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…

What is world literature—as seen from Stockholm?

After seeing Vincent Barletta’s recent post on José Saramago’s funeral I was spurred to write a post I’ve been planning for quite a while on the Nobel prize in literature of recent years. I spent Spring Quarter teaching a course on the contemporary global Anglophone novel as seen through the Nobel prize, so I’ve been thinking about the institution of the prize and the way it reflects and transforms literature. I’ve also been considering this and other institutions of “world literature” as sites in which certain ideas about literary autonomy—about art for art’s sake, writerly freedom, aesthetic distance, and so on—continue to play important, even generative roles, long after literary scholarship has ceased to take those ideas seriously.

A colleague who read my previous post suggested to me that I was calling for a basically “positivist” style of literary scholarship, akin to the would-be empirical investigations of nineteenth-century philologists and historians. He didn’t mean that in a positive way. And thereon hangs a twentieth-century literary-historical tale…