Posts in category: Sociological Bandwagon

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.

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:

I have a review essay out in the new issue of American Literary History, under the title “Genre Fiction without Shame.” It’s a longish discussion of Mark McGurl’s Everything and Less and Kim Wilkins, Beth Driscoll, and Lisa Fletcher’s Genre Worlds, ornamented with my Strong Opinions™ about the study of popular genre. The journal permits authors to share an initially submitted version. Bonus features of the latter include a few embarrassing imprecisions in quotation and a far superior choice of typeface; for more precision and worse typography, refer to the published version.

From the essay:

Is literary studies on the verge of a genre turn of its own? When so eminent a literary historian as Mark McGurl argues that “genre fiction is the heart of the matter of literature” (xviii) in the present era, it might seem so. McGurl’s Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021) maps out a wide range of fiction subgenres, placing them at the center of contemporary fiction. Working in a different vein, Kim Wilkins, Beth Driscoll, and Lisa Fletcher illuminate the social dynamics of genre-fiction production in their collective monograph Genre Worlds: Popular Fiction and Twenty-First-Century Book Culture (2022). Yet, like the genre turn in literary fiction, this recent genre-fiction scholarship evinces a reified understanding of its subject. McGurl relies on high-literary assumptions about genre, even as he deflates the pretensions of literary fiction; Wilkins et al., writing as insiders, take the cohesiveness and autonomy of their “genre worlds” for granted. These contrasting limitations are both, it seems to me, responses to genre fiction’s status in the literary field. Without a fuller analysis of how that status is produced, work on genre fiction misses major aspects of the phenomenon, especially the contingency of genre categories and the variability of reader response.

Despite the Strong Opinions™, mainly I pay tribute to the new ground opened up by these two books for systematic studies of genre fiction in the full complexity of its social existence. Now if only I can get my own contribution done before the study of literary institutions becomes purely archaeological.

I have an article out in the new issue of Book History, modestly titled “Origins of the US Genre-Fiction System, 1890–1956.” By kind permission of the publisher I can also share the accepted manuscript version, which is both open access and richer in typographical errors.

This is the first published piece of my current book project on the history of genre fiction. In the article I attempt to trace the formation of an institutionalized system of genre categories in American publishing. Here’s the abstract, with a few more reflections after the jump:

Though genre fiction is now ubiquitous, and though both book history and literary studies have devoted considerable attention to individual genres like science fiction and romance novels, the history of the system of popular fiction categories has been little studied. This essay traces the origins of the genre-fiction system in United States magazine and book publishing, bringing sociological and book-historical analysis to bear on changing practices of categorization in publishing, advertising, librarianship, and reader response from the 1890s through the 1950s. Genre categories were only intermittently in use through the 1910s; they were first institutionalized in pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s. The genre-fiction system was transmitted to book publishing only in the course of the so-called “paperback revolution” of the 1940s and 1950s, which made room for fiction-book production by categories while relegating it to a permanently low-status position. This transmission across publishing formats was far from deliberate; instead, the essay argues, the system of genre fiction arose and endured as a stable compromise articulating an expanded fiction-reading public to an expansive print culture industry, making new readers and new fiction—and new kinds of fiction—regularly available to each other in an enduringly hierarchized field.

I have an extended review of John Thompson’s new study of publishing, Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing, forthcoming in Contemporary Literature. Tempting as it is to publish an adaptation of my review as a cozy historical mystery novel on Kindle Unlimited, I prefer to keep adding to my personal weblog like it’s 2009. The journal kindly permits authors to share accepted manuscripts, so here it is: behold the digital revolution in publishing! The final edited version will appear in Contemporary Literature 62, no. 3 (Fall 2022). Spoilers: I liked the book and think that literary scholars should read the work of this eminent sociologist. Also spoilers: the digital revolution in publishing does not consist of putting LaTeX’d PDFs on your website.

Update: added the link to the published version.

