Posts in category: Arcade

Over on Arcade I wrote an introduction to a Colloquy on Autonomy: we’ve collected a long series of posts connected to problems of literary, cultural, and other kinds of autonomy. Comments are welcome on the Colloquy page, and keep an eye out for new entries in the series!

[Sub-sub-editor’s note, June 13, 2016: it appears that in the renovated Arcade, the new colloquies section does not provide access to pre-renovation colloquies. The Internet Archive took a snapshot of the page in February 2012. My introduction to the colloquy is still accessible on Arcade.]

[Sub-sub-sub-editor’s note, July 27, 2026: my introduction disappeared too, so I added the text here, and struck out the invitation to comment. Links lead to the Wayback Archive versions of pages.]

Update, July 2026: This was a post on Arcade, which has, oddly enough, been cited by more than one serious work on close reading. My post is still there, though moved to a new server, at shc.stanford.edu/arcade/interventions/close-reading-genre. I’ve updated this page to include my text for reference, with one broken link fixed.

I have recently been seething with irritation at a certain scholarly book. Tempting as it would be to use the internet for its natural purpose and gripe about that book in detail, I am instead going to channel my energies into something with a little more intellectual value. The source of my irritation, you see, is that this book exaggerates to a fault—an incredibly irritating fault—all the virtues of “good” close reading. But what do I mean by that, my rational self asks my (normally dominant) griping self? Hmm. Fair question, rational self.

Here’s how I got to that question, and it’s not because I’m giving up on the standard English Ph.D. tactic of giving books as birthday presents to everyone I know (which gets more embarrassing every year, really).

Over at the National Humanities Center’s On the Human website, Paula Moya has posted a fascinating piece on cultural neuroscience, science reporting, and race. Go check out the discussion going on there and then, if you wish, consider these thoughts on cultural comparison.

We tend to have a basically cheerful vision of the circulation of ideas across borders. Literature, the Humanities, and the World! as it says on the Arcade masthead. But sometimes those who participate in that circulation take a grimmer view. I’ve been working on the Indian, or rather, Kenyan-Indian-English-American, writer G.V. Desani (1909–2000). One of Desani’s recurring themes, in his single novel All About H. Hatterr and his other English-language writings, is the injuries of public circulation. Often this is painfully literal: Hatterr, in the picaresque novel that sends him around India, frequently ends his adventures stripped of clothing as well as cash and dignity. (Amardeep Singh, who is, by the bye, an exemplary academic blogger, analyzes Hatterr’s disrobing in his recent essay on the novel.)

One of the last things one wants to hear, when one has undergone some misfortune or difficulty, is the injunction to count one’s blessings. Think how well off you really are, someone inevitably tells you. Remember your advantages, the voice exhorts, your resources, your talents. But this individualist, go-get-’em cheer rings hollow in times of widespread deprivation, when “misfortune” is not individual bad luck but a structural unhappiness shared by many.

Thanks to coverage in the mass media (NY Times) and, more importantly, the scholarly blogosphere (Language Log and again Language Log, Arcade’s own Natalia Cecire, David Crystal…indeed as I am writing this more and more responses are popping up, more than I can read today [later: including right here on Arcade, so go read Paula Moya’s post, too!]), many of you will have already heard about an interesting development coming out of Google Books: an article, to be published in Science, on the Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books by Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Lieberman Aiden, et al. (Don’t miss the important supplement describing their methods in more detail.) Michel and Lieberman Aiden and their collaborators at Harvard and Google, who have backgrounds not in the humanities but in mathematics, computer science, and biology, have compiled tables of “n-grams,” n=1…5, for a large number of books in Google’s Google Books database. An n-gram is just a sequence of n words. Looking at changes in the frequencies of these n-grams over time, the authors seek to watch cultural change happening—not just qualitatively, but, they claim, quantitatively. Google has also released an interface to the n-gram tables, allowing you to graph the changing frequency of an n-gram of your choice over time.

Name your favorite historical master narratives!

The other day I was looking again into Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City. Of the many wonderful things about that wonderful book, my favorite is the second chapter, “A Problem of Perspective.” In this chapter, Williams, in deadpan style, cites a series of laments over the decline of country or village life. The brilliant, very funny twist is that he works backwards, showing that though each generation is convinced that it is seeing the end of the old country ways in its lifetime, the previous generation expressed the very same conviction. From F.R. Leavis to Thomas Hardy; from Hardy to Eliot; from Eliot to John Clare to Goldsmith…to Philip Massinger, to Thomas More, “to the 1370s, for example, when Langland’s Piers Plowman sees the dissatisfaction of the labourers, who will not eat yesterday’s vegetables but must have fresh meat.” This Williams calls the “escalator,” a force that seems to move these laments inevitably, mechanically, backwards and backwards into history.

Prefatory warning: My, my. This is rather long. What follows is 3700-odd words, concluding my discussion of Nobel lectures, emphasizing themes of literary politics and the problem of autonomy in literature. Please feel free to comment or discuss even if you don’t read the whole thing!

Yet once more, O ye laurels, I consider the last twenty Nobel prizewinners in literature, and once more I turn over the question of literary autonomy…

Let us return once again to the groves of Swedish Academe, and continue contemplating the last twenty Nobel literature lectures…