as well as trends and chang-es in the formation of these poetic communities and affiliations. We suggest that this ap-proach may offer new ways of imagining the multiple dimensions contributing to the so-cial formation of contemporary American poetry.","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41657870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
New media forms affect a culture, in part, by reshaping what is seeable and sayable: what “ideas,” as Neil Postman once put it, “we can conveniently express.” In this essay, I ask what one of today’s major new media forms—viral, digital “content”—compels us to see and say. To address that question, I em-brace a makeshift, hybrid methodology, informed by theory, sociology, arts criticism, and the digital humanities, and eschewing media theoretical orthodoxies that have been dominant across the humanities (namely: an exaggerated emphasis on the “medium” at the expense of the “message”). From this poly-glot perspective, I analyze content contained in a database that I have compiled, indexing 205,147 of the most-shared pieces of viral media on sites like Facebook and Twitter, from 2014 to 2019. After survey-ing this content’s basic features, I focus on one, particularly popular and quintessential content genre, which I call the “uplifting anecdote”: a short, sentimental account of a heroic act. The uplifting anec-dote, I argue, promotes a novel type of ethics, ideally suited to the content economy. I then track this ethics’ dissemination into the broader culture, through a discussion of two prominent, aesthetic artifacts: George Saunders’ prize-winning, best-selling novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), and NBC’s popular sitcom, The Good Place (2016-2020).
{"title":"Content-Era Ethics","authors":"T. Mcnulty","doi":"10.22148/001C.22220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001C.22220","url":null,"abstract":"New media forms affect a culture, in part, by reshaping what is seeable and sayable: what “ideas,” as Neil Postman once put it, “we can conveniently express.” In this essay, I ask what one of today’s major new media forms—viral, digital “content”—compels us to see and say. To address that question, I em-brace a makeshift, hybrid methodology, informed by theory, sociology, arts criticism, and the digital humanities, and eschewing media theoretical orthodoxies that have been dominant across the humanities (namely: an exaggerated emphasis on the “medium” at the expense of the “message”). From this poly-glot perspective, I analyze content contained in a database that I have compiled, indexing 205,147 of the most-shared pieces of viral media on sites like Facebook and Twitter, from 2014 to 2019. After survey-ing this content’s basic features, I focus on one, particularly popular and quintessential content genre, which I call the “uplifting anecdote”: a short, sentimental account of a heroic act. The uplifting anec-dote, I argue, promotes a novel type of ethics, ideally suited to the content economy. I then track this ethics’ dissemination into the broader culture, through a discussion of two prominent, aesthetic artifacts: George Saunders’ prize-winning, best-selling novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), and NBC’s popular sitcom, The Good Place (2016-2020).","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47131063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Using a custom-designed database of 388,000 first editions of German Literature this paper investigates the long-term development of genre-indicating subtitles over more than 500 years of literary history. This approach adds a social-institutional perspective to recent work in the field of genre theory, and is a first step towards combining historical testimony, i.e. historical actors’ classifications, and textual features in a single model. Starting from the fundamental question of how many books have generic subtitles, the paper analyses the use of the most common genre labels, the relation between generic subtitles and genre production, periods of the permanent presence of generic terms (institutional cycles) and periods of generic differentiation. It identifies recurrent patterns in the development of generic subtitles using K-Means-Clustering and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and sheds light on literature’s changing relation to history and truth, thereby underpinning recent theoretical work on the practices of poetic invention.
{"title":"An Institutional Perspective on Genres: Generic Subtitles in German Literature from 1500-2020","authors":"Benjamin Gittel","doi":"10.22148/001C.22086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001C.22086","url":null,"abstract":"Using a custom-designed database of 388,000 first editions of German Literature this paper investigates the long-term development of genre-indicating subtitles over more than 500 years of literary history. This approach adds a social-institutional perspective to recent work in the field of genre theory, and is a first step towards combining historical testimony, i.e. historical actors’ classifications, and textual features in a single model. Starting from the fundamental question of how many books have generic subtitles, the paper analyses the use of the most common genre labels, the relation between generic subtitles and genre production, periods of the permanent presence of generic terms (institutional cycles) and periods of generic differentiation. It identifies recurrent patterns in the development of generic subtitles using K-Means-Clustering and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and sheds light on literature’s changing relation to history and truth, thereby underpinning recent theoretical work on the practices of poetic invention.","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41802519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the 1980s, anxiety about the extensive and ongoing conglomeration of the publishing industry led to the emergence of a movement of nonprofit publishers. It included counterculture figures like Coffee House’s Allan Kornblum and Milkweed’s Emilie Buchwald, who got their start with boutique letterpresses; political and aesthetic activists like Arte Público’s Nicolás Kanellos, Feminist Press’s Florence Howe, and Dalkey Archive’s John O’Brien; and refugees from conglomeration like Fiona McCrae and André Schiffrin. Nonprofits often defined themselves by their support for literariness, and which they depicted as under threat from commercial houses, which helped them gain support from private foundations, philanthropists, and government agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts. We discovered that these two different ways of structuring publishers’ finances—conglomerate and nonprofit—created a split within literature, yielding two distinct modes of American writing after 1980. This essay characterizes the two modes, explains how the split between them happened, and illustrates the significance of this shift for the rise of multiculturalism. We pay particularly close attention to the careers of Percival Everett and Karen Tei Yamashita. 93 James Kyung-Jin Lee writes that Yamashita critiques “an abstract notion of cultural difference that always demands the sameness produced by the silencing of stories of violence and exclusion. As such, an embrace of multiculturalism would be Asian America’s ultimate undoing, as our allegiance to ignore the suffering of others inevitably prevents us from confronting the suffering within”
