At this year’s Modernist Studies Association meeting in Las Vegas I have convened a roundtable (where I will also be speaking) under the rubric
Beyond Modernist Periodization: Alternatives to the Canonical Half-Century.
8:30 a.m.–10 a.m., Red Rock VII, Flamingo Hotel, Friday, October 19, 2012.

Here are the (fantastic) people involved, and here’s what it’s all about.

Theory by the numbers

or, The yack of the hack of the yack

This is a longer version of my proposal for a THATCamp Theory 2012 session.

How we should go about mining the digital archive of the history of scholarship for theoretical resources? Let’s talk about text-mining journals, quantitatively analyzing metadata about scholarship, and living with closed access as theorists. And perhaps we can work on a dataset or two—I’ll bring some example data and laughably primitive visualizations!

I’m coordinating the Modernism and Globalization Seminar Series this year. We’ve just updated our webpage at the CCA, so check that out. The first MGSS event is a seminar with Heather Love on October 26. In March we’ll have a lecture by Jim English. More details to follow.

I’ve posted a draft syllabus as well as a one-page course description for my Spring 2012 graduate seminar on the sociology of twentieth-century literature. Click here for the course website. All very much under construction.

The websites for my fall courses are now online with preliminary syllabuses: 350:355 Twentieth-Century Fiction I and 350:437 Popular Reading: Low to Middling Genres, 1890–1945.

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.

So I keep seeing links to this denunciation of the dysfunction of Microsoft Word in Slate: Tom Scocca, “Death to Word”.

One heartily endorses the sentiment. Scocca’s example of what pasted Microsoft Word XML looks like is comedy gold (and all too familiar from student blog posts). The heart sinks, however, when it turns out that the only alternative Scocca knows to mention is TextEdit, even though his explicit concern is with the crippling defects of Word when it comes to moving documents between print and HTML. In other words, the entire universe of text editing software (as opposed to word processors) is invisible to the writer of the article. No doubt he can’t imagine any way to break Word’s near-monopoly, let alone that there are both open-source and commercial systems of long standing that are much more versatile.

%& is not a shebang.

Somewhere on the internets I picked up the idea that the first line of a tex file should specify what flavor of TeX it’s written in, where flavor was one of TeX, LaTeX, XeLaTeX, XeTeX, etc. I think was imagining that it was some kind of TeX-internal version of the “shebang” #! that tells a Unix shell what program to use to execute a script. Indeed my standard template file had such a line (but not any more).

Wrong.

The descriptions of my course offerings for the fall—my first semester as a member of the Rutgers English faculty!—are now online on the English department website. I am teaching 350:355 Twentieth Century Fiction I, an introductory course on early-twentieth century novels and stories from James to Hurston to Anand. I also teaching a seminar, 350:437 Popular Reading: Low to Middling Genres, 1890–1945, which surveys the key genres—like mystery and thriller—of that period of widespread pleasure reading.

I am hoping some interested students may find this page. I’ve added descriptions of these upcoming courses to my teaching page, which shows what kinds of courses I’ve taught in the past. I invite any interested student to contact me at my personal e-mail address with questions about my courses.