Posts in category: Events

This coming Thursday, February 12 at 6 p.m., I am discussing some work from my book in progress on genre fiction with the Culture Workshop of the NYU Sociology department. Clayton Childress of UBC and Under the Cover will be the discussant. I have precirculated a manuscript excerpt under the title “Yank Mags, Mushrooms, and Failed Isomorphisms: British Genre Fiction before 1970 and the Transmission of Classifications in Commercial Publishing.”

Perhaps “failed isomorphism” is an inauspicious rubric for an attempt at interdisciplinary scholarship, but there I go anyway. In this part of the book, I describe the surprising divergences between British and American genre-fiction history in the first half of the twentieth century, in order to explain why the UK, the country with the more robust popular fiction industry at the start of the century, lagged behind the US in developing genre fiction as a formal system of categories.

I’m presenting at this year’s conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing at the University of Reading. My talk is a first stab at a British-focused counterpart to my work on US genre fiction’s origins:

Yank Mags and Mushrooms: Genre Fiction in mid-century Britain

We’re in the midst of a busy month for the sociology of literature at Rutgers English. Usually the only person busy with the soc. of lit. is yours truly, but last week we welcomed a credentialed literary sociologist, Karl Berglund (Uppsala), in a double-header with Justin Tackett (Utah State) at the Initiative for the Book. Justin presented on “Clipped Reading” and the history of the intertitle; Kalle presented some of the findings from his terrific new book on audio readers—including the crucial question of how people go to sleep listening to novels.

This coming week, we have a packed Thursday and Friday in conjunction with the Colloquium on Independent Publishing. We welcome John B. Thompson from Cambridge to discuss his recent Book Wars: I’m on record with my enthusiasm for that book (and his previous work too), so I’m thrilled to have him at Rutgers. He’ll also be part of the broader discussion of independent publishing and the sociology of literature.

And I only just learned that the week after all this, there’s a big Bourdieu-fest happening at NYU! It’s April 25–27, with major figures from the Bourdieusian tradition including Gisèle Sapiro (blurbed by yours truly and also blogged by yours truly), Johan Heilbron, Mustafa Emirbayer, Gil Eyal, and John Guillory among other distinguished names. I’ll be there (when I can) in my specially made “Sociology is a Martial Art” dogi. Anyway, here’s the score for the events at Rutgers:

Next Wednesday, the yearlong seminar on classification which I am co-organizing at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis is hosting a one-day symposium on “Data, Classification, and Everyday Life.” We have three exciting guests and a plan to take over the world.

I’m attending the Society for Novel Studies conference in Pittsburgh this week. I’m on a panel organized by my colleague Rebecca Walkowitz on “Genre Fiction and World Literature,” with papers by Sarah Chihaya (Princeton), Jessica FitzPatrick (Pitt), and Philip Joseph (University of Colorado–Denver). The panel is in the D session, Saturday at 2:30 p.m. in Carnegie Room I-II.

My paper is called “Cosmopolitanism before and after the Omnivore,” and I’m going to argue that the rise of omnivorousness as a high-status disposition enables one kind of cosmopolitan science fiction—exemplified by Ghosh’s Calcutta Chromosome—while inviting us to forget the worldliness of lowlier forms dating back to the earliest pulps. Visualization:

I’ll be at the Modernist Studies Association in Boston this weekend. I’m looking forward to a lively discussion of modernist disciplinarity in the seminar Jonathan Goodwin and I have organized.

On Sunday 11/22 I’m on a roundtable, “The New Institutionalism in Modernist Studies,” organized and chaired by Robert Higney (CCNY/CUNY), with Merve Emre (American Academy/McGill), Lisi Schoenbach (University of Tennessee), and Lisa Siraganian (SMU).

H1. The number of definitions of “institutionalism” is at least as large as the number of scholars asked to define it.

H2. The amount of monomaniacal insistence on the importance of genre fiction increases linearly (at least) with the amount of time you let Goldstone speak.

It’s at 10:30 a.m. in St. George A. Since we’re a five-cornered roundtable, there should be plenty of time for wider discussion, especially if the chair draws the correct conclusion from H2. Should be fun.

