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The Slaughterhouse of Literature
Abstract
MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (2000) 207-227
Let me begin with a few titles: Arabian Tales, Aylmers, Annaline, Alicia de Lacey, Albigenses, Augustus and Adelina, Albert, Adventures of a Guinea, Abbess of Valiera, Ariel, Almacks, Adventures of Seven Shillings, Abbess, Arlington, Adelaide, Aretas, Abdallah the Moor, Anne Grey, Andrew the Savoyard, Agatha, Agnes de Monsfoldt, Anastasius, Anzoletto Ladoski, Arabian Nights, Adventures of a French Sarjeant, Adventures of Bamfylde Moore Carew, A Commissioner, Avondale Priory, Abduction, Accusing Spirit, Arward the Red Chieftain, Agnes de Courcy, An Old Friend, Annals of the Parish, Alice Grey, Astrologer, An Old Family Legend, Anna, Banditt's Bride, Bridal of Donnamore, Borderers, Beggar Girl . . .
It was the first page of an 1845 catalog: Columbell's circulating library, in Derby: a small collection, of the kind that wanted only successful books. But today, only a couple of titles still ring familiar. The others, nothing. Gone. The history of the world is the slaughterhouse of the world, reads a famous Hegelian aphorism; and of literature. The majority of books disappear forever -- and "majority" actually misses the point: if we set today's canon of nineteenth-century British novels at two hundred titles (which is a very high figure), they would still be only about 0.5 percent of all published novels.
And the other 99.5 percent? This is the question behind this article, and behind the larger idea of literary history that is now taking shape in the work of several critics -- most recently Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau, Katie Trumpener, and Margaret Cohen. The difference is that, for me, the aim is not so much a change in the canon -- the discovery of precursors to the canon or alternatives to it, to be restored to a prominent position -- as a change in how we look at all of literary history: canonical and noncanonical: together. To do so, I focus on what I call rivals: contemporaries who write more or less like canonical authors (in my case, more or less like Arthur Conan Doyle), but not quite, and who interest me because, from what I have seen of that forgotten 99 percent, they seem to be the largest contingent of the "great unread," as Cohen calls it. And that's really my hope, as I have said: to come up with a new sense of the literary field as a whole.
But of course, there is a problem here. Knowing two hundred novels is already difficult. Twenty thousand? How can we do it, what does "knowledge" mean, in this new scenario? One thing for sure: it cannot mean the very close reading of very few texts -- secularized theology, really ("canon"!)--that has radiated from the cheerful town of New Haven over the whole field of literary studies. A larger literary history requires other skills: sampling; statistics; work with series, titles, concordances , incipits -- and perhaps also the "trees" that I discuss in this essay. But first, a brief premise.
The slaughter of literature. And the butchers -- readers: who read novel A (but not B, C, D, E, F, G, H, . . .) and so keep A "alive" into the next generation, when other readers may keep it alive into the following one, and so on until eventually A becomes canonized. Readers, not professors, make canons: academic decisions are mere echoes of a process that unfolds fundamentally outside the school: reluctant rubber-stamping, not much more. Conan Doyle is a perfect case in point: socially supercanonical right away, but academically canonical only a hundred years later. And the same happened to Cervantes, Defoe, Austen, Balzac, Tolstoy. . . .
A space outside the school, where the canon is selected: the market. Readers read A and so keep it alive; better, they buy A, inducing its publishers to keep it in print until another generation shows up, and so on. A concrete example can be found in James Raven's excellent study of British publishing between 1750 and 1770: if one looks at the table of "the most popular novelists by editions printed 1750-1769," it's quite clear that the interplay of readers and publishers in the marketplace had completely shaped the canon of the eighteenth...
... During postcommunism, the same critic argues that Romanian popular literature virtually disappears, replaced, at least during the 1990s, by translations of western commercial literature. Consulting Dicționarul cronologic al romanului tradus în România 1990-2000[Chronological Dictionary of the Translated Novel in Romania 1990-2000 (DCRT) 10 , we can observe, for instance, that a single American author of romance novels, Sandra Brown, was translated significantly more during this time than entire national literatures, not least because of the inexpensive translation rights when compared to other genres or authors. Even if "the prestige of serious literature declined drastically in the first post-communist decade" 11 , this did not trigger a response on the national book market, weakened by economic liberalization, going through a laborious process of democratizing its institutions and attempting to cater to a precarious population, for which cultural consumption was not a priority. ...
... During postcommunism, the same critic argues that Romanian popular literature virtually disappears, replaced, at least during the 1990s, by translations of western commercial literature. Consulting Dicționarul cronologic al romanului tradus în România 1990-2000[Chronological Dictionary of the Translated Novel in Romania 1990-2000 (DCRT) 10 , we can observe, for instance, that a single American author of romance novels, Sandra Brown, was translated significantly more during this time than entire national literatures, not least because of the inexpensive translation rights when compared to other genres or authors. Even if "the prestige of serious literature declined drastically in the first post-communist decade" 11 , this did not trigger a response on the national book market, weakened by economic liberalization, going through a laborious process of democratizing its institutions and attempting to cater to a precarious population, for which cultural consumption was not a priority. ...
