Rutgers students are about to enroll in spring 2025 courses—here are descriptions of mine. (Batteries not included. Images enlarged to show texture. Paid for by the Committee to Read Some Good Books in Class.)

Ursula K. Le Guin: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Literature

English 358:437, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00–3:20 in HC-E128
Syllabus etc.

I celebrate the labor movement on May 1 and syllabuses on the first Monday in September.

This semester I volunteered to teach in Rutgers’s revamped first-year writing course, College Writing (the Course Formerly Known As Expos). My last first-year writing course was a while ago, when we still used styluses and clay tablets, but I think I am ready to meet the younger generation where they are and make the leap forward to quill pens. The course-wide syllabus gives a sense of the revamped focus of this course on self-conscious practice with multiple genres, occasions, and media of writing.

The other course continues my streak of science-fiction teaching, this time in Interdisciplinary Honors guise: Science/Fiction: Ghosts in the Machine. The focus is on fictional machine intelligences, with occasional glimpses into philosophical, computational, and cognitive perspectives on the questions they raise. My qualifications for the interdisciplinary part of the course include having read Gödel, Escher, Bach at a vulnerable age and knowing a dimension-reduction technique when I see one.

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:

It’s syllabus time again—what’s that you say? the semester has already started?—well I guess I’d better put something on the internet to show I have some idea what I’m going to be doing in class.

I am teaching a graduate seminar this term: Twentieth-Century Genre: The Case of the Detective. Through some unaccountable oversight I have been allowed to teach a course designated “theory,” which means all students will be required to rewrite Aristotle’s Poetics as if it were about Nancy Drew mysteries instead of tragedy. But seriously folks: the goal is to survey some of the variety of the genre over the last century-plus, from Nancy Drew to Percival Everett, and see what kind of shock we can give to our literary-historical and generic assumptions when we do that.

I am also renewing a course I haven’t taught in ten years, an undergraduate seminar designed around a selection of Anglophone novelists who have won the Nobel prize: Nobel Prizewinners. After much wrestling with my conscience I have had to leave off Patrick White in order to clear some room for the last decade’s very interesting new Anglophone-novelist laureates. The previous century’s laureates are represented on my syllabus by Kipling, Faulkner, Gordimer—and Morrison’s “Recitatif.” You decide which of these choices is trolling.

Those links go to course pages which summarize the schedule and link on to PDFs with the complete syllabuses. As time and the copyright window marches on, it is becoming ever easier for a twentieth-centuryist to point to digitized sources: it’s pretty to fun to be able to link to complete scans of pulp magazines and old mystery anthologies. So I did that. Long live the Internet Archive.

It’s been a while since I checked in on the statistics for what is laughingly called “the job market” in English for PhDs. But after a few demoralizing conversations with people looking at the thing from various angles (I was the one doing the demoralizing), I realized I wanted an updated version of a chart I last made in 2017, comparing new English PhDs and new faculty job openings. There was a pandemic in the interim.

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.

This past Tuesday, at the kind invitation of Wen Xin, I gave a talk at the University of Kansas, under the title “Data Is a Sandwich: Lessons from the Computational Literary Field.” My slides (PDF) might only be of use for pictures of the titular sandwich, but they do also contain R code for reproducing my figures demonstrating some of the lessons I taught out of my dataculture package of cultural data in last year’s Data and Culture course. The talk itself was a bit of a retrospective on different things I’ve tried to do in literary data analysis since I first started dabbling some 14 years ago (!?!), with gestures towards what I think are the lessons I learned about how useful data gets made and turned into evidence for meaningful scholarly arguments.

I honor Labor Day the way Karl Marx intended, by finishing up my syllabuses. Since it’s September, it must be Early Twentieth-Century Fiction time. I am also teaching Introduction to Science Fiction for the first time. Will there be Star Trek? Of course there will be Star Trek. The links go to pages with abbreviated schedules, but the full syllabuses are available in PDF: Early 20th-c. and SF. The two syllabus formats are not automatically generated from the same source, because getting that right (for my definition of “right”) remains much harder than it should be, and I am trying to spend less time fiddling with computer-y stuff and more time peering into the unhallowed depths of genre-fiction history.

Manual pin: My article, “Origins of the US Genre-Fiction System, 1890–1856,” is just out in Book History. Read all about it.

I made an R package with some “cultural” datasets of various kinds that might be of pedagogical use. It is available on github as agoldst/dataculture. See the repository page for a summary of the datasets, which I used to teach introductory analyses of:

1. cultural tastes over time and social space (names, music genres, recipes)
2. textual/paratextual signs of fictional genre (text-mining science fiction and crime)
3. historical and fictional social networks (Hamlet characters and eighteenth-century Bostonian troublemakers)

If that sounds interesting, take a look at the package and the lecture slides and lab exercises from the course I created it for, “Data and Culture” (Fall 2022). I’m hoping to save someone somewhere a few steps of wheel-reinventing.