1. The first time I visited Paris, I tried to act it out. Written in 1919 and published the next year by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, Hope Mirrlees’s Paris describes…
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Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
Paradise: On-Earthly Dilemmas
You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that. —Samuel Beckett, Endgame for Johanna Winant I. On-earthly delights The painting now known as The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490 – 1510)…
Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
A Friend, An Enemy
On June 21, 2021, I added a postscript to this essay. — Joshua Kotin I On April Fool’s Day, 1965, Amiri Baraka (known then as LeRoi Jones) sent a postcard…
Contemporaries Essays, Interpretive Difficulty
My Interdisciplinary Uncanny Valley
Of all the interpretive experiences, and of all of the analytical puzzles, that might have baffled me, I had never envisioned this one: attempting, as an English professor, to understand…
Peer Reviewed Articles
Issue 7: Post45 x Journal of Cultural Analytics, Peer Reviewed Articles
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…
Issue 7: Post45 x Journal of Cultural Analytics, Peer Reviewed Articles
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…
Issue 7: Post45 x Journal of Cultural Analytics, Peer Reviewed Articles
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…
Issue 7: Post45 x Journal of Cultural Analytics, Peer Reviewed Articles
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,…
Issue 7: Post45 x Journal of Cultural Analytics, Peer Reviewed Articles
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…