... useful for thinking about canon formations; as he points out, marching music was once an incredibly varied field, and now it's all reduced to one guy: John Philip Sousa. Time, Klosterman argues, will inevitably narrow rock and roll to one or two artists who get studied in school: The Modern Lovers what, Adam Ant who? Franco Moretti's "The Slaughterhouse of Literature" (Moretti 2000) makes a similar argument about the minute percentage of Victorian literature even 19th century experts read; the Victorians were just too damn prolific. Those of us in fanfiction studies experience a similar Slaughterhouse of Fic every day; you just can't read even the tiniest percentage of it. ...
Fanfiction as a cultural practice has rapidly evolved in recent years, from a community-based form of social interaction to a globally recognised form of narrative world-building [...]
... La metodo-logía GTA, en particular, facilita la adquisición de nuevos conocimientos mediante la extracción de datos históricos y culturales asociados a su contexto geo-espacial. A través del modelo de reconocimiento y desambiguación de entidades nombradas, las herramientas de software desarrolladas, y los métodos de análisis espacial que hemos comenzado a implementar recientemente, el enfoque acelerará el procesamiento de colecciones masivas de documentos, lo cual, a su vez, ofrece la posibilidad de practicar lo que en estudios literarios se denomina lectura distante (Moretti 2000a(Moretti , 2000b. La premisa de ese tipo de análisis es que, en presencia de un corpus masivo de textos, la lectura minuciosa de cada fragmento se vuelve casi imposible. ...
La Red Temática Conacyt de Tecnologías Digitales para la Difusión del Patrimonio Cultural (RedTDPC) se complace en presentar esta nueva colección de trabajos, producto de las investigaciones llevadas a cabo por 39 de sus miembros en los últimos tres años.
La RedTDPC fue creada en 2015 por un grupo de investigadores interesados en reducir las barreras que impiden el acceso de la población mexicana a las manifestaciones de cultura material y al patrimonio cultural vivo. Dado que este problema puede resolverse aprovechando las nuevas tecnologías de la información y la comunicación, la RedTDPC adoptó la misión de investigar las condiciones técnicas, intelectuales, legales y económicas para que las tecnologías digitales puedan ayudar a profesionistas de museos, archivos y bibliotecas a mejorar el análisis, la difusión y la divulgación del patrimonio cultural.
La RedTDPC ha fomentado la cooperación inter y transdisciplinaria de investigadores, estudiantes, agentes del sector público, la iniciativa privada, organizaciones no gubernamentales y asociaciones civiles. La interacción de dichos actores ha permitido influir en el diseño de mejores políticas públicas y en la adopción de buenas prácticas para el análisis y divulgación del patrimonio cultural por parte de arqueólogos, historiadores, museólogos, matemáticos, expertos en computación e ingenieros, así como de estudiantes y gestores culturales.
... La metodo-logía GTA, en particular, facilita la adquisición de nuevos conocimientos mediante la extracción de datos históricos y culturales asociados a su contexto geo-espacial. A través del modelo de reconocimiento y desambiguación de entidades nombradas, las herramientas de software desarrolladas, y los métodos de análisis espacial que hemos comenzado a implementar recientemente, el enfoque acelerará el procesamiento de colecciones masivas de documentos, lo cual, a su vez, ofrece la posibilidad de practicar lo que en estudios literarios se denomina lectura distante (Moretti 2000a(Moretti , 2000b. La premisa de ese tipo de análisis es que, en presencia de un corpus masivo de textos, la lectura minuciosa de cada fragmento se vuelve casi imposible. ...
Este libro reúne la experiencia de 39 investigadores dedicados a desarrollar métodos, técnicas y herramientas digitales para facilitar el análisis, preservación y divulgación del patrimonio cultural. El contenido se organiza en 17 capítulos de temas muy diversos, entre los cuales se cuentan: el uso de visión por computadora para analizar la morfología tridimensional de objetos arqueológicos, la combinación de lingüística computacional con análisis espacial para identificar patrones de información en documentos históricos, la aplicación de Quimiometríapara determinar la procedencia de objetos de obsidiana, y el análisis de imágenes por transformación de re"ectancia para detectar huellas en objetos de piedra. A esos trabajos se suma el uso de la realidad virtual y aumentada en la reconstrucción de zonas arqueológicas y una discusión de los criterios de usabilidad que deben considerarse al diseñar aplicaciones digitales.
... La metodo-logía GTA, en particular, facilita la adquisición de nuevos conocimientos mediante la extracción de datos históricos y culturales asociados a su contexto geo-espacial. A través del modelo de reconocimiento y desambiguación de entidades nombradas, las herramientas de software desarrolladas, y los métodos de análisis espacial que hemos comenzado a implementar recientemente, el enfoque acelerará el procesamiento de colecciones masivas de documentos, lo cual, a su vez, ofrece la posibilidad de practicar lo que en estudios literarios se denomina lectura distante (Moretti 2000a(Moretti , 2000b. La premisa de ese tipo de análisis es que, en presencia de un corpus masivo de textos, la lectura minuciosa de cada fragmento se vuelve casi imposible. ...
This chapter describes a project focused on analysing a collection of historical documents known as Relaciones Geográficas de la Nueva España (1577-1585). The research protocol applies techniques from Natural Language Processing, Corpus Linguistics, Machine Learning and Spatial Analysis, combined within a methodology called Geographical Text Analysis. The first results include the compilation of a gazetteer of sixteenth century place names; the development of a deep-learning model for Named Entity
Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD) based on neural networks and word-embedding algorithms, which has been specifically tailored to analyse corpora written in pre-modern Spanish; and the implementation of software for the automatic extraction of historical data. The following pages contain an overview of the documentary corpus, as well as a summary of the methodology, the challenges faced in the course of the project and the first results.
