Reading, Writing and Reputation: Literary Networks in Contemporary American Fiction

1. Overview
Long-established models of literary production are
changing dramatically as the digital era continues
to blur, and at times erase, the divisions between
authors, critics and readers. Millions of cultural
consumers are now empowered to participate in
previously closed literary conversations and to express
forms of mass distinction through their purchases
and reviews. My project argues that these traces of
popular reading choices constitute a fresh perspective
on elusive audience reactions to literature, one that
reveals distinct networks of conversation that are
transforming previously well-understood relationships
between writers and their readers, between the art of
fiction and the market for books (Radway). Employing
network analysis methodologies and ‘distant reading’
of book reviews, recommendations and other digital
traces of cultural distinction (Moretti), my research
develops new models for studying literary culture in
America today. In this paper I consider the reception of
three mid-career writers, David Foster Wallace, Junot
Díaz and Colson Whitehead, asking how they have
redefined authorial expectations and literary identity
through their work.
2. Background
My project is founded on the argument that as literary
production evolves, new kinds of reading communities
and collaborative cultural entities are emerging. Many
of these communities are ephemeral and quite often
they are fostered by commercial interests seeking to
capitalize on their cultural production. Nevertheless, a
handful of websites like Amazon continue to dominate
the marketplace for books and attract millions of
customer reviews, ratings and purchase decisions,
and the literary ecologies of these book reviews have
become valuable research resources. The ideational
networks I explore are made up of books, authors,
characters and other literary entities (these are the
nodes), along with the references linking them together
as collocations in book reviews, suggestions from
recommendation engines, and other structures of
connection. As my project has moved from Thomas
Pynchon and Toni Morrison to the younger generation
represented by Wallace, Díaz and Whitehead, I have
improved my data-gathering and network analysis
methodologies. With new data and better tools, I
hope to determine how the game of authorial fame
is changing in an increasingly reflexive, networked
literary landscape.
3. Proposal
This paper will present my research on three younger
writers who have broken new ground in literary
constructions of identity in a shifting landscape
of reception. Wallace, Díaz and Whitehead, all
members of “Generation X,” are writers who have
captured national attention through particularities of
self-presentation and novelistic style.
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I argue that these authors signal a sea change in
literary reputation. Authors as well as publishers are
now interacting with active communities of readers who
conduct complex cultural conversations independent
of traditional arbiters of taste. As the barriers
separating readers from ordained critics crumble
online, younger authors are increasingly engaging
with audiences that are both collaborative and vocal.
Tracing the half-spun career arcs of Wallace, Díaz
and Whitehead, this paper articulates a new model
of contemporary literary culture: a reading society
that demands increasing authorial reflexivity to mirror
the collaborative, iterative nature of digital literary
conversations.
Each author makes a distinct form of literary identity
central to his work. David Foster Wallace defined
a deeply introspective and reflexive narrative voice,
pioneering a style so individual that he ultimately felt it
had become clichéd and struggled to escape it in his
final years of writing. In his breakout novel The Brief,
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz has tackled
the challenges of his hybrid Dominican/American
identity by creating a new argot of Spanglish phrases,
pop cultural references and an ingenious deployment
of footnotes to both buttress and undermine normative
American understandings of Latin American history
and culture. Finally, Colson Whitehead has similarly
inverted expectations for African American authors,
accomplishing the seemingly impossible feat of writing
in the traditions of both Toni Morrison and Thomas
Pynchon. As a group, these writers have little in
common except their age, positions of cultural prestige
and their talents as re-inventors of literary identity.
This makes them excellent subjects for a study of
contemporary literary reception and the collective
construction of literary identities.
4. Methodology
The project draws on two primary datasets: first,
a corpus of professional and consumer book
reviews collected from nationally prestigious reviewing
newspapers and magazines along with consumer
reviews from Amazon dating back to 1996; second,
networks of recommendations based on consumer
purchases and book ownership drawn from the
websites Amazon and LibraryThing. Comparing these
different literary networks allows me to make broader
arguments about contemporary authorial fame and
the changing role of the everyday reader in literary
conversations.
For the first dataset, consumer and professional book
reviews, I have employed the MorphAdorner project’s
Named Entity Recognition tool to create a dictionary
of literary proper nouns (authors, titles, character
names, etc). This dictionary was used to identify
collocations on a paragraph level throughout these
reviews, making nouns into nodes and collocations into
links. This approach allows me to empirically identify
and visualize those authors and texts frequently
mentioned in the same review contexts. The resulting
noun networks reveal not only the distinctions between
everyday readers and more traditional arbiters of
literary taste but the ways in which popular authors
are increasingly carrying on multiple independent and
complex literary conversations.
The second dataset combines book recommendations
provided by Amazon’s “Customers who bought
this also bought” engine and LibraryThing’s
recommendation engine. In this case books form the
nodes and recommendations the links connecting
them. Employing network analysis to identify patterns
of prestige and clustering in these recommendation
networks has allowed me to trace the diverse functions
of genre and authorial identity in ordering literary texts
and to identify the basic rules of contemporary market
canonicity.
5. Conclusion
As I have moved this project through its first two case
studies, with Pynchon and Morrison, I have refined a
hybrid methodology that explores literary and cultural
context through a limited empirical lens, considering
particular digital and textual networks of reference
and evaluation. This iteration of the process takes on
three authors with very different styles to ask how a
younger literary generation is working together with
newly empowered readers to construct new kinds
of multiply mediated, widely collaborative forms of
cultural identity. By studying these writers mid-career,
I hope to trace both the evolution of contemporary
authorial fame and its relationship to wider systems of
social distinction in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
References
Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production:
Essays on Art and Literature.. Randal Johnson (ed.).
New York: Columbia University Press.
English, J. (2005). The Economy of Prestige.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Guillory, J. (1993). Cultural Capital: The Problem
of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
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Moretti, F. (2005). Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstracted
Models for a Literary History. London and New York:
Verso.
(2009). MorphAdorner.. Northwestern University.
http://morphadorner.northwestern.edu/.
Radway, J. (1997). A Feeling for Books: The Bookof-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class
Desire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
(2010). yEd Graph Editor. yWorks GmbH. http://ww
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