4: Digital Horizons

DIGITAL HUMANITIES PROJECTS:

• Chicago Text Lab
• Jim English et al, Mining Goodreads: Literary Reception Studies at Scale

READING:

• Hoyt Long and Richard Jean So, “Turbulent Flow: A Computational Model of World Literature” (2016)
• Mark McGurl, “Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon” (2016)
• Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons (2019)

Pre-Class Notes

– Hi all! I’ve fleshed out my B-Course essay proposal below. Looking forward to our group disscussions in class!

In December 2017, The New Yorker published “Cat Person”, a short story written by a young, fairly unknown American writer named Kristen Roupenian. The story revolves around Margot, a 20-year-old woman, who goes on a mediocre date with Robert, a 34-year-old man. Their awkward date leads to bad sex, and Margot breaks off the relationship. When she runs into Robert a month later, he angrily calls her a “whore”. 

On the surface, not much seems to happen. However, The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, told Roupenian’s editor that she found the story ‘intriguing’, and chose to publish it. At that point, Roupenian had only had a single story accepted in a print literary magazine; the rest of her published work was available only in small-press online magazines. “Cat Person” had already been rejected by every other publication she’d sent it to. 

Almost immediately after its publication, “Cat Person” became the most-read piece on The New Yorker’s website that year. The story was shared on Twitter more than a thousand times in its first week of publication. Within a week, Roupenian had sold her debut short story collection to Scout Press (Simon & Schuster US) for $1.3 million. In short, it became the world’s first “viral” short story.

Or did it? In June 1948, The New Yorker ran “The Lottery”, a now-infamous short story which revolves around an annual ritual practiced in a small, unnamed village, in which the inhabitants must draw lots to select one person who will be stoned to death. The story was written by Shirley Jackson – another young, fairly unknown female writer – more than half a decade before Roupenian penned her provocative short story. After “The Lottery” ran, hundreds of readers wrote letters expressing their anger and confusion over the short story, enquiring what it meant, some even cancelling their subscriptions to the magazine. Jackson became a literary sensation almost overnight – and more than half a century later, “The Lottery” is still hailed as “perhaps the most controversial short story The New Yorker has ever published”. 

In this essay, I will explore the making, marketing, and reception of “the viral short story”. I am particularly interested in how these two short stories, written in very different periods, exemplify the mass reading culture we know as “going viral”. What did this mean in the 1940s versus now? What makes a story “go viral”? 

Over the Christmas break, I visited The New Yorker archive at the New York Public Library, as well as the Shirley Jackson Papers, which are held at the Library of Congress. There, I was able to gain access to hundreds of letters from readers to Shirley Jackson, private correspondence between Jackson and her agents, internal correspondence from The New Yorker’s fiction department around the publication of “The Lottery”, as well as Jackson’s original manuscript and scrapbook for “The Lottery”.  

Although “The Lottery” didn’t “go viral” in a traditional sense, the enormous outpouring the short story received is reminiscent of the way readers used Twitter to respond to Roupenian’s “Cat Person”. I want to explore the role of Twitter as a digital archive, and hope to see how the practice of mass-sharing and public reading shaped the reception of Roupenian’s “Cat Person”. By drawing a comparison between the two, I hope to explore what makes a story “go viral”.

In this week’s workshop, I am looking for some help to decide what methodologies I should draw upon in order to support my argument. I am particularly interested in exploring different ideas about reader reception, “virality”, shared reading, and mass reading cultures (our discussions of “scale” will be quite useful here, I think). However, I’m also interested in exploring the cultural prestige of The New Yorker, and the role of Twitter in our reading experience. Any recommendations or ideas on these topics would be greatly appreciated! [CRK]

—

What I wish to do (you know, apart from have some tea + cake, and curl up with a book of my choosing)

Is to look at the 2009 edition of The Wind in the Willows, edited by Annie Gauger. In appearance, it resembles a coffee table book more than a scholarly edition and declares itself a tribute to Kenneth Grahame. At the same time, it contains archival material, and exhaustive footnotes that provide information on Grahame’s personal life, political allegory, intertextual references, and evaluation of various illustrators and their “faithfulness” to the text.

This begs the question of who the intended audience is and what kinds of reading this work can (not) facilitate. It appears to cater to more than one reading. The political analyses contextualise TWitW, as do the excursions into Grahame’s life, inviting/providing a symptomatic reading. Yet the stress on personal meaning of the editor and the introduction’s author clearly invoke affective responses. Furthermore, the volume is part of a series of annotated classics such as Dracula, Alice in Wonderland, and Huckleberry Finn, obviously devoted to canonised pieces, classics.