... by S.B). 1 Historians could have easily forgotten Louandre for this text (which, of course, happened), and literary theorists could have fairly neglected him, if it were not for his distinction between the "royalty of poetry, the masters we love to read time and again, who are constantly republished and sold" and the "obscure satellites [...] which form a genuine Milky Way on our firmament" (972, trans. by S.B.). 2 Louandre theorizes here about "the great unread", a century and a half before the concept gained momentum within world literature studies and long before distant reading and macroanalysis rethought the quantitative analysis of literature (Cohen 1999;Moretti 2000aMoretti , 2000bMoretti , 2013Jockers 2013). This great unread is of interest in the present article, mainly through "constellations" of translations within a given space and time, defined by the chronological distance between the original publication of a novel and the release of its first translation in a given target culture. ...
This article makes use of quantitative methods to chart the particular morphologies of translated novels in Romania after World War II. The three charts presented show the chronological shift in the preferences for translating novels in a comprehensive account of all the Russian (and Soviet), French, and American novels translated in Romania, demonstrating that the translations can be analyzed through what Jordan A.Y. Smith convincingly argues to be a useful model in translation studies and world literature, namely translationscapes. Through use of an extensive database, the article illustrates which periods the novels translated in communist Romania originate from and describes three patterns of translation during communism according to David Damrosch’s approach to canon. This points towards a certain need for clarifying the circulation of the novel from a big data perspective, through what this study refers to as quantitative translationscapes.
... Yet, these texts, beyond "the small fraction... conserved by close readers... <are> the forgotten '99.5' percent of the world literary production beyond consecrated traditions." 29 Computational research of the majority of texts, based on sampling, statistical analysis, work with bibliographic records and datasets, incipits, 30 offers new perspectives for the study of literary history. ...
The aim of this paper is to emphasize how rich music material stored in Serbian libraries-the National Library of Serbia, the Matica Srpska Library, and library of the Faculty of Music-could be used to develop more widespread professional and research capacities in the field of music, using contemporary possibilities of new technologies. We hold an opinion that digital technologies could expand and enhance our knowledge on music in general, on the one hand, and lead to new discoveries, fresh and innovative enrichment of current views on music history, on the other hand. Our starting point is RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales), an organization with numerous datasets, which focuses on a musical sources all over the world. We shall point out the importance of knowing what exists and where it is kept, and then indicate similar initiatives and projects in Serbian libraries. At the end, we emphasize the importance of providing larger music datasets in Serbia.
... Paintings in these stories can sometimes function like clues. As Franco Moretti (2000) points out in his work on clues in late-Victorian detective fiction, clues operate as encrypted references to criminals: they are there to be decoded by the detective and (possibly) the reader. In "The Unfinished Picture: A Reverie" (Kenney 1845), for example, the narrator chances upon a painted portrait and then listens as it recounts a tale to him; the painting exists to retell a story about past events (albeit via the fantastical means of its subject speaking). ...
“Picture” stories, a whole genre of short fiction denoted by the central role of a picture, were common in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, from the 1840s to the 1860s. They featured in periodicals publishing fiction aimed towards middle- and lower-class readers, such as Ainsworth’s Magazine, Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal, Bentley’s Miscellany, and Sharpe’s London Magazine of Entertainment and Instruction for General Reading. Titles usually made the genre obvious: e.g. “The Story of a Picture” (1842), “The Fatal Picture” (Elder 1843), “The Adventures of a Picture” (Medwin 1843), “The Unfinished Picture: A Reverie” (Kenney 1845), “The Lost Picture” (1853), “The Unowned Picture” (1856), and “Memoirs of an Old Picture” (1859). Many of the “pictures” in these stories of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s are paintings, but not all. Picture stories about photographs often worked in radically different ways from those stories about paintings, with photographs posing a new set of problems for viewers. This essay is about how writers of picture stories explored those problems, and aims to uncover how and why paintings and photographs work differently within this genre of short fiction.
... By using the number of Goodreads ratings as a proxy for the contemporary success of late Victorian novels, this paper simplifies what research in the digital humanities has lately regarded as two distinct categories of success: popularity and prestige [45,2,35] (the former emerging from unsupervised reader preferences and the latter from those of an "elite" group of literary scholars and critics, which has the power to affect the degree of exposure of the general readership to a limited group of novels). The resulting dynamics are quite complicated and beyond the scope of this paper, whose population-based approach was conceptually guided by Moretti's claim that the "social" canon shapes the "academic" canon and not the other way around [29]. Future studies can also use resources like the MLA bibliography and the Open Syllabus project in order to disentangle the complex social dynamics of literary prestige, and whether they are in any way affected by the emotional valence of the novels. ...
