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Philosophy, Literature, and the Avoidance of Reading New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Nancy Yousef
Abstract: “Philosophy of literature” is a thriving subfield of Anglo-American philosophy but virtually unknown within literary studies. This essay aims to address a significant methodological inadequacy that is characteristic of much work in “philosophy of literature”: the remarkable absence of sustained and close textual interpretation as a technique for argument and substantiation. Underlying this
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Drone Form and Techno-Futurities New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Debjani Ganguly
Abstract: What does it mean for humanity to inhabit a techno-planetary system in which it is not central? This essay will address a facet of this question by exploring the aesthetics of drone warfare. The drone features in my reading as a metonym for a techno-human continuum in which the human as an autonomous subject with interiority and capacity for ethical action appears as eminently dispensable
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Othello and the Formalism of Compulsion New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Gerard Passannante
Abstract: I use the term “formalism” to name the tendency of compulsion to reduce experience, through repetition, to a simple shape, rhythm, and intensity. This essay shows how compulsion’s reduction of the self to just a few characteristics enables—even solicits—analogy across different contexts. Focusing on Othello, I consider several aspects of Shakespeare’s staging of compulsion: the two-way traffic
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Contributors New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-03-12
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors Eric Bulson is Andrew W. Mellon All-Claremont Chair in the Humanities in the Department of English at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author, most recently, of ‘Ulysses’ by Numbers (2020). Debjani Ganguly is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity
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Measuring Mimesis New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Eric Bulson
Abstract: This essay provides a computational close reading of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. In particular, it examines how measurements of its basic building blocks—the chapters, quotations, and pages—can inform our understanding of how Auerbach came to terms with the representation, and distribution, of three thousand years of literary history in a single literary-critical work. By taking the measurements
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White Things: Form, Formalization, and the Use of Prosody New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Ben Glaser
Abstract: The limited prosodic literacy of revamped formalisms perpetuates the whiteness of lyric reading. By prizing ironic distance and elevating the critic as form’s discoverer, the concept of poetic form reinscribes racialized value judgments even where critics hope to valorize nonwhite poetic strategies. Formalism should instead attend to the history that gave poets their sense of form. Nonwhite
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Naming Argentina: The Subject of Torture and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Rachel Greenspan
Abstract: The concurrent diffusion of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Argentina and the state’s deployment of torture and disappearance during the most recent military dictatorship have led many critics to interpret the turn to Lacan as a cerebral substitute for political protest after the coup d’état. This essay examines how the ruling junta’s specific forms of violence provoked a crisis in the relationship
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Jacques Rancière, J. M. Coetzee, and Doing Things Oneself New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Christina Lupton
Abstract: Jacques Rancière and J. M. Coetzee, exact contemporaries, are both interested the worker’s access to aesthetic experience. In Rancière’s case, this involves looking backward to the fact that nineteenth-century workers were able to squeeze time from their working lives for art and literature. In Coetzee’s case, however, this problem of distributing aesthetic sensibility turns out to be a matter
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Pastoral Authority New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Nathan TeBokkel
Abstract: We are “label eaters”; we eat “storied food.” In agricultural and literary history, the food label is a central medium, the pastoral a central genre. Revisiting the pastoral through William Empson’s influential theory and through science and technology studies, this essay argues that the pastoral covertly legitimates authority by overtly mediating nature. It was refined during the consummation
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Introduction New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Herbert Tucker, Bruce Holsinger
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Introduction Herbert Tucker and Bruce Holsinger Polymathy—the achievement of distinction in multiple arenas of intellectual endeavor—commands attention wherever it appears. Yet we don't quite know what to make of it. Wonder, honor, envy, suspicion, and dismissal may all confusedly arise in ordinary souls when they confront a versatile
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Saying Everything New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Kevin Hart
Abstract: Can one "know everything"? In the past, there were people who came close to doing so, but it seems impossible to have contemporaries who know everything. Certainly, some texts aspire to "say everything"; and the French expression tout dire has a venerable history. Yet saying everything is not the same as polymathy. Can texts, however, be polymaths? A case for an affirmative answer to the