How do editions like these actively produce and continue the status of a “classic”? And what is it about the WitW that audiences love? Also, did the criticism of reading we’ve perused so far account for possible effects of childhood reading? From this jumble of loose ideas – reception history, purpose of the edition, possible readings, continuous creation of a classic – I aim to weave an argument that may very easily contain only one or two of the above.

Sources for reception history:

• Sales numbers by publishers
• Amazon reviews (if Michael approves)

Potentially relevant secondary readings:

• Günter Leypoldt – Degrees of Public Relevance: Walter Scott and Toni Morrison
• Franco Moretti – The Slaughterhouse of Literature
• Rita Felski – Context Stinks!
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick – Paranoid Reading

[FH]

I think I gave a bit too much background info. If you’re strapped for time, just skip to the fourth paragraph:) 

Julia Alvarez is a Dominican-American author who has repeatedly emphasized the importance of the hyphen in her identity. She views herself as both a Dominican and an American, not one or the other but a hybrid of both. This combination identity is reinforced by members of both parties. Dominicans do not generally accept her as a Dominican, but neither do the Americans view her as strictly American. She represents “life as a hybrid. Life as a hyphen.” 

Alvarez is known primarily for her first two novels How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and In the Time of the Butterflies (1994). What I find most interesting about these books is that they, like their author, seem to bridge two national cultures: the Dominican Republic and the United States. Garcia Girls focuses on four young Dominican girls who immigrate to the United States after their father’s political involvement forces them to flee the Dominican Republic. It talks about their struggle to learn English, to assimilate, to learn the nuances of a new culture, and to find and craft their own identity. Essentially, the customs of the DR and the customs in the US find themselves at odds with the four girls grappling with which ones to adopt and how to maneuver the in-between. 

Time of the Butterflies is a story, based on fact but fictionalized by Alvarez, of the Mirabal sisters who participated in the Dominican revolution against the dictatorship of Trujillo. This story, such a pivotal moment in the history of Dominicans, was fictionalized and popularized by Alvarez, who herself comes into the story as the gringa dominicana researching the story and writing it down, for American audiences. It is the history of the DR but became internationally known through the English works of someone with strong ties (even citizenship) to the United States. 

This close, sometimes conflicting association between the DR and the US in the life and works of Julia Alvarez is something that I’d like to explore more by looking at the public reception of these two works both within the United States and within the Dominican Republic. Specifically, I’m interested in how the book was marketed in both countries, how the public responded, why the books gained popularity in both countries (seems to be for very different reasons), how different reading cultures respond and why, and how these stories may have changed national opinion or stereotypes of both countries. I’m also interested in the transition: how both books were written in English and published in the United States but were destined from the beginning to be translated into Spanish and circulated within the Dominican Republic. Essentially, the history of the book itself (especially How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents) takes a reverse journey to the one in its contents. What can be learned by these new migration patterns and how does it change perception of the relationship between the US and the DR? 

I’m basing most of my paper on articles, opinion pieces, and reviews in newspapers, itineraries of book tours, correspondence between Julia Alvarez and various parties (including her editor, literary agent, and publicist), and records of book sales from the original publishers (I’ve emailed and they said they should be able to get me the numbers, so hopefully that happens!). I’ve also been researching the cultural and political relationship between the US and the DR. 

For this week’s workshop, I’m interested in hearing ideas/methodologies about reader reception (especially when that reception occurs in different countries or cultures), works in translation and how that influences perceptions of power, and history of the book (from the publisher, to marketing, to circulation, to reception, to cultural influence). [MD]

—

In my B-Course essay, I’m interested in exploring the genetic history of Stephen Spender’s often overlooked novel, The Temple. Based on his own experiences in Hamburg the summer after attending Oxford, the novel follows the experiences of a young English man, Paul, traveling through Europe with his friends, Ernst, Joachim, and others. The novel centers around Paul’s evolving friendships with characters based on many of Spender’s actual friends, such as W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Herbert List, whose photograph Spender used for The Temple’s cover art.