Despite the recent upswing of computational research on Victorian novels, it has largely overlooked insight from cultural evolution and the cognitive sciences. This study aims to contribute to this incipient scholarship by testing the hypothesis that novels containing content with a lower mean emotional valence are more likely to trigger recommendation-based transmission chains, and as a result tend to have greater cultural longevity. This study performs a correlation analysis between the mean sentiment and the contemporary popularity (using the number of user ratings from Goodreads) of a selection of late Victorian novels published in the United Kingdom between 1891 and 1901, taken from Project Gutenberg (n=846). Moreover, the study looks into the implications of this correlation for the differences between novels that were bestsellers at the time of publication and those that can be considered canonical today (that have recently had Broadview, Oxford University, or Penguin Press editions). The results show a weak negative correlation between the present day popularity and the mean emotional valence of the novels, which nevertheless holds true for both the bestselling and canonical novels. Moreover, canonical novels tend to have a lower mean emotional valence than the bestsellers.
... Koestler 1964Koestler -1978; image copyright IGI Global (Velikovsky 2016, p. 212) Figure 3. The holon/parton structure of the unit of culture -or the meme (idea, process, product); image copyright IGI Global (Velikovsky 2016, p. 217) The three laws of holarchies apply to the units on each level; namely each of these whole units: (1) As an analysis of the laws governing these holon/ partons: individual novels compete with other individual novels for reader attention, thus for canonical status, and for both library and retail shelf-space in the field (Boyd, 2009; Van Peer, 1996, 1997Moretti 2000); as do transmedia stories, literary genres, and sub-genres; the specific words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters (and also any images) that have survived the creation and editing process are those retained in the published work; in the completed work they also co-operate (or, operate together) to attract the attention of; to convey information and meaning to; and, possibly to evoke emotional or intellectual engagement (the 'flow' state, or Narrative Transportation) in the reader, i.e. the audience, or field (Boyd, Carroll, & Gottschall, 2010;Velikovsky 2014a Bioculture is composed of extrasomatic symbol systems (e.g., written and spoken language, mathematics, musical notation, paintings, drawings, and so on). This holon/parton (and holarchy) structural tendency of symbolic biocultural artifacts as outlined above has been hinted at by prior theorists including Herbert Simon (1996): ...
A universal problem in the disciplines of communication, creativity, philosophy, biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, history, linguistics, information science, cultural studies, literature, media and other domains of knowledge in both the arts and sciences has been the definition of ‘culture' (see Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952; Baldwin et al., 2006), including the specification of ‘the unit of culture', and, mechanisms of culture. This chapter proposes a theory of the unit of culture, or, the ‘meme' (Dawkins, 1976; Dennett, 1995; Blackmore, 1999), a unit which is also the narreme (Barthes, 1966), or ‘unit of story', or ‘unit of narrative'. The holon/parton theory of the unit of culture (Velikovsky, 2014) is a consilient (Wilson, 1998) synthesis of (Koestler, 1964, 1967, 1978) and Feynman (1975, 2005) and also the Evolutionary Systems Theory model of creativity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988-2014; Simonton, 1984-2014). This theory of the unit of culture potentially has applications across all creative cultural domains and disciplines in the sciences, arts and communication media.
... This kind of institutionalised prestige has often been opposed to the popularity of bestselling fiction [14], appreciated by many because of its serial replication of known plot schemes or themes. More broadly, the issue concerns the contrast between a narrow selection of canonized works and the entirety of the archived literary production [15]. Fanfiction is an example of popular literature, produced in a context in which social exchange, collaborative work, and fidelity to the canon or to fandom tropes is the norm. ...
We analyse stories in Harry Potter fan fiction published on Archive of Our Own (AO3), using concepts from cultural evolution. In particular, we focus on cumulative cultural evolution, that is, the idea that cultural systems improve with time, drawing on previous innovations. In this study we examine two features of cumulative culture: accumulation and improvement. First, we show that stories in Harry Potter's fan fiction accumulate cultural traits-unique tags, in our analysis-through time, both globally and at the level of single stories. Second, more recent stories are also liked more by readers than earlier stories. Our research illustrates the potential of the combination of cultural evolution theory and digital literary studies, and it paves the way for the study of the effects of online digital media on cultural cumulation.
... 7 In other cases, distant readers take into account full-text documents and they browse through them or, as Moretti once put it, they 'serially' read them, limiting themselves to detect in the texts specific features such as recurring formal devices or traits (Moretti 2013a, p. 44). An example of this procedure is Moretti's investigation of the presence and roles of clues in late nineteenth-century detective stories (Moretti 2000). The present investigation certainly belongs to the latter kind of human distant reading, since we browsed through the fulltext articles of our corpus, with the exclusive aim of detecting in them the presence and roles of logic. ...
Using quantitative methods, we investigate the role of logic in analytic philosophy from 1941 to 2010. In particular, a corpus of five journals publishing analytic philosophy is assessed and evaluated against three main criteria: the presence of logic, its role and level of technical sophistication. The analysis reveals that (1) logic is not present at all in nearly three-quarters of the corpus, (2) the instrumental role of logic prevails over the non-instrumental ones, and (3) the level of technical sophistication increases in time, although it remains relatively low. These results are used to challenge the view, widespread among analytic philosophers and labeled here “prevailing view”, that logic is a widely used and highly sophisticated method to analyze philosophical problems.
An inclusive history of the novel during the long 19th century, one involving the demography of novels and novelists, has been widely discussed. A precondition for this kind of historical research is an exhaustive list of novels published during the period. The contribution of this paper are estimates of yearly rates of new novel production between 1837 and 1919 in the British Isles.