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Early Medieval Arabic Polymathy: A Preliminary Sketch New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Ahmed H. al-Rahim
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Early Medieval Arabic PolymathyA Preliminary Sketch Ahmed H. al-Rahim (bio) By perfect polymath (perfectam polymathian) I mean knowledge of various subjects, collected from all kinds of studies, overflowing with fullness, and wandering freely through all the fields of the disciplines as far as the human mind is able to pursue with tireless
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Expansive Energy: An Alternative Portrait of Denis Diderot New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Abstract: Historians of the Enlightenment are stymied by Denis Diderot's cloven polymathy. An insoluble dilemma arises between, on one hand, the amazing range of interests attested in his roles as both editor and contributor for the Encyclopédie and, on the other hand, his incorrigible dilettantism, in the centrifugal and often inconclusive pursuit of whatever topic came his way. We will do better
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The Peculiar Illumination of the Polymathic Mind: Mary Somerville, William Whewell, and the Disciplinary Formation of the Sciences New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Kathryn A. Neeley
Abstract: Mary Somerville (1780-1872) and William Whewell (1794-1866) both contributed to the disciplinary formation of the sciences in Great Britain in the nineteenth century: she as a synthesizer who connected the various branches of knowledge in the emerging physical sciences, and he as the first person who used the history of all branches of science to define what distinguished scientific knowledge
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"A Living Growth": Rabindranath Tagore and Polymathy New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Fakrul Alam
Abstract: This paper looks at Rabindranath Tagore, the great Indian writer, as a polymath, a man crossing literary, artistic, intellectual, linguistic and civilizational borders of all kinds, and as someone whose imagination was always in flight. It sees him as someone who, time and again, kept trying his hand at all sorts of things, despite the difficulties he faced and the challenges ahead of him
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Being Whole New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Stephen Nachmanovitch
Abstract: I begin by thinking of my friend and mentor Gregory Bateson, but the questions here are broad and relate to the experience of many people, and many kinds of people. Gregory was known as a great polymath. But that is not quite right. In truth, he was a holomath, if we can coin that word. A polymath is a person who turns to, and sometimes excels in, multiple fields of endeavor. A holomath is
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Sons and Mothers: or, The Polymath and the Philologist New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Merve Emre
Abstract: "Unsociable individual, male, polymathic, 47, desires correspondence with an intelligent, thoughtful, feminine (not feminist) woman."—New York Review of Books, May 26, 1994
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Response New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Peter Burke
Abstract: The aim of this response is to comment not so much on individual contributions, from all of which I have learned much, or indeed on individual examples of polymaths but rather on the practice of polymathy: on what the examples chosen by the authors of these essays tell us about the structures underlying, enabling, or blocking this practice and the ways in which it has changed over the centuries
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Contributors New Literary History Pub Date : 2024-01-16
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors Fakrul Alam is Supernumerary Professor of the Department of English, University of Dhaka. His publications include South Asian Writers in English (2006) and The Essential Tagore, with Radha Chakravarty (2011). Other works include the translation of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Unfinished Memoirs (2012) and Gitabitan: Selected Song-Lyrics
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Memory Work and Dirty Work: Writing the Labor of Eldercare New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Susan Fraiman
Abstract: "Memory Work and Dirty Work: Writing the Labor of Eldercare" identifies the US eldercare memoir as a burgeoning subgenre of life writing. Typically written by daughters about nursing their parents at the end of life, these memoirs—searing accounts of care for declining bodies—make eldercare visible as a major category of unpaid feminized work. Most home care aides in the US are also women
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Slaughterhouse Intimacies New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Samantha Pergadia
Abstract: This essay traces slaughterhouse intimacies, sites of material entanglement between and among species, gender, race, sexuality, and reproduction. The phrase may seem paradoxical: the slaughterhouse is a line of death and dismemberment; intimacy connotes vital connection, private interiority. Yet the history of industrial animal farming, I argue, traffics between the intimateexchanges of gender
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Creative Writing and Critical Thought II Interpreters in Court New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Emily Apter, Katie Kitamura
