The New Modernist Studies, edited by Douglas Mao, 2020
Twenty-first century paradigms of global modernism implicitly endorse “babelization” (the inscrut... more Twenty-first century paradigms of global modernism implicitly endorse “babelization” (the inscrutable styles of literary texts, the addition of lesser taught languages to the field) as a corrective to linguistic imperialism and the reduction of language to a communicative medium. Yet this stance does not fully account for the distinction between natural and artificial languages. “Debabelization,” as linguist C. K. Ogden put it in 1931, motivated rich debates about the nature of language and whether technological intervention could make particular languages more efficient agents of cultural exchange. Designers of Esperanto, Ido, and Basic English each promised that their artificial language would bridge the gap between speakers of different national tongues. This essay shows how the competitive and techno-utopian discourse around auxiliary language movements intersects with the history and aesthetics of modernist literature. While linguists strove to regulate the vagaries of natural languages, modernist writers (for example, Aimé Césaire, G. V. Desani, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H. G. Wells) used debabelization as a trope for exploring the limits of scientific objectivity and internationalist sentiment.
This introduction argues that literary expertise cannot be understood without the figure of the a... more This introduction argues that literary expertise cannot be understood without the figure of the amateur. It turns to the critic as amateur not to endorse the backlash against experts, but to recover a story of literary study and institutional crossover that might combat it. The contributors to our collection re-examine the professionalization of modern literary study from the point of view of the amateur. Yet, from the outset, point of view is misleading because “the amateur” is not a uniform position so much as an assortment of perspectives on the practice and purpose of criticism. Essays explore the amateurism of canonical critics, eccentric intellectuals, students, small press publishers, book collectors, radio show hosts, and more. View widget of book here: https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/5d9ba3c5fa4f8c0001c20413
verybody's a critic. So goes the old adage that anyone given the opportunity to judge another's p... more verybody's a critic. So goes the old adage that anyone given the opportunity to judge another's performance will do so. It is a phrase often uttered in exasperation and with the implication that "everybody" lacks expertise and authority, if not circumspection. This "everybody," in other words, is an amateur. He has access to the means of production (in the case of criticism, a voice), if not necessarily the education or training to form a sophisticated opinion. It is now routine to observe that the Internet has turned everybody into a critic and much more. Social media platforms and software packages have turned amateurs into photographers, graphic designers, journalists, and authors with followings that rival professionals in these fields. The ease and ubiquity of digital publishing have enabled the "mass amateurization" of the critical, creative, and communicative arts, allowing amateurs to bypass the gatekeeping practices of specific institutions (e.g. the gallery, the newspaper, the publishing house), and to perform acts of photography, journalism, or authorship without necessarily identifying with a specialized guild or benefitting from its resources. 1 Whether a cause of chagrin or excitement, the digital domain of publishing culture is definitively changing the ways in which contemporary writers, artists, and audiences conceive of their creative works and creative selves. The task of this essay is to examine the organizational, collaborative, and economic practices that are blurring the lines between amateur identity and professional activity, as well as between professional identity and amateur activity. As this chiasmus suggests, the crossing of amateur and professional practices defines the digital publishing scene of online writing communities, for-profit social networks, and for-love fandoms. In these spaces, amateurs share what they love while being exploited for their data; they climb the career ladder while also learning to game the system. Most of all, they partake in communal processes of reading and writing that exert transformative pressure on august institutions of literature, from the publishing house to professional authorship to reviewing culture.
A short methods paper on the significance of Web 2.0 social media platforms for the discipline of... more A short methods paper on the significance of Web 2.0 social media platforms for the discipline of literary studies. It reflects on how social media companies deploy the rhetoric of "platform" to differentiate themselves from gatekeeping publishers and argues that contemporary literary culture is now embedded within internet culture.
The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2019
A response to a forum convened on my book Chimeras of Form. I reflect on the place of the book i... more A response to a forum convened on my book Chimeras of Form. I reflect on the place of the book in modernist and postcolonial studies. I also argue that the forum as a whole points to major concerns regarding the relationship of literature to social movements. Finally, I consider the impact of postcolonial theory on literary studies and the future of postcolonial studies as an institutional category.
This essay was written for a special issue of Modernism/Modernity entitled "Weak Theory." It the... more This essay was written for a special issue of Modernism/Modernity entitled "Weak Theory." It theorizes the concept of obliterature in relationship to feminist publishing in print and digital media, the modernist canon, and academic labor. We argue that obliterature exists in a shadow formation to capital L, canonical Literature. It explains the relationship between the enduring and ephemeral, the amateur and the professional, in the construction of aesthetic value. Our case studies for amateur criticism are Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas and Kate Zambreno's Heroines.