For almost 100 years, the Monthly Review documented literary history in Britain through its efforts to review every published text. Appearing monthly from 1749 to 1844, the periodical sheds light not only on texts published during this time, many of which are now “lost” to scholarly analysis, but also on the original critical discourse surrounding these texts. Analysis of the Monthly Review presents an opportunity to discern influential trends in publishing and literary criticism, yet close examination of the periodical proves formidable due to its size. In this paper, we use statistical topic modeling to “read” the over 140,000 pages of the Monthly Review, revealing prominent themes and discourses in the corpus. In particular, we highlight the periodical’s presentation of genre differences and its privileging of specific discourses and frameworks of critical evaluation, all of which served to shape contemporary readers’ perceptions of the rapidly expanding literary sphere.
The present paper aims for an analysis on how the poems written by Moni Stǎnilǎ are evolving in relation to the periphery complex. A close reading approach highlights the dynamic reconfigurations of the aesthetic horizons, ready to break down canons and to suggest others, in a continuous refurbishment of images and functions that convert their original marks in order to create a world linked to the subject reconstruction.
This volume responds to the current interest in computational and statistical methods to describe and analyse metre, style, and poeticity, particularly insofar as they can open up new research perspectives in literature, linguistics, and literary history. The contributions are representative of the diversity of approaches, methods, and goals of a thriving research community. Although most papers focus on written poetry, including computer-generated poetry, the volume also features analyses of spoken poetry, narrative prose, and drama. The contributions employ a variety of methods and techniques ranging from motif analysis, network analysis, machine learning, and Natural Language Processing. The volume pays particular attention to annotation, one of the most basic practices in computational stylistics. This contribution to the growing, dynamic field of digital literary studies will be useful to both students and scholars looking for an overview of current trends, relevant methods, and possible results, at a crucial moment in the development of novel approaches, when one needs to keep in mind the qualitative, hermeneutical benefit made possible by such quantitative efforts.
This chapter investigates the relationship between interpretative literary character types, such as the schemer, and descriptive character properties, such as gender, age, and social status. This relationship is crucial to studying dramatic characters quantitatively across a corpus of plays, as both properties and types can be used to guide a rational comparative or diachronic analysis. To this end, we first discuss the principles of character types in drama history and theater practice, connect them to gender, age, and social status, and finally discuss their possible operationalization using machine learning.
Jane Austen's fiction is itself philosophy, a fact to which Stanley Cavell attested when he honored his philosophical teacher, J. L. Austin, through homage to her and her work. Engaging equally in criticism and in philosophy, Jane Austen and Other Minds demonstrates the standing of Austen's fiction as a philosophical investigation, both in its own right and as a resource to ordinary language philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Eric Reid Lindstrom addresses a long-standing shortcoming of Austen scholarship by locating in her fiction a linguistic phenomenology available to the novelistic everyday but not afforded her in intellectual history. He simultaneously advances recognition and understanding of J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell, and of ordinary language philosophy, within Austen scholarship and the broader field of contemporary literary studies. This book argues compellingly for Cavell's choice of Austen as a means to pursue 'passionate exchange,' reimagining her common association with restriction and confinement.
This article looks at cultural studies as an alternative to literary studies. To cofound cultural studies, Stuart Hall had to abandon literary studies. Later development, however, enabled cultural studies itself to engulf literary studies. Today, with radical approaches such as Franco Moretti‘s distant reading, literary studies has itself started to approach cultural studies. But it is no longer the dominant kind of cultural studies; it is something much closer to Hall's initial project. Moretti's literary studies is not mimicking the cultural studies that is subsuming literary studies anyway; on the contrary, it is proposing a repoliticization similar to Hall's original intervention. Thus Moretti is effectively following up on Hall's own critique of the depoliticized cultural studies that came to dominate early cultural studies as well as literary studies. At stake, then, is not only literary studies vis-à-vis cultural studies but the politics of cultural studies itself.
The New Joyce Studies indicates the variety and energy of research on James Joyce since the year 2000. Essays examine Joyce's works and their reception in the light of a larger set of concerns: a diverse international terrain of scholarly modes and methodologies, an imperilled environment, and crises of racial justice, to name just a few. This is a Joyce studies that dissolves early visions of Joyce as a sui generis genius by reconstructing his indebtedness to specific literary communities. It models ways of integrating masses of compositional and publication details with literary and historical events. It develops hybrid critical approaches from posthuman, medical, and queer methodologies. It analyzes the nature and consequences of its extension from Ireland to mainland Europe, and to Africa and Latin America. Examining issues of copyright law, translation, and the history of literary institutions, this volume seeks to use Joyce's canonical centrality to inform modernist studies more broadly.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories are, in themselves, a physical product of their time, stuffed full of Victorian materialities that lead to the successful completion of several cases by Sherlock Holmes. Recent revisions of the Sherlockian mythology in neo-Victorian texts and transmedia adaptations emulate the concrete nature of his detective investigations to walk us through the data required to solve the crime in a manner that can only be solved by reading the material context(s) of things. Maier investigates how various iterations of Holmes uses his microscopic views of things—be they tobacco, blood drops, footprints, telegrams, canes, cuffs or dirt, all constituting a kind of critical cultural archive—to reconstitute the safety of society from the aberrant source of criminality that disturbs conventional order, and how neo-Victorian re-visionings of Conan Doyle’s world, including Anthony Horowitz’s House of Silk, Lyndsay Faye’s The Art of Detection, Granada TV’s Sherlock Holmes, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes and BBC Sherlock, represent things.