Abstract: The following exchange is the edited transcript of an event that took place online on February 24, 2022. The conversation is the second in a series jointly sponsored by New Literary History and the Center for Fiction that brings together novelists and poets with literary theorists and historians to create a series of in-depth conversations about the state of literary practice and study in
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How to Survive Totalitarianism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Zoë Roth
Abstract: In the wake of the Trump election, Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism garnered renewed attention. In it, she argues that totalitarian ideology "is severed from the world individuals perceive through the five senses "and insists on a 'truer' reality concealed behind all perceptible things." By changing what appears true, totalitarian regimes can produce new, upside-down realities built
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Appreciation After Critique New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Wolfram Schmidgen
Abstract: Long belittled as a sentiment that makes no measurable contribution to knowledge, appreciation is being reclaimed today. Postcritical writers, in particular, have turned appreciation into a model affect for how literary scholars relate to their objects of study. They have been empowered to do so by the flat ontologies associated with such thinkers as Graham Harman, Jane Bennett, and especially
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Coupling Men in Couplet Space: Pope to Gunn New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Dustin D. Stewart
Abstract: Donald davie, a serious man, had serious doubts, but his friend Thom Gunn kept assuring him that contemporary poetry could be at once really gay and really traditional. Gunn thought so partly because several major poets who helped forge the tradition as he and Davie knew it, poets such as Christopher Marlowe and Walt Whitman, were themselves gay.1 He also thought so, as his recently published
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Genre at Earth Magnitude: A Theory of Climate Fiction New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Derek Woods
Abstract: What critics and publishers now call climate fiction is a growing genre that captures significant critical attention. This essay theorizes the relation between two of the genre's features, one formal and one political, in the scale frame they address: the planetary scale of climate, or what many scientists call the Earth system. The archive that articulates these features consists of a popular
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The Homelessness of the Novel: Friedrich Blanckenburg and Novel Poetics New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Fredrik Renard
Abstract: Of all the major literary genres, the novel is the only one that has no poetics of its own and thus no given place in the canon of genres established in Antiquity. Formally speaking, the novel emerged as a homeless genre—a fact with which it has had to cope ever since the rise in popularity of romance during the Italian renaissance. How this homelessness is dealt with is however not an historical
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Introduction, Literary Cybernetics: History, Theory, Post-Disciplinarity New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Heather A. Love, Lea Pao
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Introduction, Literary Cybernetics:History, Theory, Post-Disciplinarity Heather A. Love (bio) and Lea Pao (bio) In 1948, mit mathematician Norbert Wiener coined the term "cybernetics"—adapted from the Greek word for "steersman" or "governor"—to describe an emerging technology-based discipline focused on the science of "control and communication
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On Poems (System and Environment) New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Jack W. Chen
Abstract: In this essay, I propose a different approach to how we might conceptualize poetry, one that understands the poem not simply in terms of human-centered agency (that is, the complex of author-persona-reader) but as an emergent informatic-system. I focus on how the material and immaterial media of language, prosodic rules, and generic constraints all possess their own kinds of agency, comprising
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The Art of Distinction New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Paul Jaussen
Abstract: In this brief essay, I consider the following question: can systems thinking offer us a general theory of literary form? By "general theory," I mean the highest level of abstraction, akin to Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm; I'll largely (though not entirely) pass over the "middle-level" concepts that Marjorie Levinson and Jonathan Culler call "poetics" and, lower still, the ordinary science
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The Marriage Plot, Again: A Feedback Loop New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Megan Ward
Abstract: The bigamy plot—the courtship's evil twin—involves characters marrying, then marrying again, a phenomenon rife across Victorian novels. This repetition creates redundancy, both in terms of spouses and, from an informatic perspective, reinforcing the marriage plot's importance. In contrast to a regulated feedback loop that generates stasis, the bigamy plot accumulates more of the same, emphasizing
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New Noise? New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Marc Kohlbry
Abstract: October 26, 1966: At his inaugural lecture as professorial chair at the University of Strasbourg, the French cybernetician Abraham A. Moles was met not with applause but with tomatoes.1 Those responsible for the projectiles were members of the Situationist International (SI), the revolutionary avant-garde organization led by Guy Debord whose influence would color the uprisings of Mai 68.
