I’m attending the Society for Novel Studies conference in Pittsburgh this week. I’m on a panel organized by my colleague Rebecca Walkowitz on “Genre Fiction and World Literature,” with papers by Sarah Chihaya (Princeton), Jessica FitzPatrick (Pitt), and Philip Joseph (University of Colorado–Denver). The panel is in the D session, Saturday at 2:30 p.m. in Carnegie Room I-II.

My paper is called “Cosmopolitanism before and after the Omnivore,” and I’m going to argue that the rise of omnivorousness as a high-status disposition enables one kind of cosmopolitan science fiction—exemplified by Ghosh’s Calcutta Chromosome—while inviting us to forget the worldliness of lowlier forms dating back to the earliest pulps. Visualization:

Every year, I teach Early Twentieth-Century Fiction. In the first lecture, I tell my students that the baseline fact about fiction in this period is expansion: more books, more readers, more writers. It is this expansion which makes possible the diversification and hierarchization that characterize the literary field in the twentieth century. And every year, I want to illustrate these claims quantitatively. It seems straightforward enough: surely, somewhere in my small pile of book-history books, there would be a table of figures of fiction production over time that will let me substantiate this straightforward point. But the best I have managed so far has been disappointingly vague and broad-brush, cobbled together from a table here and an offhand summary there in work by book historians.

For my research on popular fiction genres, I have been working through Publishers’ Weekly in the decades on either side of 1900. It has the additional convenience of being digitally available, since scans of the yearly volumes are in HathiTrust (and, mirabile dictu, actually organized under a single catalogue entry). PW is one of the sources for the figures I have seen, since it kept a running bibliography of new books, and every January printed an annual summary of the past year’s production. Since I was reading those annual summaries anyway, I decided to transcribe PW’s tallies of yearly fiction production. Perhaps it would be possible to automate the transcription, but trying to get, say, Tabula going here was more work than just writing down the numbers in a CSV file myself.

It occurred to me that this transcription might be useful to others, and that it wouldn’t hurt to make it possible to build on it. So I have put it on github. I didn’t have the time to transcribe the full tables, so there’s work to be done to get PW’s other categories transcribed. And other fundamental time series for the literary field would be equally useful: statistics from other countries, of course (I am also going through the Publishers’ Circular myself); but also anything about readership or the book market.

Descriptions of the courses I’m teaching next semester are now up on the teaching page. I am offering Early Twentieth-Century Fiction, as I have in past years, as well as a new course, a seminar on “Science Fiction in Print from Pulp to the Present.” I’m very excited about both courses. I’m still working on the syllabuses, which will be linked from those pages as soon as they’re ready. In the meanwhile, my Early 20th-Century Fiction syllabus from 2014 is online; this year’s course will not be identical, but it will be broadly similar. I taught science fiction as a 300-level course in 2013; the 400-level seminar will have different readings and requirements but quite a bit of overlap in terms of themes. I’m always happy to hear from students who are interested in either course.

I’ve updated this site with a minor redesign. I switched to using Hugo to generate the site. Hugo’s speed advantage over Jekyll was a big draw, despite its tragically disorganized documentation and some frustrating minor limitations. I’ve tried to preserve all the old links, except for some reorganizing in the blog-post categories; all the posts are still there, but I eliminated some redundant categories, and category listings themselves have moved. I have also updated my page on LaTeX and digital documents with extra remarks on markdown and R markdown. The page is no longer headed “Typography or death!” though I continue to stand by that position.