O tempo sócio-histórico mais recente empunhou, pela força da ação e protagonismo de alguns grupos, o debate sobre a diferença e sobre as desigualdades rotineiramente estruturadas a partir dela. Nesse mesmo movimento, impôs também ao campo intelectual pensar-se criticamente, reflexionando sobre o lugar da diferença e sobre desigualdades reiteradas e naturalizadas internamente. Assim, se os arranjos de poder que organizam a vida social ampla a partir da normalização de formas de pensamento, como o patriarcalismo e o racismo, foram também acriticamente fluentes por muito tempo na organização da arena intelectual, em ambos os casos tais arranjos organizados não se fizeram isentos de disputas e tensionamentos. Ascende, então, no meio intelectual, pari passu ao enfrentamento promovido por grupos negros e feministas, a necessidade de pensar a diferença no espaço da produção acadêmica. Ao passo em que a ampla maioria dos livros que inventariam as “grandes obras” de interpretação nacional, os “grandes ensaios” elucidadores do Brasil, elencam quase que exclusivamente figuras masculinas, impõe-se indagar: onde estavam as intelectuais brasileiras, cuja massiva presença nas cadeiras das ciências humanas sempre foi marcante no século XX? Do que se ocupavam? Elas não produziram “interpretações nacionais” ou essa ausência no elenco rotineiro de intérpretes do Brasil expressa um apagamento ou um sublugar atribuído a suas produções e suas formas de explicar? Afinal, quais os lugares e possibilidades de alcançarmos a interpretação nacional produzida por mulheres? Tais problematizações são aprofundadas nesta entrevista com a professora Mariana Miggiolaro Chaguri (IFCH/UNICAMP).
This article uses a quantitative approach to study the reception of women writers in post-war Britain. Using data from two influential journals in the period (1946–1960), the TLS and the Listener, we first establish a list of those contemporary British women writers who were most frequently mentioned in these magazines. We then compare their representation in the magazines to that of three comparison groups: a selection of British male contemporary writers, well-known earlier British women writers, and canonical male authors. We explore how the differential categories of gender and canonicity intersect in the (under ) representation of contemporary women writers, and how this underrepresentation not only holds true for the mid-twentieth century but, at least as it is reflected in the attention paid to writers by TLS reviewers, continues in the later 20th and early 21st century.
This article studies the production of the Romanian novel published between 1933 and 1947 by deploying instruments of quantitative analysis. More precisely, based on the corpus resulted from the project The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel: 1933-1947 (more than 700 digitized novels), our analysis focuses on the canonical writers and their “rivals”, the authors and their novels bypassed by the literary canon, the geographical networks of production and the origin of the authors. The relevance of such a study lies not only in recording the evolution of the Romanian production centers, but also in mapping the formula, the mechanisms and, taking into account the article that analyzes the period 1901-1932, the process of canonization of the Romanian novel published in the first half of the 20th century.
From its very beginning, the term “distant reading” (Moretti 2000) was controversial, displacing ‘close reading’ by relying on literary histories and thereby reflecting on the entire global literary system. One of the weaknesses of this approach lies in its exclusive reliance on canonical and authoritative historiographies, one or two for each national literature, something which is bound to over-simplify the complexities of national literatures. As is known, Moretti’s proposal became a ‘slogan’ for Digital Humanities while algorithmic manipulation of texts has taken the place of reading literary (human) histories. Yet the problem of over-simplification remains, albeit differently. As an alternative, we offer a fusion approach, radicalising Moretti’s idea. In this article, we demonstrate how computer-based analysis of different readings carried out by many readers – not necessarily professionals – produces a relatively minute picture. Our case study will be the Hebrew novel, from its emergence in 1853 to the present day; a manageable corpus on which we gather information using questionnaires we have carefully created in our lab. Alongside the presentation of our approach, the actual research, and its initial findings, we will reflect theoretically on the conceptual benefits, as well as the limits, of public distance reading.