Only in the course of preparing a graduate seminar session on Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters did I learn that Casanova died, far too early, three years ago at the age of 59. No one would have appreciated better than Casanova the significance of delayed uptake. But, all ironies about myself aside, I was quite moved by the memorial notices by Gisèle Sapiro for the Institute of World Literature and by Joseph Jurt for Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Here’s a brief belated tribute of my own.

My first graduate course at Rutgers, way back in Spring 2013—innocent times, when the worst things we had to worry about were the death spiral of the profession of literary studies, rampant inequality, and climate crisis—was called “Author, Reader, Field: Literary Sociologies of Modernism and the Twentieth Century.” As that ungainly title suggests, it was a mash-up, trying to combine some kind of modernism survey with some kind of discussion of the sociology of literature, while also too-too-cleverly hinting that there is a special connection between modernism and the sociology of literature.

I’m at it again, repeating a graduate course for the first time in my career, and the more plainly titled “Author, Reader, Field” is not nearly as streamlined as the condensed title implies. Also it’s not in three parts. Here’s my draft syllabus, if you’re curious about that sort of thing. Since I recently taught a grad survey of U.S. early twentieth-century literature, this time I bracketed off the Western Hemisphere (more or less) and pinned the course to British literature instead.

But keeping things pretty insular (not totally insular) doesn’t resolve the problem of selection at all. I like literary-historical overviews, and I like theories and methodologies, and I think graduate students ought to have simultaneous doses of both, but even after fourteen years of teaching, the semester still seems too short for what I want to do. I’m less worried about the primary texts than I am about the scholarship. I spend a week on Ulysses with an utterly clear conscience. But I wanted a buffet table of “approaches,” and there’s far less on offer than I initially imagined. Since I am a structured structure functioning as a structuring structure, the spread is mostly Bourdieusian. Tuchman and Fortin stand almost alone for sobering Anglo-American empiricism—which isn’t so bad, but still.

About a decade ago—painful words to type—I started working on an empirical study of the bibliography of scholarship on modernism. I intended it to be a quick side-project, maybe a piece of an essay or a book introduction, that would bolster my theoretical argument for alternatives to “modernism” as a period concept for studies of the twentieth century. It was also my first foray into quantitative work, which possibly explains why it has seemed to need so many further iterations since then. In any case, I now have an essay version, which I call “Modernist Studies without Modernism,” which I am ready to make public. I have posted it to an Open Science Framework repository which also points to a reproducibility archive with R markdown source code for the essay and (processed and cleaned) data.

This post is a discussion and partial replication of Ted Underwood and Jordan Sellers’s fascinating essay “How Quickly Do Literary Standards Change?” (available in preprint and discussed on Ted’s blog). Hats off to Ted and Jordan, who have contributed something really remarkable here, not just in their provocative arguments but in the data they have made usable by others. It’s one thing to circulate data and code so that someone can in principle re-run your scripts—though that is already a lot—and quite another to make the data accessible enough for fresh analyses. The latter is a very demanding standard, too demanding for everyone to meet, I think. But it is what is required to let others build directly on your results. Even more importantly, it’s what’s needed to make research results pedagogically available. As I argue in an essay I’m working on now, any quantitative methods pedagogy should—must—lean heavily on the results of research. In the immortal words of Miriam Posner, “It’s just awful trying to find a humanities dataset”: one of the best ways to address this challenge would be to make good research data available in recirculable, easily accessible form.

So consider this post partly pedagogical in intent: I want to show that Ted and Jordan’s replication repository is already an excellent dataset and could be the basis for a lesson in automatic classification. What I want to emphasize here is that their work allows us to breeze right past the data-wrangling and straight into the analytical substance. This may not be entirely obvious from their python code, so I’m going to try to make it clearer by doing the whole thing in R instead.

Rather than give all the technical detail, I’ll only show the R code where it makes a point about the analysis. The full R markdown source for this post is in this repository. Feel free to skim right past the R listings anyway. This is a literary theory and data analysis post that happens to have some software details in it, not a programming post. Here we go…

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.