Global modernism is almost always talked about in terms of expansion: more archives, more languages, longer time frames, wider geographies. This pieces talks about it in terms of scalability. Scalability refers to the ability of a system, network, or project to handle growth without changing its governing principles—that is, to accommodate more material with minimum expenditure. I argue that global modernism as not scaled well and that a lack of scalability is a good thing.
This essay shows how digital publishing practices are changing the field of contemporary literatu... more This essay shows how digital publishing practices are changing the field of contemporary literature. It identifies an overlooked intersection between strategies of amateur creativity and professional literary production across print and digital mediums. Strategies of amateur creativity (a category coined by Lawrence Lessig) include self-publishing stories, novels, and poetry, participating in online writing communities, and using social media platforms to share work. Such online behavior fosters a global popular culture that is, I argue, reshaping traditional literary categories like authorship and canonicity as well as institutions like the publishing house. The essay brings scholarship on fandom, digital sharing economies, and media studies into conversation with literary studies to explain how internet cultures of amateurism alter definitional accounts of artistic works as both commodities and gifts. It further shows how changing conceptions of literary ownership and distribution inform a range of contemporary writers’ experiments with the formal composition of their works, anonymous publishing, and promotion. Writers addressed include Margaret Atwood, Elena Ferrante, Wu Ming, Cory Doctorow, and Lauren Beukes.
Collected in The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction Since 1945, ed. David James (Cambridge: C... more Collected in The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction Since 1945, ed. David James (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016)
The New Modernist Studies, edited by Douglas Mao, 2020
Twenty-first century paradigms of global modernism implicitly endorse “babelization” (the inscrut... more Twenty-first century paradigms of global modernism implicitly endorse “babelization” (the inscrutable styles of literary texts, the addition of lesser taught languages to the field) as a corrective to linguistic imperialism and the reduction of language to a communicative medium. Yet this stance does not fully account for the distinction between natural and artificial languages. “Debabelization,” as linguist C. K. Ogden put it in 1931, motivated rich debates about the nature of language and whether technological intervention could make particular languages more efficient agents of cultural exchange. Designers of Esperanto, Ido, and Basic English each promised that their artificial language would bridge the gap between speakers of different national tongues. This essay shows how the competitive and techno-utopian discourse around auxiliary language movements intersects with the history and aesthetics of modernist literature. While linguists strove to regulate the vagaries of natural languages, modernist writers (for example, Aimé Césaire, G. V. Desani, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H. G. Wells) used debabelization as a trope for exploring the limits of scientific objectivity and internationalist sentiment.
This introduction argues that literary expertise cannot be understood without the figure of the a... more This introduction argues that literary expertise cannot be understood without the figure of the amateur. It turns to the critic as amateur not to endorse the backlash against experts, but to recover a story of literary study and institutional crossover that might combat it. The contributors to our collection re-examine the professionalization of modern literary study from the point of view of the amateur. Yet, from the outset, point of view is misleading because “the amateur” is not a uniform position so much as an assortment of perspectives on the practice and purpose of criticism. Essays explore the amateurism of canonical critics, eccentric intellectuals, students, small press publishers, book collectors, radio show hosts, and more. View widget of book here: https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/5d9ba3c5fa4f8c0001c20413
verybody's a critic. So goes the old adage that anyone given the opportunity to judge another's p... more verybody's a critic. So goes the old adage that anyone given the opportunity to judge another's performance will do so. It is a phrase often uttered in exasperation and with the implication that "everybody" lacks expertise and authority, if not circumspection. This "everybody," in other words, is an amateur. He has access to the means of production (in the case of criticism, a voice), if not necessarily the education or training to form a sophisticated opinion. It is now routine to observe that the Internet has turned everybody into a critic and much more. Social media platforms and software packages have turned amateurs into photographers, graphic designers, journalists, and authors with followings that rival professionals in these fields. The ease and ubiquity of digital publishing have enabled the "mass amateurization" of the critical, creative, and communicative arts, allowing amateurs to bypass the gatekeeping practices of specific institutions (e.g. the gallery, the newspaper, the publishing house), and to perform acts of photography, journalism, or authorship without necessarily identifying with a specialized guild or benefitting from its resources. 1 Whether a cause of chagrin or excitement, the digital domain of publishing culture is definitively changing the ways in which contemporary writers, artists, and audiences conceive of their creative works and creative selves. The task of this essay is to examine the organizational, collaborative, and economic practices that are blurring the lines between amateur identity and professional activity, as well as between professional identity and amateur activity. As this chiasmus suggests, the crossing of amateur and professional practices defines the digital publishing scene of online writing communities, for-profit social networks, and for-love fandoms. In these spaces, amateurs share what they love while being exploited for their data; they climb the career ladder while also learning to game the system. Most of all, they partake in communal processes of reading and writing that exert transformative pressure on august institutions of literature, from the publishing house to professional authorship to reviewing culture.