Plus de quarante ans après la naissance de l’éternel nouveau média qu’est le jeu vidéo, plus de vingt ans après les prophéties de la mort du livre papier au profit du numérique, cette thèse a pour objectif d’étudier les interactions entre la culture littéraire et la culture vidéoludique, et ainsi de participer à la compréhension de la sphère médiatique contemporaine. Il s’agit alors de déterminer les modalités de coexistence des deux médias : comment le jeu vidéo fait-il sa place dans le champ médiatique ; comment la littérature s’adapte-t-elle à ce nouvel écosystème ? Ce travail tente d’examiner le jeu vidéo à travers le prisme de la littérature mais aussi d’observer la littérature à l’aune du jeu vidéo. Il utilise les concepts de différents champs de recherche – en particulier la nouvelle sociologie des médias, les recherches sur l’intermédialité, les études littéraires et les Game Studies – sans pour autant complètement les rejoindre. Les recherches s’appuient sur l’étude d’un corpus réduit, délimité à partir d’un ensemble vaste d’œuvres et l’observation de la variété des phénomènes esthétiques permet de mettre au jour trois logiques qui les structurent : l’autonomie fondamentale des deux cultures, leur divergence et le contact dans les moments, plus rares, où les interactions sont avérées. Contrairement à l’idéalisation de la convergence médiatique, cette thèse souligne qu’entre la littérature et les jeux vidéo, la tendance est davantage au renforcement des frontières qu’en leur brouillage. Cependant, une démarche de recherche-création autour d’un Visual Novel expérimente les possibilités d’hybridation des deux médias pour faire advenir, à leur croisement, une nouvelle forme médiatique
Recent approaches to literary character treat fictional population as a defining element of narrative form but continue to read novels at the level of individual characters. This essay uses the tools of narrative network analysis to bridge the gap between microlevel readings and the interpretation of the novel’s character-system as a population. Network analyses of three highly populous works—Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and David Simon’s HBO series The Wire—yield measures of social density and character centrality that show how Joyce adapted a Dickensian network plot that emerged amid the population explosion of nineteenth-century Britain to an Irish context marked by demographic decline. This adaptation of Dickens’s plot structure prepared it for a similar use in The Wire. Both Joyce and Simon use a large fictional network to periodically decenter their protagonists and undermine the typological assumptions of much realist fiction. The essay suggests that, rather than read these developments as evidence of a formal rupture between modernism and realism, we view Bleak House, Ulysses, and The Wire as playing a role in an understudied tradition of “population thinking” in the novel.
World Literature is a vital part of twentieth-first century critical and comparative literary studies. As a field that engages seriously with function of literary studies in our global era, the study of World literature requires new approaches. The Cambridge History of World Literature is founded on the assumption that World Literature is not all literatures of the world nor a canonical set of globally successful literary works. It highlights scholarship on literary works that focus on the logics of circulation drawn from multiple literary cultures and technologies of the textual. While not rejecting the nation as a site of analysis, these volumes will offer insights into new cartographies – the hemispheric, the oceanic, the transregional, the archipelagic, the multilingual local – that better reflect the multi-scalar and spatially dispersed nature of literary production. It will interrogate existing historical, methodological and cartographic boundaries, and showcase humanistic and literary endeavors in the face of world scale environmental and humanitarian catastrophes.
Computational approaches to literary studies have tended to fetishize Russian Formalism. The evolving canon of Digital Humanities scholarship shows persistent leanings on Formalism and the theoretical movements that emerged in its wake, including Prague School structuralism, discourse analysis, and semiotics. Twenty-first-century scholars relive the evolutions, embattled stances, and fraught histories of modern literary theory and its founding figures, whom they claim as their predecessors – from historical poetics to the social turn of discourse analysis. As scholars working in Digital Humanities and Russian literary studies, we attempt to examine the suggestive continuities between Russian literary theory and computational literary analysis. Focusing on the posited link between discourse analysis and topic modelling, we offer a case study of topic modeling using the full run of the academic journal Slavic Review. We briefly review the process of topic modeling for literary analysis, consider some insights from topic modeling Slavic Review and, for comparison, briefly consider two other prominent journals in the field – Slavic and East European Journal and Russian Review.
In the last four decades, the novel of memory has gained momentum on the world scene, taking advantage of the collapse of colonial and/or dictatorial regimes around the globe. Romania was not an exception, so after the fall of Communism in 1989, and more prominently at the beginning of the new millennium, this subgenre blossomed. Based on quantitative and qualitative research of a selection of fifty novels published in the Romanian space both before and after the fall of the communist regime, this article is the first attempt to map the Romanian novel of memory from a genre-based perspective. Our approach follows the evolution of the novel of memory in the course of four decades, from a thematic, formal, and generational perspective. Relying on these operators, as well as on the culturalist approach to literature in memory studies, we distinguish between a traumatic, a (n)ostalgic and an agonistic novel of memory.
Text reuse measurement is important for both LIS and literary studies, where it is mainly used to study influence between authors. Although projects such as Tesserae have already adopted computational methods for investigating text reuse in Latin poetry, its potential applications to the rich collections of English poetry have not been realized. This research proposes a modified version of the Tesserae Project’s measure based on the insight embodied in TF–IDF to study English poetry. Using the Irish poet Yeats’ relationship to five English Romantic poets as a test case, three parallel experiments were conducted in order to evaluate the suitability of this method for English poetry. The results show that this new method is effective in measuring text reuse in English poetry, and the TF–IDF based modification is more sensitive to known cases of text reuse than the original method. This method can also be adopted to noncanonical literary works in the future, providing an example of the significance of LIS for digital humanities.
The following study employs a quantitative analysis of the Romanian novelistic production from the period 1901-1932. By using the literary corpus developed by the research project ASTRA Data Mining. The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel 1901-1932, implemented by ASTRA National Museum Complex, this paper focuses on the secondary canonical writers (with their “b-sides and rarities”), the novelists’ origins, the abundance and the geographical nodes of production, in order to investigate the dynamic relation between national cultural centers and their respective editorial networks, as well as the mechanisms of canonization within the Romanian novel of the period.
