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"Taste Fiction."
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Memoirs of the Life of Henriette-Sylvie de Moliere
No detailed description available for \"Memoirs of the Life of Henriette-Sylvie de Moliere\".
eBook
I hear a pickle : (and smell, see, touch, and taste it, too!)
Children explore their five senses, learning what they can see, smell, hear, touch, and taste.
Book
The novel and the new ethics
For a generation of contemporary Anglo-American novelists, the question \"Why write?\" has been answered with a renewed will to believe in the ethical value of literature. Dissatisfied with postmodernist parody and pastiche, a broad array of novelist-critics—including J.M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Gish Jen, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Franzen—champion the novel as the literary genre most qualified to illuminate individual ethical action and decision-making within complex and diverse social worlds. Key to this contemporary vision of the novel's ethical power is the task of knowing and being responsible to people different from oneself, and so thoroughly have contemporary novelists devoted themselves to the ethics of otherness, that this ethics frequently sets the terms for plot, characterization, and theme. In The Novel and the New Ethics, literary critic Dorothy J. Hale investigates how the contemporary emphasis on literature's social relevance sparks a new ethical description of the novel's social value that is in fact rooted in the modernist notion of narrative form. This \"new\" ethics of the contemporary moment has its origin in the \"new\" idea of novelistic form that Henry James inaugurated and which was consolidated through the modernist narrative experiments and was developed over the course of the twentieth century. In Hale's reading, the art of the novel becomes defined with increasing explicitness as an aesthetics of alterity made visible as a formalist ethics. In fact, it is this commitment to otherness as a narrative act which has conferred on the genre an artistic intensity and richness that extends to the novel's every word.
eBook
Literary tastes are as heritable as other human phenotypes: Evidence from twins’ library borrowing
Social science research argues that differences in individuals’ literary and cultural tastes originate in social environments. Yet, it might be that these differences are partly associated with genetic differences between individuals. To address this possibility, we use nation-scale registry data on library borrowing among Danish twins ( N = 67,900) to assess the heritability of literary tastes. We measure literary tastes via borrowing of books of different genres (e.g., crime and biographical novels) and formats (physical, digital, and audio) and decompose the total variance in literary tastes into components attributable to shared genes (heritability), shared environments (social environment shared by siblings), and unique environments (social environments not shared by siblings). We find that genetic differences account for 45–70 percent of the total variance in literary tastes, shared environments account for almost none of the variance, and unique environments account for a moderate share. These results suggest that literary tastes are approximately as heritable as other human phenotypes (e.g., physical traits, cognition, and health). Moreover, heritability is higher for socioeconomically disadvantaged groups than for advantaged groups. Overall, our results suggest that research should consider the role of genetic differences in accounting for individual differences in literary and broader cultural tastes.
Journal Article
Do book consumers discriminate against Black, female, or young authors?
The publishing industry shows marked evidence of both gender and racial discrimination. A rational explanation for this difference in treatment of both female and Black authors might relate to the taste-based preferences of book consumers, who might be less willing to pay for books by such authors. We ran a randomized experiment to test for the presence of discriminatory preferences by consumers based on authors’ race, gender and/or age. We collected ratings of 25,201 book surveys across 9,072 subjects on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, making this study the largest experimental study of the book market to date. Subjects were presented with mocked-up book covers and descriptions from each of 14 fiction and non-fiction genres, with one of three possible titles per book randomly assigned. Using author names and photographs, we signaled authors’ race, gender, and age and randomly assigned these combinations to each book presented to our subjects. We then asked subjects to rate their interest in purchasing the book, their evaluation of the author’s credentials, and the amount they were willing to pay for the book. The experimental design of this study strived to eliminate the potential for proxy-based discrimination by providing book descriptions that detailed the authors’ relevant professional experience. The large sample allowed for exploration of various types of taste-based discrimination observed in the literature, including discrimination against particular groups, homophily, and pro-social behavior. Overall, book consumers showed a willingness to pay approximately $0.50 or 3.5% more on average for books by Black authors and little, if any, practically meaningful discrimination based on age or gender. In other words, our study finds no and even contrary evidence of taste-based preferences by consumers that would rationalize the historic discriminatory treatment of Black or of female authors by publishers nor of discrimination based on an author’s age.
Journal Article
\Why can't you tell I'm disgusting?\ Reading Ainslie Hogarth's Dark Fantasy Novel Motherthing through a Gastrofeminist Lens
Abby proceeds to kill, cut up, and cook another woman as Ralph's preferred dish Chicken à la King, serving it to her unsuspecting husband. The novel crystallizes and criticizes a traditional feminine taste ideal, wherein food should taste mild and familiar, and where gustatory experiments and culinary creativity would challenge the gastro-social order that Abby strives for. [...]Abby's self-loathing leads to the reproduction of unhealthy gender roles from her childhood home. (Højlund 6, my translation) Any discussion of 'good taste· thus derives from both a person's individual preferences that change over time-taste as an aesthetic category-and a universal standard that everyone in a society is expected to follow-taste as a moral category (Gronow 291).
Journal Article
Cultural Reception and Production: The Social Construction of Meaning in Book Clubs
Investigations of the reception of textual objects have alternately emphasized demographically conditioned patterns of evaluation and taste, or the agency of viewers, readers, and listeners in constructing their own cultural interpretations. In the present article, we advance an empirical and formal analysis of the cultural reception of texts in which interpretations of the multiple dimensions on which a text may be evaluated are transmitted and modified within small groups of individuals in face-to-face contact. We contribute an approach in which the intersection of social structure, individual readings, and interactive group processes all may enter into readers' interpretations of a novel. Our investigation focuses on a set of book clubs for which we collected data on group members' pre- and post-discussion evaluations of a specific book, and the interpersonal influence networks that were formed during the groups' discussions. We analyze these data with a multilevel model of individuals nested in groups, which allows us to address the effects of structure and group dynamics on cultural reception in a single analytic framework.
Journal Article
La haine de la littérature selon Bernard Lamy
The paper focuses on Lamy’s reflections on literary fiction and theatre as displayed in his Nouvelles réflexions sur l’art poétique (1678). Bernard Lamy (1640–1715) was a prolific writer, a major Augustinian thinker and a member of the French Oratory. Today, he is mostly known for his La rhétorique ou l’Art de parler (1st edition dates back to 1675), and his numerous works continue to elicit contributions from specialists on rhetoric and literary fiction. Lamy’s reflections on literature, theatre and aesthetics are based on rigorous moral and religious grounds, hence his overriding aim to dismantle and deconstruct the core of what some continue to call the “classical doctrine”. Lamy systematically treats topics such as embellishment, respect for the unities (time, place, action), paradoxes of aesthetical pleasure, verisimilitude, morality of literary and theatrical fiction, etc., all to demonstrate their radical incompatibility with the principles and values of an exemplary pious person. Lamy’s rigorist moral and religious views might well seem shocking to a modern reader, but we aim to show that his analysis of various creative strategies (especially intricacies of rhetorical adaptation and procedures of arousing an emotional/intellectual response) has a great potential to enrich our understanding of early modern fiction and theatre.
Journal Article