A short methods paper on the significance of Web 2.0 social media platforms for the discipline of... more A short methods paper on the significance of Web 2.0 social media platforms for the discipline of literary studies. It reflects on how social media companies deploy the rhetoric of "platform" to differentiate themselves from gatekeeping publishers and argues that contemporary literary culture is now embedded within internet culture.
The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2019
A response to a forum convened on my book Chimeras of Form. I reflect on the place of the book i... more A response to a forum convened on my book Chimeras of Form. I reflect on the place of the book in modernist and postcolonial studies. I also argue that the forum as a whole points to major concerns regarding the relationship of literature to social movements. Finally, I consider the impact of postcolonial theory on literary studies and the future of postcolonial studies as an institutional category.
This essay was written for a special issue of Modernism/Modernity entitled "Weak Theory." It the... more This essay was written for a special issue of Modernism/Modernity entitled "Weak Theory." It theorizes the concept of obliterature in relationship to feminist publishing in print and digital media, the modernist canon, and academic labor. We argue that obliterature exists in a shadow formation to capital L, canonical Literature. It explains the relationship between the enduring and ephemeral, the amateur and the professional, in the construction of aesthetic value. Our case studies for amateur criticism are Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas and Kate Zambreno's Heroines.
Global modernism is almost always talked about in terms of expansion: more archives, more languages, longer time frames, wider geographies. This pieces talks about it in terms of scalability. Scalability refers to the ability of a system, network, or project to handle growth without changing its governing principles—that is, to accommodate more material with minimum expenditure. I argue that global modernism as not scaled well and that a lack of scalability is a good thing.
This essay shows how digital publishing practices are changing the field of contemporary literatu... more This essay shows how digital publishing practices are changing the field of contemporary literature. It identifies an overlooked intersection between strategies of amateur creativity and professional literary production across print and digital mediums. Strategies of amateur creativity (a category coined by Lawrence Lessig) include self-publishing stories, novels, and poetry, participating in online writing communities, and using social media platforms to share work. Such online behavior fosters a global popular culture that is, I argue, reshaping traditional literary categories like authorship and canonicity as well as institutions like the publishing house. The essay brings scholarship on fandom, digital sharing economies, and media studies into conversation with literary studies to explain how internet cultures of amateurism alter definitional accounts of artistic works as both commodities and gifts. It further shows how changing conceptions of literary ownership and distribution inform a range of contemporary writers’ experiments with the formal composition of their works, anonymous publishing, and promotion. Writers addressed include Margaret Atwood, Elena Ferrante, Wu Ming, Cory Doctorow, and Lauren Beukes.
Collected in The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction Since 1945, ed. David James (Cambridge: C... more Collected in The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction Since 1945, ed. David James (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016)
Putting Foreignness to the test: rabindranath tagore's Babu english t he most interesting Points ... more Putting Foreignness to the test: rabindranath tagore's Babu english t he most interesting Points of contention in the comparative literature/world literature debates have concerned the status of original languages. For those who see a sharp distinction between comparative literature and world literature, most notably gayatri spivak, reading in the original language conveys more than simply the deep knowledge of a specialist (though this should not be undervalued). it signals an ethical responsibility -often phrased as a resistance to the sweeping and homogenizing effects of globalization -whereby a commitment to original languages is also a commitment to other kinds of rootedness: for example, the literary work's place within a particular cultural-historical milieu and the uniqueness of aesthetic and linguistic modes that would be lost even in the most worthy of translations (Death 8-10; 106). Yet this view of original languages, cultural particularism, and translation has come under pressure not only from proponents of world literature (damrosch, What; Walkowitz, "Unimaginable"), but also due to the institutional successes of comparatists like spivak and edward said. their position at the vanguard of postcolonial studies helped open the academy to the very non-european literatures -Bengali and Arabic, just to name two -that initiated the critique of comparison as eurocentric (see, for example, Chow and melas) and now turn literary studies toward a "doubleconsciousness" mode of comparison (radhakrishnan 256; Friedman 756). such models of comparison deeply inform the design of world literature courses, which have used the moniker "world" to reflect upon multidirectional patterns of influence and rethink the relationship between text and context (Agathacleous and gosselink 454; Cooppan 24-25).
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Global modernism is almost always talked about in terms of expansion: more archives, more languages, longer time frames, wider geographies. This pieces talks about it in terms of scalability. Scalability refers to the ability of a system, network, or project to handle growth without changing its governing principles—that is, to accommodate more material with minimum expenditure. I argue that global modernism as not scaled well and that a lack of scalability is a good thing.
Global modernism is almost always talked about in terms of expansion: more archives, more languages, longer time frames, wider geographies. This pieces talks about it in terms of scalability. Scalability refers to the ability of a system, network, or project to handle growth without changing its governing principles—that is, to accommodate more material with minimum expenditure. I argue that global modernism as not scaled well and that a lack of scalability is a good thing.