Mark your calendars. This promises to be a fascinating talk:
Sponsored by the NYU Department of English and NYU Libraries
Corpus or Field?
A Challenge for Quantitative Methods
Andrew Goldstone, Rutgers University
*4:30 PM, Thursday, October 15 *
*East Room, Avery Fisher Center, *
*Bobst Library, 2nd Fl. *
*New York University *
One of the most promising prospects for quantitative methods in literary
studies is that of rigorous and empirically wide-ranging accounts of the
relations between literature and society. Yet the boundary between textual
interpretation and a sociological analysis of literature has proven
surprisingly hard to cross. In this talk, I retrace some sociological
traditions of quantitative textual study, from postwar content analyses of
political opinion to contemporary field theory, and I argue that they offer
literary scholars alternatives to the doxa of “reading” that dominates and
limits methodological discussion in our discipline. The sociological
traditions turn us from corpus to field, from text collections to social
spaces of symbolic competition and collaboration. I will discuss (and
exemplify) the many challenges and pitfalls of this shift, technical and
conceptual, in my own attempts to quantify the changing status of “reading”
in the history of literary scholarship.
Dinner & drinks will follow the talk and Q&A.
Andrew Goldstone is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at
Rutgers University. He has collaborated with Ted Underwood on “The Quiet
Studies of Literary Studies: What Thirteen Thousand Scholars Tell Us,” *New
Literary History*, 45.3 (Summer 2014) and “What Can Topic Models of PMLA
Teach Us About the History of Literary Scholarship?”*Journal of Digital
Humanities* 2.1 (Winter 2012).Goldstone’s book, *Fictions of Autonomy:
Modernism from Wilde to de Man* (Oxford University Press, 2013), shows how
modernists’ many attempts to make literature a law unto itself devised
distinctive modes of relation between literary works and their social
world. His work in progress includes a book project, “Wastes of Time: Genre
and the Literary Field since 1890,” and a text-mining investigation of the
scholarly field of modernist studies.
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