The both the Harry Ransom Center and the Weston Library house several of Spender’s drafts and notes, which span from the early 1940s to the novel’s final publication by Faber in 1988. Spender makes drastic changes across these drafts, from the main character’s name to his travel destinations to even the format of the story, which features fewer and fewer diary entries as the drafts unfold. Considering the changes Spender makes to the friendships featured in the story, it is surprising that there has been no scholarship on the changes Spender made to the dedication pages of his many drafts. Given that the Weston and HRC house more than seven different drafts of the dedication to The Temple, I would like my genetic criticism of The Temple to use Spender’s dedications as a framework for interpreting the revisions made. Almost all of the dedicatees are featured in the story as characters, and I am interested in whether the drafts reflect their dedications, what the effect is in drawing a reader’s attention to a given character at the outset, and what outside factors may have played a role in these changing dedications.

Using the tools and templates provided by Emma Huber’s Digital Editions course at the Taylor Institution, I plan to format this analysis as a digital archive or “research guide” that features high-resolution images of six different drafts of the dedication. An annotation will accompany each image that places it alongside its respective draft and the other drafts in the collection. An introduction to the research guide will aim to synthesize the collection of dedication pages and annotations, analyzing the relevance of the dedication page to The Temple’s genetic history. It is important that this work be studied because it, unlike much of Spender’s other work, traces his entire literary career while also placing his work in relationship to his mentors and contemporaries, such as W.H. Auden. Even though a wealth of information and material exists surrounding The Temple, very little scholarship has focused on it, let alone read the work against itself rather than as a tool for understanding Spender’s poetry. I hope that this project will bring to light an overlooked part of Spender’s career, evaluate the dedication page as a framework for genetic criticism, and place the work into the context of Spender’s literary and personal friendships. Looking forward to hearing everyone’s input on this! [CA]

–

A genetic criticism of B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo, his second novel, would trace the various stages of his production of both of this text, and the unique and violent “anti-reader” outlook that would come to shape his thoughts on literature and his writing process as a whole. The drafts, notebooks and letters in the archive of the novel’s production, in British Library Add. MS 89001, might reveal it as a as a suffering, mutilated work, not only in its literal laceration in Johnson’s late decision to have the novel printed with holes cut in some of its pages and his agonising over character name-changes, but also in the purposed ways it vexes its own relationship with reality and textuality. Its attempts to “reproduce the moment-to-moment fragmentariness of life” result in its highly self-conscious and material “aposiopesis”, which becomes, to its intrusive author, the deeper tragedy than that of the eponymous murdered supply teacher. 

Johnson’s archival material is made up of notes, plans, and unusual source-materials on scraps of torn graph paper and on the backs of receipts. These offer not only an interesting avenue to exploring the temporal genesis of AA, by tracking changing developments of the narrative as they match up to the dates on car-rental tickets and newspaper clippings, but perhaps also a conceptual frame for his literary style as a whole, as one focused on and frustrated by its pulpy mundanity and mediocre grasp of reality and masculinity. [SM]

In my B-Course essay, I plan to question the purpose, inherent message, and commercial and cultural value of a book. I will look into two different book artists, Ben Denzer and Russell Maret, both of whom are Manhattan-Based, living book artists interested in the form of the book rather than the content, and both of whom have gone through the New York Center for the Book Arts.

For Ben Denzer, I will be looking at the cheese book of American craft cheese slices that we saw at the Weston, and the 192 dollar book, a binding of 192 US one-dollar bills. Ben Denzer’s decision to publish such (arguably) conceptual art objects under the “Catalog Press,” the bind them into traditional book format, and the decision to print limited text (title, press, and price) calls into mind how we consume the book as an object. With the cheese book, I also want to question the mortality or conservation of a book, and what happens when a book is not meant to survive; the purpose of books and preservation in libraries. Another question that would be pertinent to both objects would be the commercial value of a book. American craft cheese is known to be ubiquitous, questionably long-lasting, and extremely cheap. Yet when it is bound and sold in limited copies, the value of the cheese ‘book’ multiplies by a hundredfold. The 192 dollar book is exactly twice the price of the number of one-dollar bills included: $384. Then again, what happens in the conceptualization, production, promotion, and supply chain that hitches up the price of a book? I wish to question the essential value of a book both culturally and commercially, and how their value might be decided by the public eye as well as the maker.

With both Denzer and Maret, I further want to investigate what happens when a book is stripped of text. With the increasing use of electronic sources–admittedly more accessible and sustainable–I posit that book artists have now the freedom to focus on the aesthetic value of the book as an object. Maret is particularly interested in the aesthetic aspects of font types, which harkens back to handmade illuminated manuscripts from the medieval to early modern period.

I am struggling most with finding secondary sources on both artists, but plan to look at certain art historical writing on books; I am currently using the Rare Books Collections in the Weston as a major source, and hope to get in contact with Ben Denzer for a brief interview.

Post-Class Notes