Posts in category: Arcade

I recently picked up the first of Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels, Faceless Killers. I loved the Kenneth Branagh TV adaptations of these mysteries but had been saving up the pleasure of the novels themselves. I have the special talent of forgetting the resolution of pretty much any mystery I read, so I have no trouble enjoying the suspense a second time around. What I do not enjoy, however, is reading an excellent novel in a poor text.

If we want to do sociology of literature, let’s get away from texts for a bit.

One of the most promising things about the current interest in quantitative methods for literary study is that it offers us some alternatives to reading as a method. There are important questions about literature—above all, about literature as a social and historical system—that cannot be answered with the tools of the expert textual interpreter. Such questions are better answered, I believe, in closer collaboration with our disciplinary kindred in the social sciences.

Thanks to a new special issue of Cultural Sociology focused on literature, we have a chance to look at some concerete examples of what sociological approaches to literary problems currently look like. In this post I’ll discuss the excellent essay there by Gisèle Sapiro, Translation and Symbolic Capital in the Era of Globalization: French Literature in the United States. Sapiro, whose work I have been following for a while, works in the tradition of the sociology of fields, and has written on both twentieth-century literary history and contemporary world literature. This latest essay is particularly fun to think with, because I have my greedy paws on some of the same data Sapiro uses, so it will be possible to look in some detail at the sort of evidence and the sort of analysis her approach entails—and, perhaps, to think how to extend it.

I don’t think any writer did more to form me than Terry Pratchett. That might be a bit of a dangerous thing for a professional literary scholar to say. It would be easier to recount how much Ulysses, say, meant to a budding adolescent highbrow. In fact, though, I suspect that as a teenager, and not only as a teenager, I had a Pratchettian reading of the novel: Joyce’s Dublin as Ankh-Morpork, puns and pastiche as the engine driving the narrative language forward, the library of culture as an interdimensional transit zone, and no icon left unsmashed. In any case, I’m certain I would be a very different person if my elementary-school librarian hadn’t read Truckers to us and started me on a Pratchett kick that never stopped.

I recently returned from the DH 2014 conference in Lausanne. I went to give my brief (my brief brief) for getting serious about social science methods in digital humanities under the title “Let DH Be Sociological!” The conference offered plenty to think about on this theme. Also I got accused of wanting to “dumb down” an entire field of study…so that’s got me thinking too.

Let’s talk about quantitative literary history and where you can find the best tacos al pastor.

I’ve been spending some time recently researching trends in the history of literary scholarship. For MLA this year, for a panel on “Seeing with Numbers” with Hoyt Long, Richard So, Matt Jockers, and Amy Hungerford, I was thinking about the drive to include more texts among our objects of study. On the panel we focused on efforts to see more of literary history by using quantitative methods.¹ But as I was working on my analysis of the changing (or rather unchanging) distribution of scholarly attention in modernist studies, it occurred to me that it is not only the quantifiers in literary studies who articulate the impulse to include more texts.

This post could also be called: Walter Benjamin in the Age of Me Noodling Around with Small Data.

On Monday I participated in a roundtable discussing Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”/“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Rereading this essay after not having looked at it in five years or so, I was struck by the degree to which Benjamin anticipated (or, better, laid the groundwork for) both the rhetoric and the analytic procedures of contemporary historicist literary criticism and cultural studies: coordinating large social-structural changes with changes in artistic genres and artistic values; attending to popular culture alongside high culture; and, especially, announcing the imperative to “politicize art.” This is not quite as banal as might seem—after all, Benjamin was not an academic, and this famous essay is not a work of literary criticism or of philology. Anyway it made me want to think more about the reception history of this essay.

I had wanted to bring to that roundtable a couple of quick factoids from that reception history using JSTOR’s archive of scholarly journals. I didn’t quite manage the nice handout I envisioned, but as I put together my remarks I gathered a little data, and so this post relates the explorations I made.

A slightly annotated reconstruction of my response to the survey distributed to all Rutgers faculty as part of the new president’s Strategic Planning initative.

This post is co-written by Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood. It is cross-posted at The Stone and the Shell and Arcade. Update, July 2026: the Arcade version lost links to figures, and JSTOR Data for Analysis is long gone, but the images hosted at Ted's website are still around and linked here, as is, amazingly, the interactive image map linked from the first figure below.

Of all our literary-historical narratives it is the history of criticism itself that seems most wedded to a stodgy history-of-ideas approach—narrating change through a succession of stars or contending schools. While scholars like John Guillory and Gerald Graff have produced subtler models of disciplinary history, we could still do more to complicate the narratives that organize our discipline's understanding of itself.

The archive of scholarship is also, unlike many twentieth-century archives, digitized and available for "distant reading." Much of what we need is available through JSTOR’s Data for Research API. So last summer it occurred to a group of us that topic modeling PMLA might provide a new perspective on the history of literary studies. Although Goldstone and Underwood are writing this post, the impetus for the project also came from Natalia Cecire, Brian Croxall, and Roger Whitson, who may do deeper dives into specific aspects of this archive in the near future.

I’d like to expand on our discussion of John Thompson’s sociology of contemporary publishing by posing some literary-historical questions. In his post on Thompson, Lee Konstantinou framed some questions about contemporary book publication and promotion which Merchants of Culture can help us to ask. I’m particularly enamored of his statement that the “big book”—the potential bestseller, as certified by large advances and publisher buzz—is the “great white whale” of the study of recent literature. (The discussion in comments also focused on the big book, but it turned out that it was hard to keep straight the distinction between the big book—an only potential hit—and the literary sensation.) I had been worrying that my own training in literary studies gave me much less purchase than I wanted on the world of agents, publishers, and retailers that Thompson describes. But Lee argues that literary studies can and should undertake research on the gatekeeping and filtering mechanisms of publishing: “What are the filters, norms, expectations, and constraints that distinguish the unpublishable from the publishable?” Or, to borrow a phrase from a forceful theoretical essay by Rachel Malik, what are the “horizons of the publishable” in the present, and how and why have they shifted over time? To follow Lee’s program, we will have to look into the different kinds of “platform” authors have; we will have to pay attention to the construction of “voice”; and we will have to understand how actors in the publishing field organize books into series of comparable items—“comps” or, to use our own term of art, genres. I would also add that we need to find out who has access to the means to write—education, time, desire—as well as the means to even have a chance at publication—social capital, geographic location, and so on.

Seen through a sociologist’s eyes, the literary system can look very strange indeed.

I thought I understood this principle, having quaffed vigorously of the heady Bourdieuean mead and embraced Bourdieu’s ways of making questions of literary value, literary reading, and literary belief historically and socially relative. But I have been spending months coming to terms with a new version of the lesson, having been reading and thinking over the British sociologist John B. Thompson’s recent book Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. I’m going to discuss it in this post and a subsequent one, and my lit-sociological comrade Lee Konstantinou will address Thompson too, continuing the dialogue from our earlier discussion of Wendy Griswold’s work on the reading class. In this post, I will give a quick summary of this remarkable and important book and then state what I see as its principal challenge to literary study.