Posts in category: Theory

My article with Ted Underwood on the long-term history of literary studies is now available in a preprint form (pdf). This essay will appear in NLH, but the publisher has kindly given permission for us to make a submitted manuscript available now. Please keep your eyes open for the final published version. It’s been a long (though enjoyable) journey from our initial exploratory blog post in late 2012 to this essay.

The article’s primary evidence is a topic model of seven scholarly journals in literary studies that span the last century and a bit more. In order to make this form of evidence more accessible, I designed a website that allows you to explore the model. Ted and I spent a long time exploring the many, many different ways you can slice and dice topic models before arriving at the claims we make in the essay. To get a sense of how we might have gotten there, spend some time surfing the model, seeing both its power to reveal and its inevitable froth of randomness and approximation. And, hopefully, you’ll discover patterns of your own.

What I’m most proud of in our essay is our effort to show why our approach responds to central questions in literary history and literary theory. We are interested in topic modeling in itself, but I see our essay as aiming primarily at two things. We try to revise literary scholarship’s conception of its own history. And we argue that quantitative methodologies in literary history, far from dispensing with interpretation, attempt to scale up the interpretation of cultural texts while keeping the major problems of interpretation in view. This scaling-up tends to bring humanistic scholarship into closer proximity to the challenges and methodologies of the social sciences.

I’m planning to expand on that last claim in my talk at DH 2014…. Ted’s and my joint formulations are in the essay. Read it, and browse the website.

After the jump, the rest of this post is all geeking out about programming and workflows.

I spent last Friday and Saturday at an excellent workshop on Indian Literature as Comparative Literature, organized by Preetha Mani of the AMESALL department at Rutgers. The workshop focused on the relations among the regional languages and literatures of South Asia and the question of their joint participation in “modern” or “modernist” Indian literature. I had the pleasure of being the discussant for a panel with Snehal Shingavi, Kumkum Sangari, and Francesca Orsini. For me, someone with interest in but very limited knowledge of South Asian literatures, and no modern S. Asian languages (except…English), the talks and discussion provided all kinds of leads into scholarship and primary sources from South Asia I want to know more about—and, equally, a wealth of stimulating comparative and theoretical ideas.¹

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.