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Contemporaries Essays, Stranger Things and Nostalgia Now

Boys, Fractured: Stranger Things and Nostalgia Now

1 After a game of Dungeons and Dragons, two boys bike home from their friend’s house on a night in 1983. They are unaware of the awful and awesome events…

Contemporaries Essays, Stranger Things and Nostalgia Now

Familiar Things: Snow Ball ’84 and Straight Nostalgia

The second season of Stranger Things concludes with a junior high dance, Snow Ball ’84. Barely emerged from recent horrors, the kids discover the rituals of straight adolescence by awkwardly slow dancing,…

Issue 2: How To Be Now, Peer Reviewed Articles

Fuck the Avant-Garde

Rachel Greenwald Smith

Contemporaries Essays, Cultural Analytics Now

Afterword: Cultural Analytics Next

In his introduction to this cluster, Dan wrote that cultural analytics “has arrived at a new dispensation,” catalyzed by the publication of A World of Fiction, Enumerations, and Distant Horizons. This new phase is…

Contemporaries Essays, Cultural Analytics Now

Gauging One’s Audience: a Response to Laura B. McGrath

1: Process Whether to foreground process is a central question for cultural analytics. How much does the reader need to know about the texts in my corpus (what is a…

Contemporaries Essays, Cultural Analytics Now

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Cultural Analytics Now

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,…

Contemporaries Essays, Cultural Analytics Now

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:…

Contemporaries Essays, Cultural Analytics Now

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…

Contemporaries Essays, Cultural Analytics Now

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…