The Emergence of Literary Diction

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Literary criticism used to be, in great part, an attempt to define the distinctive character of “literary language.” The project preoccupied Russian Formalists and American New Critics, and dates back to the nineteenth century. In recent years, critics have largely abandoned the attempt to define literary language, since it is now clear that the category of literature itself is historically unstable. But if we could trace the transformation of literary language in a detailed way, this instability might become interesting: we could use the changing characteristics that have marked language as literary to illuminate the transformation of literature as a social category.

What Can Topic Models of PMLA Teach Us About the History of Literary Scholarship?

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Of all our literary-historical narratives it is the history of criticism itself that seems most wedded to a stodgy history-of-ideas approach — narrating change through a succession of stars or contending schools. While scholars like John Guillory and Gerald Graff have produced subtler models of disciplinary history, we could still do more to complicate the narratives that organize our discipline’s understanding of itself.

Figure 1: A browsable network based on Underwood’s model of PMLA. Click through, then mouse over or click on individual topics.

Tunderwood on Journal of Digital Humanities

The Emergence of Literary Diction

What Can Topic Models of PMLA Teach Us About the History of Literary Scholarship?