In the first half of the last century, scores of Western artists and art historians traveled to India to have a firsthand experience of its variegated heritage of performing arts…
Issues
In the Same Room, Again: Anecdotes about Feminist Meetings
A Light Loose Commitment When I was a graduate student in New York, I worked as the managing editor of a feminist academic journal that focused on art and performance…
Circuit Training: The Critique of Narrative Reason
The system must be oriented to openness de novo. Peter Sloterdijk We fence our encounters in with gates. Erving Goffman Form, in the narrow sense, is nothing more than the…
An Introduction to Ambivalent Criticism
This special issue doesn’t propose Ambivalent Criticism™. Instead, this issue forwards essays that reflect on a style in which we already do criticism — a style we are calling ambivalent…
Introduction: Contemporary Culture After Data Science
The computational study of contemporary culture is experiencing something of a renaissance across the university. Computer scientists are writing algorithms to identify the emotional arcs of novels.1 Sociologists are building…
Content-Era Ethics
Between 2008 and 2012, social media changed. Previously, companies like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr had been small, independent startups. Their sites were walled gardens where users could create and…
Squatter Regionalism: Postwar Fiction, Geography, and the Program Era
The last chapter of Tom Lutz’s landmark study Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (2004) is ambitiously titled “The New New Regionalism and the Future of Literature.” In it, Lutz reminds…
The Goodreads “Classics”: A Computational Study of Readers, Amazon, and Crowdsourced Amateur Criticism
What is a classic? This is “not a new question,” as T.S. Eliot acknowledged more than seventy-five years ago.1 More than simply “not new,” this question now feels decidedly old,…
Voice
If trade publications like Publisher’s Weekly and Writer’s Digest are any indication, there is no more desirable a trait for a would-be writer than voice. Not talent or technique, not craft or style, not…
A Network Analysis of Postwar American Poetry in the Age of Digital Audio Archives
Writing in 1981, Ron Silliman could not have been more astute in characterizing networks and scenes as the two governing modes of social organization in postwar American poetry.1 According to…