This post is a discussion and partial replication of Ted Underwood and Jordan Sellers’s fascinating essay “How Quickly Do Literary Standards Change?” (available in preprint and discussed on Ted’s blog). Hats off to Ted and Jordan, who have contributed something really remarkable here, not just in their provocative arguments but in the data they have made usable by others. It’s one thing to circulate data and code so that someone can in principle re-run your scripts—though that is already a lot—and quite another to make the data accessible enough for fresh analyses. The latter is a very demanding standard, too demanding for everyone to meet, I think. But it is what is required to let others build directly on your results. Even more importantly, it’s what’s needed to make research results pedagogically available. As I argue in an essay I’m working on now, any quantitative methods pedagogy should—must—lean heavily on the results of research. In the immortal words of Miriam Posner, “It’s just awful trying to find a humanities dataset”: one of the best ways to address this challenge would be to make good research data available in recirculable, easily accessible form.

So consider this post partly pedagogical in intent: I want to show that Ted and Jordan’s replication repository is already an excellent dataset and could be the basis for a lesson in automatic classification. What I want to emphasize here is that their work allows us to breeze right past the data-wrangling and straight into the analytical substance. This may not be entirely obvious from their python code, so I’m going to try to make it clearer by doing the whole thing in R instead.

Rather than give all the technical detail, I’ll only show the R code where it makes a point about the analysis. The full R markdown source for this post is in this repository. Feel free to skim right past the R listings anyway. This is a literary theory and data analysis post that happens to have some software details in it, not a programming post. Here we go…

Last year I participated in a symposium at the University of Utrecht on The Ethics of Autonomy. Many of the contributions to that symposium now appear in revised form in a special issue of the Journal of Dutch Literature, edited by the symposium organizers, Frans Ruiter and Wilbert Smulders. I contributed a response to the whole, Autonomy Proliferates. The issue is in English, but all the titles have Dutch versions as well, and I particularly appreciate the rather more poetic-sounding version of mine, “Autonomie bloeit.”

Most of the essays discuss the work of the Dutch novelist W.F. Hermans, a writer for whom literary autonomy was, as Ruiter and Smulders argue in their own contribution, a central concern. But the journal issue is really very wide-ranging, both in terms of approaches and in terms of the subject matter which the pretext of autonomy makes possible. A number of essays take up the cultural theories of Pierre Bourdieu: Ruiter and Smulders draw close parallels between Bourdieu and Hermans; Thomas Vaessens makes a provocative argument against accepting what he calls Bourdieu’s “faith in autonomy”; Laurens Ham complicates Bourdieu’s framework in his study of the continuing struggles over autonomy in contemporary Dutch literature from Multatuli to the present; and as for me, well—no surprises about my theoretical touchstones, if you know me for the fanboy I am.

That’s not to say that the contributors are all in lockstep. In addition to the controversy between Ruiter and Smulders and Vaessens about autonomy and responsibility, strikingly different views of autonomy emerge in the other essays, by Derek Attridge, Aukje van Rooden, Marc de Kesel, and Arnold Heumakers.

Hermans was a new writer for me and a great pleasure to explore, even if only in translation. His output is mostly unavailable in English; Ina Rilke has translated two of his novels, The Darkroom of Damocles and Beyond Sleep. I glance at the latter in my contribution to the special issue. The JDL special issue also includes English translations of two short pieces of Hermans’s writing: a biting manifesto, “Unsympathetic Fictional Characters” (trans. I. Rilke), and an enigmatic early story, “An Emancipation” (trans. M. Hutchison).

[Edited 12/27/15: Ham’s essay, “The Specialism of Unspecificity,” is not only about contemporary writing—nor, of course, is Bourdieu his only theoretical interlocutor, any more than he is for any of the other scholars here.]

I’ll be at the Modernist Studies Association in Boston this weekend. I’m looking forward to a lively discussion of modernist disciplinarity in the seminar Jonathan Goodwin and I have organized.

On Sunday 11/22 I’m on a roundtable, “The New Institutionalism in Modernist Studies,” organized and chaired by Robert Higney (CCNY/CUNY), with Merve Emre (American Academy/McGill), Lisi Schoenbach (University of Tennessee), and Lisa Siraganian (SMU).

H1. The number of definitions of “institutionalism” is at least as large as the number of scholars asked to define it.

