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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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

Asian American literature has grown dramatically in recent decades, reflecting a broader acceleration in contemporary cultural production.1 While no comprehensive bibliography of Asian American literary publications exists, we can look…

1: Port Townsend From Port Townsend, Washington, you can watch the Puget Sound meet the Salish Sea: the small water turns west toward the open ocean. In 1982, James Laughlin…

Academics have long recognized 1970 as a signal moment in feminism’s history. In the US, it has been labeled “Feminism’s Pivotal Year” when a “wave of press attention” moved women’s…