Contemporaries Essays

More Specific, More Complex

Katherine Bode, A World of Fiction 1: Remember when we used to fight about corpora? I read Katherine Bode’s “The Equivalence of Close and Distant Reading; Or, toward a New Object…

Charisma (Embodiment): a Response to Tess McNulty

1: In fall 2018, I made the trek across the Bay to Berkeley, where Andrew Piper was giving a talk drawn from his newly-published Enumerations. He presented results from chapter six,…

Models and Meaning

Andrew Piper, Enumerations: Data and Literary Studies 1: Models Andrew Piper’s Enumerations: Data and Literary Studies, published by the University of Chicago Press last August, begins with a simple, if inflammatory, charge:…

Seeing Double: a Response to Dan Sinykin

Ted Underwood’s Distant Horizons is a book that concerns continuity and courts consensus. That sets the tone just right for this response, as there is much in Dan’s review with which I…

Distant Reading and Literary Knowledge

Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change 1: Conflict Ted Underwood is ambitious. In Distant Horizons, published in February by University of Chicago Press, he reports that recent advances…

Introduction: Cultural Analytics Now

Call it cultural analytics or distant reading or data-rich literary studies. It is that branch of digital humanities that most leans on quantitative methods to understand its objects. For much…

The Social Forms of Speculative Poetics

From popular dystopian narratives to steampunk, zombie and horror tales to Afrosurrealist texts and alternate histories, speculative modes proliferate across our contemporary cultural landscape. Speculative aesthetics play on the tense,…

Window Poetics

I dwell in Possibility -A fairer House than Prose -More numerous of Windows -Superior – for Doors – What’s a window, to a poet? For Emily Dickinson, above, the act…

Translating a Milestone: Mon Emily Dickinson in France

In what follows, I explore how the 2017 French translation of Susan Howe’s landmark 1985 text, My Emily Dickinson, as Mon Emily Dickinson by the Dickinson scholar and prolific translator…

“The Jewel of the North”: Mateo Galindo’s “Encadenar” in Space

all that you touch you changeall that you change changes you [ . . . ] During this “Dim Age” governments defined parts of the North American Southwest as zones…