H2. The amount of monomaniacal insistence on the importance of genre fiction increases linearly (at least) with the amount of time you let Goldstone speak.

It’s at 10:30 a.m. in St. George A. Since we’re a five-cornered roundtable, there should be plenty of time for wider discussion, especially if the chair draws the correct conclusion from H2. Should be fun.

I’m speaking at NYU this Thursday afternoon, at the invitation of the NYU Digital Experiments group:

Corpus or Field? A Challenge for Quantitative Methods

One of the most promising prospects for quantitative methods in literary studies is that of rigorous and empirically wide-ranging accounts of the relations between literature and society. Yet the boundary between textual interpretation and a sociological analysis of literature has proven surprisingly hard to cross. In this talk, I retrace some sociological traditions of quantitative textual study, from postwar content analyses of political opinion to contemporary field theory, and I argue that they offer literary scholars alternatives to the doxa of “reading” that dominates and limits methodological discussion in our discipline. The sociological traditions turn us from corpus to field, from text collections to social spaces of symbolic competition and collaboration. I will discuss (and exemplify) the many challenges and pitfalls of this shift, technical and conceptual, in my own attempts to quantify the changing status of “reading” in the history of literary scholarship.

If you’re around, the talk is in Bobst Library (2nd fl., Avery Fisher Center, East Room) at 4:30. Come accuse me of naïve positivism, I dare you.

Pierre Bourdieu, pioneer of quantitative literary analysis:

Pour vérifier la correspondance entre l’espace des positions et l’espace des prises de position, nous avons recensé 537 textes de 510 auteurs publiés par les éditeurs retenus dans notre étude, qui ont été traduits en français entre juillet 1995 et juillet 1996 et retenu, pour chacun des titres, les variables suivantes : genre (roman, nouvelle, récit, conte), éditeur d’origine et et d’arrivée, langue d’origine (pour l’anglais on a distingué entre «anglais» et «américain»), nom du traducteur, nom et sexe de l’auteur, année de parution de l’édition originale, de la traduction française (1995 ou 1996), jugements de la critique, prix, nombre de pages, nombre total d’auteurs étrangers publiées par l’éditeur concerné, nombre d’auteurs ayant la même langue d’origine nationale. L’immensité des recherches nécessaires pour le mener à bien nous a conduits à abandonner ce projet.

In order to verify the correspondence between the space of positions and the space of position-takings, we took a census [survey?] of 537 texts by 510 authors translated into French between July 1995 and July 1996 which were published by the publishers in our study, considering the following variables: genre (roman, nouvelle, récit, conte [novel, short story, (non-fiction) narrative, (fantastic) tale]), original publisher and French publisher, original language (for English we distinguished between “English” and “American”), name of translator, name and sex of the author, year of publication of the original edition, of the French translation (1995 or 1996), critics’ judgments, prizes, number of pages, total number of foreign authors published by the publisher in question, number of authors having the same original national language. The immensity of the research necessary to carry this project off led us to abandon it.

("Une révolution conservatrice dans l’édition," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 126, no. 1 [1999]: 3–28; here 18n31.)

Nothing beside remains….

(thanks to @rania_tn on twitter for help translating genre terms; I alone am responsible for errors in translation above)

It’s gratifying, and a little frightening, when someone else uses your own code. Jonathan Goodwin has built on my dfrtopics and dfr-browser code-blobs to produce a fascinating visualization of topics in fiction 1920–1922, derived by modeling the genre-specific word frequencies data set from HathiTrust. He’s given a nice description of his process as well. In the process, Jonathan revealed some unnecessarily restrictive assumptions built into my code. He solved the problem by modifying my code: all praise to him! But then I felt bad and wanted to make it possible for others to go further without having to dig into the Area X that is my code. So I made a few adjustments to my new version of dfrtopics. Here are some notes on using the updated version to cope with the issues Jonathan found in processing and modeling the Hathi data.