This essay explores “distant reading,” first, as a project of studying genre at supratextual scales of analysis (from early conceptions to computationalist successors) and, second, through the prescient late Victorian literary persona with which the latter practices intersect. A Study in Scarlet, the novella that introduced Sherlock Holmes, offers the first meditation on distant reading. A split double plot that anticipates generic fissures within crime fiction broadly conceived, A Study in Scarlet creates a data-centric detective intelligence in dialogue with late Victorian statistical innovations that remain central to machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) today. Doyle’s generically split novella shows that the charismatic detective who dominates its first part is the merely partial virtuoso of a limited form. As such, A Study in Scarlet invites us to contemplate and clarify the humanistic stakes of machine “reading” during what some AI commentators conceive as a fourth industrial revolution.
This paper investigates how unsupervised machine learning methods might make hermeneutic interpretive text analysis more objective in the social sciences. Through a close examination of the uses of topic modeling—a popular unsupervised approach in the social sciences—it argues that the primary way in which unsupervised learning supports interpretation is by allowing interpreters to discover unanticipated information in larger and more diverse corpora and by improving the transparency of the interpretive process. This view highlights that unsupervised modeling does not eliminate the researchers’ judgments from the process of producing evidence for social scientific theories. The paper shows this by distinguishing between two prevalent attitudes toward topic modeling, i.e., topic realism and topic instrumentalism. Under neither can modeling provide social scientific evidence without the researchers’ interpretive engagement with the original text materials. Thus the unsupervised text analysis cannot improve the objectivity of interpretation by alleviating the problem of underdetermination in interpretive debate. The paper argues that the sense in which unsupervised methods can improve objectivity is by providing researchers with the resources to justify to others that their interpretations are correct. This kind of objectivity seeks to reduce suspicions in collective debate that interpretations are the products of arbitrary processes influenced by the researchers’ idiosyncratic decisions or starting points. The paper discusses this view in relation to alternative approaches to formalizing interpretation and identifies several limitations on what unsupervised learning can be expected to achieve in terms of supporting interpretive work.
Why We Read Fiction offers a lucid overview of the most exciting area of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as "Theory of Mind" and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson’s Clarissa, Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Zunshine’s surprising new interpretations of well-known literary texts and popular cultural representations constantly prod her readers to rethink their own interest in fictional narrative. Written for a general audience, this study provides a jargon-free introduction to the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field known as cognitive approaches to literature and culture.
Like the early evolutionary theory (though unlike Darwin’s own output), much work in literary adaptation today operates only in terms of higher and lower forms, considering adaptations as more or less „faithful” to the „original”. In biology, it was only when this sort of evaluative discourse was discarded that new questions could be asked and therefore new answers offered. To that end, a biologist and a literary theorist work to develop the homology between biological and cultural adaptation, between natural and cultural selection: stories, in a manner parallel to genes, replicate; adaptations of both evolve with changing environments. Their „success” cannot and should not, in either case, be limited to their degree of „fidelity” to anything called a „source” or „original”.
This chapter introduces the context and rationale for this book, which is concerned with the developments in the detective genre that took place from 1893 to 1901, the years when Sherlock Holmes was dead, having been killed off by Arthur Conan Doyle in “The Final Problem.” The chapter begins by examining Sherlock Holmes’s time in the Strand Magazine, focusing on the periodical publication and short story serial format as a key component in the detective’s success. The chapter outlines the ways in which the Strand and rival periodicals portrayed crime, both in fiction and in fact in the 1890s. It goes on to examine and explore the response of the Strand and its rivals to Sherlock’s absences (between the first and second series of Holmes stories) and after his death in 1893. Focussing upon a range of detective series, which were published in a diverse range of ephemeral publications from cheap provincial newspapers to lavish monthly magazines, allows this book to explore the culture of the late-Victorian literary marketplace, touching on issues from newspaper syndication to the importance of illustrations, and the ways in which authors responded to the dictates of editors and the reading public.
A critical inquiry into the politics, practices, and infrastructures of open access and the reconfiguration of scholarly communication in digital societies.
The Open Access Movement proposes to remove price and permission barriers for accessing peer-reviewed research work—to use the power of the internet to duplicate material at an infinitesimal cost-per-copy. In this volume, contributors show that open access does not exist in a technological or policy vacuum; there are complex social, political, cultural, philosophical, and economic implications for opening research through digital technologies. The contributors examine open access from the perspectives of colonial legacies, knowledge frameworks, publics and politics, archives and digital preservation, infrastructures and platforms, and global communities. he contributors consider such topics as the perpetuation of colonial-era inequalities in research production and promulgation; the historical evolution of peer review; the problematic histories and discriminatory politics that shape our choices of what materials to preserve; the idea of scholarship as data; and resistance to the commercialization of platforms. Case studies report on such initiatives as the Making and Knowing Project, which created an openly accessible critical digital edition of a sixteenth-century French manuscript, the role of formats in Bruno Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, and the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), a network of more than 1,200 journals from sixteen countries. Taken together, the contributions represent a substantive critical engagement with the politics, practices, infrastructures, and imaginaries of open access, suggesting alternative trajectories, values, and possible futures.
This collection represents that diverse cross-section of the ways in which participants engaged with, and have since developed, the conference theme and the uncountable new directions in which Victorian studies is progressing. Ultimately, the essays collected here testify to Raymond Williams’s claim, in Keywords, that ‘It is true that no word ever finally stands on its own, since it is always an element in the social process of language, and its uses depend on complex and (though variably) systematic properties of language itself’ (22). Just as these vocabularies do not stand alone, so too the essays in this collection combine to demonstrate the complexity and interconnections of studies in Victorian language and literature.
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