As a kind of closing ritual for the past semester, I made webpages for my spring 2023 courses. I put enough work into these two courses that it felt good to collect slides/notes and handouts, breaking them free from the prison of Canvas:

• Principles of Literary Study, Spring 2023
• Introduction to Crime Fiction, Spring 2023

Also I wanted to supply the pedagogical context for two quixotic annotation projects I pursued this term: on Shahid’s Call Me Ishmael Tonight and Ngũgĩ’s Petals of Blood. There you have it. My teaching materials are of course available for anyone to reuse as they see fit. Of course future students should be alert to signs that these materials have been used to replace me with an “AI”-powered GoldstoneBot: dated pop-culture references or tired jokes would be especially clear signs that my human creativity has been replaced by a soulless mechanism.

This past semester I spent a good chunk of my Introduction to Crime Fiction course on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1977 novel Petals of Blood. I wanted my students to spend time with a text where the guilty culprit really was capitalism. By happy coincidence we reached the end of the novel, with its heroic but tantalizingly inconclusive brewery strike, just as the Rutgers faculty/grad unions went on strike. That helped add an experiential dimension to my students’ encounter with a 46-year-old text. Neocolonialism hasn’t exactly gone away either.

It’s a fun and very compelling novel, but it did seem to me to ask for some contextualization. So, as I did when I was preparing Shahid’s ghazals for my other course, I ended up compiling quite a few annotations on Ngũgĩ’s references and non-English words. They’re below, after the jump.

Annotations updated April 21, 2025, fresh from teaching Petals again.

Annotations updated again, June 18, 2026, after reading Ngũgĩ’s Dreams in a Time of War.

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.

Here are some annotations to selected references in Agha Shahid Ali’s Call Me Ishmael Tonight, together with some information about the poet. These are for my students in Principles of Literary Study this semester, who are reading the book this week. But perhaps it will be of some use for other readers of this remarkable poet.

I updated my teaching page with descriptions of my spring 2023 courses and the preliminary syllabuses. I’m teaching Principles of Literary Study and Introduction to Crime Fiction. I’m once again treating Principles as a grab-bag, splitting the semester into seven weeks on poetry and seven weeks on narrative. For the final project, students will rewrite one of the novels we read as an epic poem in hexameters, blank verse, or ślokas. Undergrad crime is a new course for me, though I have taught related material often. The final exam will consist of a single question: “Who did it?”

Note to students: that was a joke about the epic poem. I will also accept a supple free-verse rendition.

Second note to students: I think we all know who did it.

Update, 1/11/23: broken link to crime syllabus fixed. Sigh.

…Well, on YouTube: with my comrades on our union’s University Budget and Priorities Committee, I was on a panel about following the money at Rutgers, which you can see a recording of here. I talked a bit about the erosion of tenure and the rise of full-time non-tenure-track faculty positions. It’s a subject I have blogged on more than once before; those earlier posts give more detail about the data and analysis I used. Then I indulged in a little speculation and imagined—in the mode of Chris Newfield—two futures, one dismal and the other not, for the public university.

The whole program was pretty fun (despite a brief technological stumble near the end), with good questions from the audience too. Here’s a link to the slides I showed (slightly edited, with links to sources).

FOLLOW R MONEY
How the Rutgers Budget Shapes Our University
Thursday, October 13, 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Michelle Gittelman (Management and Global Business, RBS-Newark)
on the central administration’s money vacuum

Andrew Goldstone (English, SAS-New Brunswick)
on new ways of undermining tenure

Juan González (Communcations, SCI-New Brunswick; co-host, Democracy Now!) on where the COVID relief money went

Mark Killingsworth (Economics, SAS-New Brunswick)
on athletics’ financial future or lack thereof

I watched some of my own performance, which probably wasn’t a good idea. Let’s just say I’m not about to be the next TikTok sensation.

I have two undergraduate courses this fall. I thought I’d post the syllabuses and also give away my hidden agenda.

English 358:358 Early Twentieth-Century Fiction

Syllabus (pdf)

What do James Joyce, Dashiell Hammett, Mulk Raj Anand, and Zora Neale Hurston have in common? All significant writers of English-language fiction, all active in the first half of the twentieth century, these writers lived through an epoch of global social upheaval—world wars, revolutions, mass migrations, the rise and decline of empire—and their work registers and responds to a world of crisis. Yet Joyce, the Irish experimentalist, writes nothing like Hammett, the pioneer of hard-boiled detective fiction; Anand, the committed Indian leftist, adopts very different perspectives from Hurston, the supreme Harlem Renaissance novelist. This course is a study in what is and is not shared in the fiction of these four writers and others of their era. Students will learn to analyze the forms and themes of exemplary fictions of the early twentieth century and to understand the variety of these fictions as a result of social contestation and collaboration. Readings include case studies in literary modernism (Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner), detective fiction (Dorothy Sayers, Hammett), Harlem Renaissance fiction (Jean Toomer, Hurston), and Indian writing in English (Rabindranath Tagore, Anand).

