“To create an authentic period world requires thousands of specific decisions — that sheet, that cassette tape on that bedroom dresser.” — Shawn Levy1 “It has always been something of a lifelong dream to create a…
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Contemporaries Essays, Stranger Things and Nostalgia Now
Contemporaries Essays, Stranger Things and Nostalgia Now
The Violence of Nostalgia, or, the Crisis of Middle-Class Modernity
1. Vanishing from the charts only to appear again years later, pop songs are good at evoking memories of the past. When George Michael’s “Freedom 90” resurfaces now, decades after…
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
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:…