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"2 < n < infinity": A Multilayered "Phyllo Dough of the Analog and the Digital" in Alison Knowles and James Tenney's The House of Dust New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Ada Smailbegović
Abstract: One of the stanzas in Alison Knowles and James Tenney's computer-generated poem "The House of Dust" suggests a sense of a shiny, metallic, unevenly reflective enclosure, filled with light characteristic of the desert environment, and yet one that somehow shelters both aquatic and avian species: "A HOUSE OF TIN / IN A DESERT / USING NATURAL LIGHT / INHABITED BY VARIOUS BIRDS AND FISH." One
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The Double Repatriations of Cybernetics and Media Theory: Vilém Flusser and Heinz von Foerster New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Aaron Jaffe
Abstract: Connecting the dots between Vilém Flusser and Heinz von Foerster, this essay explores the links and somewhat belated co-emergence of media theory and cybernetics as a vanishing mediator in modern literary history and the posthuman turn: first, media theory's cybernetic investments and re-deployments of certain concepts and, second, a much humbler claim for cybernetics, namely, its status
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"Hermenautics": Toward a Disinformation Theory New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Avery Slater
Abstract: This essay tracks cybernetic approaches to the task of hermeneutics. From the first paradigm of cybernetics through its development within contemporary lines of research, the question of information processing evokes problems of interpretation shared by humans and machines. The article discusses Friedrich Kittler's notion of "hermenautics" in the context of disinformation and contemporary
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"Stop Asking for Life to Be a Poem": On Cybernetic Instrumentality New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Michael F. Miller
Abstract: The "sentimental" narrator of Hari Kunzru's Red Pill is starting to feel like a self-described "waster."1 Away on fellowship in Berlin at the interdisciplinary Deuter Center for Social and Cultural Research, our writer-in-residence narrator ingests the eponymous capsule and "wakes up" to the obsolescence of literary humanism, a historical "period that was drawing to a close" (RP 46).2 Instead
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Ways of Cybernetic Thinking New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Lea Pao
Abstract: Cataloging cybernetic thinking shows how the space between what one might think of as "pure" cybernetic application and the study of cybernetics offers a useful path toward understanding how literary studies can engage with cybernetics as a philosophical and intellectual model. This vertical approach folds metadiscourses into more direct engagements with cybernetic ideas and problems and
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Staying Alive: Cybernetic Persistence New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Bruce Clarke
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Staying Alive:Cybernetic Persistence Bruce Clarke (bio) In some recent writings I ventured to describe what I've called neocybernetic systems theory.1 One way I've approached this description is by drawing a contrast with Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, or ANT.2 A sympathetic colleague remarked that if Latour could own ANT, I should
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Literary Cybernetics: The Point (of the Spear) New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-09-20 N. Katherine Hayles
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Literary Cybernetics:The Point (of the Spear) N. Katherine Hayles (bio) Cybernetics and literary studies are on a collision course that will transform what it means to read, to write, and to be human. The essays on "literary cybernetics" in this issue touch on many different ways in which this phrase can be interpreted, but for all their
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Culture, Theory, Data: An Introduction New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Ted Underwood, Laura McGrath, Richard Jean So, Chad Wellmon
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Culture, Theory, Data:An Introduction Ted Underwood (bio), Laura McGrath (bio), Richard Jean So (bio), and Chad Wellmon (bio) Culture. Theory. Data. In that group of three terms, the obvious interloper is data—a word not widely used in the humanities until this century. Not that humanists ever lacked data. Our sources and archives are
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Doing (Computational) Literary Studies New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Katherine Bode
Abstract: Notwithstanding many differences within and between them, computational literary studies (CLS) and other literary fields do the same thing: they enact the phenomena they investigate by writing with writing. To make this argument, I present performativity as the endemic (though undertheorized) condition of literary knowledge, including in CLS, where it is latent: practiced by disavowed. When
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But Why Always the Novel? Midrange Reading Samples of Persons and Texts New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Alison Booth
Abstract: Literary studies, whether digital or analog, have overemphasized the novel, itself an example of the problem of misrepresenting a more complex system through favored individuals or reductive samples. Digitized access to more of the published English-language texts over centuries enables research on overlooked forms beyond boundaries of genre, nation, and period, and yet "distant reading"
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"Que Recogan Este Memoria": Black Puerto Rican Data New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Sarah Bruno, Jessica Marie 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
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Why Distant Reading Works New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Michael 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
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Inside the Mind of an AI: Materiality and the Crisis of Representation New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 N. Katherine Hayles