在20世纪80年代，对出版业广泛和持续的集团化的担忧导致了非营利出版商运动的出现。其中包括反主流文化人物，如Coffee House的艾伦·科恩布卢姆(Allan Kornblum)和Milkweed的艾米丽·布赫瓦尔德(Emilie Buchwald)，他们从精品凸版印刷机起家;政治和美学活动家，如Arte Público的Nicolás Kanellos，女权主义出版社的Florence Howe和Dalkey Archive的John O 'Brien;还有像菲奥娜·麦克雷和安德烈·施夫林这样的群体难民。非营利组织通常将自己定义为对文学的支持，并将其描述为受到商业住宅的威胁，这帮助他们获得了私人基金会、慈善家和国家艺术基金会(National Endowment for the Arts)等政府机构的支持。我们发现，这两种不同的出版商财务结构方式——企业集团和非营利组织——在文学领域造成了分裂，在1980年后产生了两种截然不同的美国写作模式。本文描述了这两种模式的特点，解释了它们之间的分裂是如何发生的，并说明了这种转变对多元文化主义兴起的意义。我们特别关注Percival Everett和Karen Tei Yamashita的职业生涯。James Kyung-Jin Lee写道，Yamashita批评了“一种文化差异的抽象概念，这种概念总是要求通过沉默暴力和排斥的故事来产生同一性。”因此，拥抱多元文化主义将是亚裔美国人最终的毁灭，因为我们对他人痛苦的忽视不可避免地阻止了我们面对自己内心的痛苦。”
{"title":"Against Conglomeration","authors":"Dan Sinykin, Edwin Roland","doi":"10.22148/001c.22331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.22331","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1980s, anxiety about the extensive and ongoing conglomeration of the publishing industry led to the emergence of a movement of nonprofit publishers. It included counterculture figures like Coffee House’s Allan Kornblum and Milkweed’s Emilie Buchwald, who got their start with boutique letterpresses; political and aesthetic activists like Arte Público’s Nicolás Kanellos, Feminist Press’s Florence Howe, and Dalkey Archive’s John O’Brien; and refugees from conglomeration like Fiona McCrae and André Schiffrin. Nonprofits often defined themselves by their support for literariness, and which they depicted as under threat from commercial houses, which helped them gain support from private foundations, philanthropists, and government agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts. We discovered that these two different ways of structuring publishers’ finances—conglomerate and nonprofit—created a split within literature, yielding two distinct modes of American writing after 1980. This essay characterizes the two modes, explains how the split between them happened, and illustrates the significance of this shift for the rise of multiculturalism. We pay particularly close attention to the careers of Percival Everett and Karen Tei Yamashita. 93 James Kyung-Jin Lee writes that Yamashita critiques “an abstract notion of cultural difference that always demands the sameness produced by the silencing of stories of violence and exclusion. As such, an embrace of multiculturalism would be Asian America’s ultimate undoing, as our allegiance to ignore the suffering of others inevitably prevents us from confronting the suffering within”","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68047462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Our project, which aims to reconstruct racial discourse in American literature, tracks three critical aspects of the representation of race and ethnicity in a corpus of over 18,000 American novels published between 1789 and 1920. First, we provide a historically sensitive account of the ethnicities that most occupied the nation’s racial imaginary, registering how different ethnic groups were perceived to be biologically, geographically, or socially linked. Second, we track the descriptive terms most associated with particular ethnicities over time as we trace the changing discursive fields surrounding particular racial groups. Finally, we explore the coherence of the discourse around each race and ethnicity represented across American literature before 1920, paying close attention to the ways in which various groups did or did not exist as semantically unified groups at specific historical moments. Taken together, our three questions show not just who was under discussion and how, but also the history—and historicity—of racialization and ethnic thinking writ large. Our goal in this paper is to identify and surface the racialized language of American Fiction and to face the harms that it caused without eliding its historical violence and force. At the same time, while we feel that confronting such racism is important work, we do not want to perpetuate the harm that this language, including many slurs, continues to cause to oppressed peoples, particularly in the Black and Native American communities. To that end, throughout this paper, we have adopted the practice of Brigitte Fielder, among others, in representing particularly harmful terms using the following convention: n[-----].
{"title":"Representing Race and Ethnicity in American Fiction, 1789-1920","authors":"M. Algee-Hewitt, J. Porter, Hannah Walser","doi":"10.22148/001c.18509","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.18509","url":null,"abstract":"Our project, which aims to reconstruct racial discourse in American literature, tracks three critical aspects of the representation of race and ethnicity in a corpus of over 18,000 American novels published between 1789 and 1920. First, we provide a historically sensitive account of the ethnicities that most occupied the nation’s racial imaginary, registering how different ethnic groups were perceived to be biologically, geographically, or socially linked. Second, we track the descriptive terms most associated with particular ethnicities over time as we trace the changing discursive fields surrounding particular racial groups. Finally, we explore the coherence of the discourse around each race and ethnicity represented across American literature before 1920, paying close attention to the ways in which various groups did or did not exist as semantically unified groups at specific historical moments. Taken together, our three questions show not just who was under discussion and how, but also the history—and historicity—of racialization and ethnic thinking writ large. Our goal in this paper is to identify and surface the racialized language of American Fiction and to face the harms that it caused without eliding its historical violence and force. At the same time, while we feel that confronting such racism is important work, we do not want to perpetuate the harm that this language, including many slurs, continues to cause to oppressed peoples, particularly in the Black and Native American communities. To that end, throughout this paper, we have adopted the practice of Brigitte Fielder, among others, in representing particularly harmful terms using the following convention: n[-----].","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68047387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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