I’m speaking at NYU this Thursday afternoon, at the invitation of the NYU Digital Experiments group:

Corpus or Field? A Challenge for Quantitative Methods

One of the most promising prospects for quantitative methods in literary studies is that of rigorous and empirically wide-ranging accounts of the relations between literature and society. Yet the boundary between textual interpretation and a sociological analysis of literature has proven surprisingly hard to cross. In this talk, I retrace some sociological traditions of quantitative textual study, from postwar content analyses of political opinion to contemporary field theory, and I argue that they offer literary scholars alternatives to the doxa of “reading” that dominates and limits methodological discussion in our discipline. The sociological traditions turn us from corpus to field, from text collections to social spaces of symbolic competition and collaboration. I will discuss (and exemplify) the many challenges and pitfalls of this shift, technical and conceptual, in my own attempts to quantify the changing status of “reading” in the history of literary scholarship.

If you’re around, the talk is in Bobst Library (2nd fl., Avery Fisher Center, East Room) at 4:30. Come accuse me of naïve positivism, I dare you.

I am co-organizing a seminar on The Production of Modernist Disciplinarity at this November’s MSA in Boston with Jonathan Goodwin (University of Louisiana, Lafayette). As a supplement to the very terse description you can find on the site, here is a slightly longer one:

The Production of Modernist Disciplinarity

Recent modernist studies are characterized by the aspiration to expand geographically, chronologically, and across media. Yet the core of “modernism” as an aesthetic, a period, and a canon of writers and artists has proven strikingly stable. This seminar invites new approaches to studying modernist disciplinarity itself, including (but not limited to) quantitative approaches, like citation analysis and probabilistic modeling, that have recently been brought to bear on disciplinary history in the humanities. How can we understand (or change) the forces that either stabilize or disrupt scholarship on modernism?

This was meant to underline that though Jonathan and I are both interested in quantitative methods for understanding disciplinary continuity and change, this is not an exclusively quantitative or “digital” seminar. All approaches are welcome. Please don’t hesitate to write me (contact information at right) or Jonathan (joncgoodwin@gmail.com) if you have any questions.

Conference registration is open. Seminar registration officially closes tomorrow, September 1. The conference early-registration discount ends September 15.

Despite any rumors you may have heard to the contrary, our seminar will not be a Zimbardo-style experiment on the production of disciplinarity.

I’m giving a talk at the Center for the Humanities at Temple tomorrow, Wednesday, April 8, in their Digital Humanities in Practice Series.

Quiet Transformations of Literary Study, 1889–2013

The history of literary scholarship is usually presented as a succession of conflicting ideas. Yet gradual, distributed change is equally significant, and often less visible to practitioners, who remember recent dramas better than the unspoken norms of eighty years ago. Understanding such change requires new methodologies. I present an analysis using probabilistic topic modeling to reveal broad trends in more than 21,000 literary-studies journal articles. As literary and cultural studies confronts the interpretive challenges posed by topic modeling and other quantitative methods, we increasingly enter the methodological domain of the social sciences.

It’s at 4:00 p.m. in the CHAT Lounge (details on the CHAT website). I can promise at least 300 words on tokenization¹ and the phrase “post-Marxist Mechanical Turk” used as sincere praise.

I’ll be in Cambridge (in the Dave Barry sense of the word) on Wednesday, March 4, to give a talk to the British Studies Colloquium of the Harvard English department. Here’s my abstract:

The Modernist Period Concept: Threat or Menace?

The early twentieth century is the modernist period. Or so we say. Does this idea, codified in the institutions of modernist studies, limit our understanding of literary history? In this talk, I use a study of thousands of MLA Bibliography entries to argue that the modernist period concept is regulated, in practice, by an all-too-familiar canon of authors (Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Pound), in spite of efforts to expand modernism culturally, geographically, and historically. These names stand for the equation of formal-aesthetic innovation, as it was practiced in Euro-American avant-garde scenes, with the literary culture of modernity. The menace of the modernist period concept is that this equation is tenacious but wrong. It conflates the whole of the literary field with its most consecrated part, precluding the study of the structural transformation of literary production and reception in the first half of the century. That transformation gives rise, not to a legible Zeitgeist, but to a system of hierarchically organized genres with non-synchronous histories. By way of speculative conclusion, I briefly compare histories of several popular fiction genres and suggest that the study of literary classification systems is a necessary complement to the study of that single high-literary genre we call “modernism.”

The talk is at 5:15 p.m. in Barker 114.

It has come to my attention that while I am quantifying literary studies in Boston, Franco Moretti will be giving the Goldstone lecture at NYU. If you are racing to my talk and tell your phone, “Take me to the Goldstone lecture, double-quick!” check that you are not being directed to New York City.