Abstract: The advent of Transformer architectures for neural nets and the high language proficiency of programs like GPT-3 confront us with a fundamental question. How can, or should, literary criticism proceed when the text's creator is not a human but a machine? The query shakes to its core literary criticism, and indeed the entire enterprise of critical inquiry. This essay confronts the issue head-on
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#BLM Insurgent Discourse, White Structures of Feeling and the Fate of the 2020 "Racial Awakening" New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Long Le-Khac, Maria Antoniak, Richard Jean 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
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Literary Studies and Collective Life New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Caroline 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
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Learning to Live with Machine Translation New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 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
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Medium Specific Sexuality New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Joan Lubin
Abstract: New names for sexual selves drop daily online. How do we make sense of this apparently novel proliferation of terms? Most of our models for thinking about sexual self-nomination derive from the history of homosexuality and its imbrication with print cultural networks of circulation and conversation. But unlike earlier terms—butch or femme, fairy or molly, sissy or stud, uranist or invert
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"Books About Race": Commercial Publishing and Racial Formation in the 21st Century New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 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
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Content's Forms New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Tess McNulty
Abstract: The internet is awash with new popular forms, from TED Talks and podcasts to makeup tutorials and tweets. And yet scholars have only just begun to explore these forms cultural effects. This essay develops an approach to new forms of popular digital "content," grounded in the humanistic theory tradition. The approach draws together formalist methods of analyzing genre from computational literary
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Situated Knowledges and Partial Perspectives: A Framework for Radical Objectivity in Computational Social Science and Computational Humanities New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 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
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Toward a Data-Driven Theory of Narrativity New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Andrew Piper, Sunyam Bagga
Abstract: In this essay, we provide a framework for the empirical testing of narrative theory using the process of machine learning and predictive modeling. Drawing on a collection of over thirteen-thousand passages from an array of different genres, our models suggest that a very small number of features are highly predictive of narrative communication and that these features strongly align with reader
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Distributed Agency in the Novel New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Dennis Yi 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
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A Queer Way of Counting: Bibliography and Computational Approaches to the Queer Novel New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Matt 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
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Our Paratextual Presents, Our Computational Literary Futures New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Roopika Risam
Abstract: How will we contend with born-digital texts, in archives and beyond, as artifacts of literary history in the future? Looking from the present forward, this essay considers the significance and challenges of born-digital texts for computational literary studies. Briefly exploring the new media paratexts that postcolonial writers are now creating, Risam asks what it would take to ensure that
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Bringing Computation into Cultural Theory: Four Good Reasons (and One Bad One) New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Clayton Childress
Abstract: We used to talk. By "we" I mean cultural sociologists and scholars in the humanities, and by "used to talk" I mean acknowledge each other's existence, at times perhaps even generously so. There are different versions as to what happened, one of which is a bit more intellectual than the other, although neither of which are entirely right. The more intellectual version is that for a brief spell
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Contributors New Literary History Pub Date : 2023-06-01
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors Maria Antoniak is a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence on the Semantic Scholar team. Her research is in natural language processing and cultural analytics. She earned her PhD in Information Science from Cornell University and has a master's degree in Computational Linguistics from the University
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Neck Verse New Literary History Pub Date : 2022-12-06 Emily Steiner
Abstract: Mitigations in medieval criminal law, designed to prevent or defer execution, have been regarded in a variety of ways: as acts of mercy, as discretionary measures, and as travesties of justice. For post-medieval English and American writers they also represent the past of the law; since at least the eighteenth century they have formed the backbone of legal histories describing the passage
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The Homological Imagination: Toward a Critical History of Political Formalism New Literary History Pub Date : 2022-12-06 Aleksandar Stević
Abstract: For more than a century now, the desire for a political interpretation of literary form has persistently resurfaced in many seemingly unrelated corners of literary theory and critical practice: in the early work of Georg Lukács and in the literary sociology of Lucien Goldmann and Franco Moretti, in poststructuralist readings of modernist fiction, in Foucauldian interpretations of the realist