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 Thursda ..read more

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 ov ..read more

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. In the figure, the blue line traces the number of new PhDs in English language and literature and closely related fields in the US. The solid black line traces the number of t ..read more

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: I ..read more

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 a ..read more

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 le ..read more

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: cultural tastes over time and social space (names, music genres, recipes) textual/paratextual signs of fictional genre (text-mining science fiction and crime) historical and fictional social networks (Hamlet characters a ..read more

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

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 ..read more

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. Publishers’ Weekly, January 25, 1941: 429. 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 ..read more