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"So, Richard Jean"
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Fictions of Natural Democracy: Pearl Buck,The Good Earth, and the Asian American Subject
This essay offers a new reading of the American author Pearl Buck, focusing on her cultural concept of \"natural democracy.\" It does so by critically reconstructing and examining this concept through three linked contexts: 1930s China, the novelThe Good Earth, and the 1943 Chinese Exclusion Acts Repeal hearings. The essay argues that natural democracy enabled the emergence of a U.S.–China, trans-Pacific cultural sphere that helped to facilitate the rise of the postwar Asian American subject.
Journal Article
Literary Pattern Recognition
Long and So explicate the haiku through the lens of close reading, read it as sociohistorical object, and interpret it through a machine-learning framework. They parse the specific and autonomous conception of the haiku that each critical method offers, while showing how these conceptions structure the method's ability to identify the haiku as a distinct and replicable style or literary pattern. Finally, they bring the methods into direct conversation to show that in spite of the discrete ontological visions of the haiku under which each operates, their different ways of recognizing pattern supplement the inevitable limitations of each.
Journal Article
Fandom and Fictionality after the Social Web: A Computational Study of AO3
Web-based fanfiction is an increasingly important species of modern fiction that is necessary to understanding contemporary literary culture in a multimedia world. Using the Harry Potter fandom on the platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) as our case study, we combine close reading and computational analysis to examine the narrative features of fanfiction and the rhetorical commentary surrounding it. Our approach models a rapprochement between literary studies and fan studies, offering a new data-driven method for analyzing the relationship between traditionally published fiction, web-based fanfiction, and empirical forms of reader response.
Journal Article
Race and Distant Reading
This essay brings together two methods of cultural‐literary analysis that have yet to be fully integrated: distant reading and the critique of race and racial difference. It constructs a reflexive and critical version of distant reading—one attuned to the arguments and methods of critical race studies—while still providing data‐driven insights useful to the writing of literary history and criticism, especially to the history and criticism of postwar African American fiction, in particular James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room . Because race is socially constructed, it poses unique challenges for a computational analysis of race and writing. Any version of distant reading that addresses race will require a dialectical approach. (RJS and ER)
Journal Article
BLM Insurgent Discourse, White Structures of Feeling and the Fate of the 2020 'Racial Awakening'
Working with Twitter data, this paper offers new findings on the #BlackLivesMatter movement and \"racial awakening\" of summer 2020. Framing methods to address this important moment, this paper contends that cultural studies and critical race studies can be enriched through an engagement with new computational approaches. We analyze how white and racial minority voices talked about race and track their fraught contestation for leadership of racial discourse over the summer of 2020. We uncover a surprising story of white colorblindness even in the midst of a \"racial awakening,\" a story that questions claims that the Trump presidency and the summer of 2020 ushered in a new era of US racial consciousness. And we show how a Black and minority discourse with transformative potential surged and receded. For cultural studies, our data and analysis revise Raymond Williams's influential model of cultural evolution by introducing a new concept: the insurgent, a long-building minority cultural strain that surges to contest the dominant culture in a moment of crisis. For critical race studies, our findings revise prominent theorizations of colorblindness, racial ideology, and hegemony. By revealing the messy and unconscious feelings characterizing colorblindness, our data contest theorizations of colorblindness as an ideology and counter the focus on articulate beliefs in theories of racial hegemony. Ultimately, this paper shows that bringing data methods focused on moments of cultural contestation and mass communication into dialogue with field-specific theory and qualitative analyses can expand our models of how race, discourse, and culture operate.
Journal Article
Economics, Race, and the Postwar US Novel
How has the language of economics, as codified by economics as a discipline, entered the US novel in the postwar period? Have economists influenced novelists at the level of language, and if so, how and how much? We begin with the belief, inferred from current scholarship on economics and culture, but never before empirically tested, that economic language became more prevalent around 1980, especially among white men—a belief that we strive to complicate and give nuance. Readers may detect an irony in the relationship between our method and case study. No academic discipline has valorized the use of quantification for social analysis more than economics. As a discipline, its language has become saturated with the language of modeling. Cultural and literary critics have long argued that economics has even harmed society by creating false accounts of how humans behave and think. Can we take their tools, however, and make them ours as a way to critique economics itself?
Journal Article
Culture, Theory, Data: An Introduction
Historical sources play a similar rhetorical role, and Rosenberg shows that the seventeenth century discussed them in a similar way, writing about \"historical data\" and even \"scriptural data. \"3 By the late eighteenth century, however, data was specializing to contexts like \"medicine, finance, natural history, and geography. Even our recipes and home movies are transmitted digitally. [...]contemporary statistical models are no longer restricted to overtly quantitative problems with a small number of variables.7 Machine learning can create variables as needed to model images, social networks, and unstructured text. Computational models have been used to estimate the number of medieval books missing from our libraries, to trace the changing senses of \"freedom\" and \"justice\" in abolitionist newspapers, and to contrast the visual styles of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie.9 There is no longer much question that computation can produce cultural knowledge.
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Editor's Column: The Library Walk
The Library Walk is a collection of plaques adorning both sidewalks along Forty-First Street between Park Avenue and the New York Public Library. Assembled by the Grand Central Partnership (in collaboration with the New York Public Library and New Yorker magazine) and cast in bronze relief by Gregg LeFevre in 2004, these weird little packets of literacy were designed to rehabilitate a \"shadowy street\" and make it a glorious library entrance. Here, Yaeger highlights sixteen scholars who comment on the Library Walk, which tries to resurrect an older mode of reading in which people seize upon literature's slogans to discover \"the best that has been thought and known.\"
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