English 359:207 Data and Culture

Syllabus (pdf)
Syllabus bibliography (pdf)

The digitization of wide swaths of the print record has opened up new challenges and opportunities for researchers in the humanities. This course introduces students to some of the key techniques used by humanities scholars to organize, manipulate, and analyze digital sources—attending both to longstanding scholarly institutions and practices that shape our understanding of digital texts (critical editions, brick-and-mortar archives, and quantitative methods within social, political, and cultural history) and to new methods for studying texts, cultural geography, and relations between and among producers and consumers of culture.

Students who complete this course will develop facility in the use of digital tools for the representation, curation, and analysis of digital text. In each case, however, we will place these relatively new tools within a longer history of humanistic inquiry and will ask: what insights can these tools provide, and what questions (and texts) do they marginalize or occlude? Our aim throughout is to examine how digitization and data science have changed the questions that humanists can ask of their sources. What does it mean to think of culture as data? What new histories do these tools and methods help us uncover? In what ways has digitization helped and hindered the ability of humanities disciplines such as history, literary studies, and art history to provide an understanding of the past that can speak to urgent questions in the present moment?

Hidden agenda after the jump (as they used to say in the Elder Days of Blogging).

The other day I was talking with an innocent bystander about some of my past work in the digital humanities. It occurred to me to wonder what a person who went looking for that work would find. The abyss also looks into you. Anyhoo, once upon a time I spent a lot of time working with data from JSTOR’s Data for Research service, a thing that no longer exists, and I produced two fairly elaborate programming projects related to topic models of text: my dfrtopics R package and my dfr-browser topic-model visualization. I am writing this post to announce that those things are still available and continue to shamble on, zombie-like, into the coming apocalypse. But I don’t plan to develop them further.

In my last post on casualization at Rutgers, written November 2021, I discussed statistics on the rise of full-time, non-tenure-track faculty, arguing that this was an increasingly significant yet under-discussed aspect of the broader erosion of the tenure track. I promised then that I’d follow up on some of the details about different categories of faculty and of institutions. Would my dire picture of “twilight for tenure” change if I separated non-medical from medical faculty, or if I paid attention to faculty with non-instructional roles? Well, I’m pleased to report the picture is dire no matter how you paint it. I’ve been looking at the more granular information on higher-education staffing found in the Human Resources data from the Department of Education (specifically, the “Employees by Assigned Position” or EAP data files from IPEDS). Here are some tentative explorations, vacillating between being tediously technical and speculatively broad-brush. Skip to the end for my regular “workers of the world” conclusion followed by faculty-casualization league tables for research universities.

The basic question is, what are the terms of employment for people doing academic work in higher education? The EAP data answer that question by classifying workers at each institution as tenured, tenure-track, non-tenure-track, or “without faculty status,” dividing each category into full-time and part-time categories and according to whether they are in medical schools or not. The EAP survey also subdivides academic workers’ duties into instruction, research, and public service—as well as further categories like librarianship, archiving, and “Student and Academic Affairs.” Graduate workers (“graduate assistants”) are treated as another employee category, assigned either to teaching or research (and medical or non-). That leaves us with many possible ways of cross-cutting or subsetting the data about tenured and contingent academic work. (Obviously such categories do not exhaust the interesting variables; for example, the EAP data does not include any demographic information about each category. These are found in other IPEDS components, which however do not subdivide job categories with the same granularity.) What I want to do here is explore—without being exhaustive about it—whether the divisions matter to our understanding of contingency in the academy. I’m hoping that even if my analysis is wanting, the annotated R code on github, as “tidy” as I can make it, might help others get a leg up on working with this data.

Yesterday I had the privilege of responding to a wonderful talk by Matt Rubery at the Rutgers Initiative for the Book on “Podcasts, Audiobooks, and Podiobooks.” Feeling out of my depth as a non-podcast-listener, I went to my happy place instead, using my response as an occasion for digging around in a period and a medium I know better. Thinking about entanglements of print and audio fiction, I was moved to learn a little bit more about…

(Image from Galactic Central.) I’m not sure bringing this up was particularly illuminating on the subject of podcasts and books, but it was fun for me and I thought I’d set down a couple of things it made me think about.