Note: Your syllabus is a valuable reference document that you should regularly consult. It will be your map for the course. In it, you will find all policies, all major assignments, and a schedule of readings. Our readings are subject to change based on our interests as a class.

Week 1: Introductions

Mon 1/24 What is the data of literary studies?

  • Short excerpt from Edith Rickert, New Methods for the Study of Literature (1927) Canvas PDF

Wed 1/26: Histories of Literary Studies

  • Read: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s One (1929) [111 pgs]
  • Optional reading:
    • James F. English and Ted Underwood, “Shifting Scales: Between Literature and Social Science,” Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 3 (September 1, 2016): 277–95. [Canvas PDF]
    • Antoinette Burton, “Archive Stories: Gender in the Making of Imperial and Colonial Histories,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (2004) [Canvas PDF]
  • Due: Research Exercise 1: Introduction to programming

Week 2: Sociology of Forms

Mon 1/31: What is the “sociology of culture”?

  • Read: Raymond Williams, “Literature,” “Traditions, Institutions, and Formations,” “Structures of Feeling,” “The Sociology of Culture,” “Forms,” from Marxism and Literature (1977) [Canvas PDF]
  • Read: Pierre Bourdieu, “Appendix 1” (pages 35-36), “Flaubert, Analyst of Flaubert” and “The Market for Symbolic Goods,” (pages 141-173)The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1994) [Canvas PDF - please only read required sections ]
  • Optional reading:
    • Pages 214-218 of Robert Darnton, “Reading, Writing, and Publishing in Eighteenth-Century France: A Case Study in the Sociology of Literature” (1971) Canvas PDF

Wed 2/2 The Data of Literary History

Week 3: Authors and the Literary Field

Mon 2/7

  • Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey ([1803]; 1818)
  • Browse:
    • facsimiles of Austen novel title pages [Canvas folder]
    • Optional: Broadview appendix (includes Austen’s correspondence with publishers, samples of Catherine Morland’s reading materials, and reviews of Northanger Abbey) [Canvas PDF]
    • titles from eighteenth-century fiction Early Novels Digital Collection
  • Deidre Lynch, excerpts from “At Home with Austen” [on the Austen industry] [Canvas PDF]

Wed 2/9

Week 4: Readers, Reception

Mon 2/14

  • Read: Wilkie Collins, “The Unknown Public” Household Words (1858) [Canvas PDF]
  • Read: Q.D. Leavis, Preface, Introduction (pages xiii-xvi), and Part I (pages 3-80) from Fiction and the Reading Public (1939) [Canvas PDF–only read assigned sections!]
  • Optional reading:
    • Jonathan Rose, three short chapters: “A Preface to a History of Audiences,” “Welsh Miner’s Libraries,” and “A Mongrel Library”The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class (2001) Canvas PDF

Wed 2/16

Week 5 Canon, Syllabus

Mon 2/21

  • Read: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
  • Read Daniel Hack, “The Citational Soul of Black Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois,” in Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2016) [Canvas PDF]
  • Practicum: Encoding Du Bois’s epigraphs [cloud version]

Wed 2/23

  • Read: Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan, Introduction: A New Syllabus The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study (2020) [Canvas PDF]
  • Due: Research Exercise 5
  • Practicum: Open Syllabus Project: charting the The Souls of Black Folk on syllabi

Week 6: Canons, Anthology

Mon 2/28

  • Read: John Guillory, “Canonical and Noncanonical,” inCultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993) Canvas PDF Notes
  • Read: Henry Louis Gates, “The Master’s Pieces: On Canon Formation and the African -American Tradition,” in Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992) Canvas PDF
  • Read: Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” (1988) Canvas PDF

Wed 3/2

SPRING RECESS

Mon 3/7 - No class

Wed 3/9 - No class

Week 7: Libraries, Archives, Collections

Mon 3/14

Wed 3/16

Week 8: Digital Archives and Imperialism

Mon 3/21

Wed 3/23

Week 9: Novels and Social Space

Mon 3/28

  • Read: David K. Elson, Nicholas Dames, and Kathleen R. McKeown, “Extracting Social Networks from Literary Fiction,” in Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL ’10 (Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2010), 138–47, [Canvas PDF]
  • Read: Matthew Wilkens, “The Geographic Imagination of Civil War-Era American Fiction,” American Literary History 25, no. 4 (December 1, 2013): 803–40, [Canvas PDF]

Wed 3/30

Week 10: Machine Reading the History of Literary Studies

Mon 4/4

Wed 4/6

Week 11: Visualizing Literary Data

Mon 4/11

Wed 4/13

Week 12: Data Futures

Mon 4/18

Wed 4/20

  • [FINAL PROJECT PRESENTATIONS]

Final Project Due Dean’s Date (5/3)