MC 281 is the second in the required sophomore sequence for Social Relations and Policy. In this course, we will explore the interactions and experiences between and among various groups in American history. We will consider how Americans both defended and contested prevailing definitions of fitness for citizenship and inclusion in the political process and American life, and how groups sought to gain access to social and political equality. This course focuses on the history of relationships within and between different groups in the United States, and explores the complexities of those relations. Rarely centered solely on race or ethnicity, such interactions were also affected by gender, sexuality, religion, nation, and class. We will also explore the shifting definitions of race and ethnicity. Students will analyze not only the experiences of the different groups, but also the connections between them to assess the larger dynamics and their implications for public policy.

Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison provides a personal inquiry into the significance of African-American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to \"put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature\". Author of \"Beloved\", \"The Bluest Eye\", \"Song of Solomon\", and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the 19th and 20th centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her argument is that the central characteristics of American literature - individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell - are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence.

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

and, according to Handley, ‘‘only betokens trouble’’ (18). Handley reads ‘‘the troubled particulars of romance and marriage in relation to American nationalism’’ (24), concluding that the conflicted marriages ‘‘in the literary West so often separate, even as they participate in, the double helix between love and nation, becoming allegories of a failed national metaphor of unity in a region, where many Americans hoped to locate common identity’’ (34). In Marriage, Violence, and the Nation, Handley challenges the myth of the ‘‘cowboy’’ West, but rather than offering an alternative paradigm, he explicitly and implicitly explores the complex act of creating literary meaning and its relationship to historical reality. In Handley’s view, and I agree, popular westerns, even formula westerns, are ‘‘ideologically complicated’’ and richly reward imaginative analysis rather than reductive dismissals (225). ‘‘What literature has to offer anyone who reads it closely,’’ Handley asserts, ‘‘is the demanding, unavoidable ambiguity and estranging effect of literary expression itself’’ (230), and he demonstrates this point in detailed and inventive readings of important and still widely read texts. Most valuable is the way he brings these readings to bear on a larger question of the relationship between literature and history, ‘‘this dilemma between the claims of representation and the claims of ‘reality’ ’’ (230). In a polemical afterword exploring ‘‘the impasses between [western] historians and literary critics,’’ (227), Handley advocates a ‘‘return to literary complexity’’ (233). These two fine books convincingly prove Handley’s point that ‘‘reality is narratively malleable’’ and support his argument ‘‘for understanding how and why narrative continues to matter’’ (232).

Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961, and: Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (review)

The Equivalence of “Close” and “Distant” Reading; or, Toward a New Object for Data-Rich Literary History

The title of this essay announces its core ambition: to propose a model of reading literary texts that synthesizes familiar humanistic approaches with computational ones. In recent years, debates over the use of computers to interpret literature have been fierce. On one side, scholars such as Franco Moretti, Matthew Jockers, Matthew Wilkens, and Andrew Piper defend the deployment of sophisticated machine techniques, like topic modeling and network analysis, to expose macroscale patterns of language and form culled from massive digitized literary corpora.1 On the other side, scholars such as Alexander Galloway, David Golumbia, Tara McPherson, and Alan Liu, who work in the field of New Media Studies, have criticized machine techniques for reducing the complexity of literary texts to mere “data” or for being incommensurable with the goals of critical theory.2 Here we move beyond this impasse by modeling a form of literary analysis

Literary Pattern Recognition: Modernism between Close Reading and Machine Learning

Not as a theologian interpreting the Divine Will in infallible dogma, but as a simplehearted anthropologist putting specimens into different large boxes—merely for present convenience tumbling things apparently similar into the same large box until a more scientific and accurate and mature arrangement is feasible, let me attempt a very general classification of such periodicals as have yet obtruded themselves in my research . . . —Ezra Pound, “Studies in Contemporary Mentality”

Network Analysis and the Sociology of Modernism

Collaboration and Translation: Lin Yutang and the Archive of Asian American Literature

This article uses computational modeling and large-scale pattern detection to develop a theory of global textual transmission as a process of turbulent flow. Specifically, it models stream-of-consciousness narration as a discrete set of linguistic features and rhetorical elements and uses this model to track the movement of this modernist technique across generic boundaries (from anglophone modernism to more popular genres) and linguistic ones (from English to Japanese). Oscillating between statistical models and moments of close reading, the article shows how a quantitatively scaled-up approach, rather than reinforcing an image of global textual flows as singular and monolithic, illuminates world literature as a system constituted by patterns of divergence in structure and of difference in sameness.

Richard Jean So

Papers

Literary Pattern Recognition: Modernism between Close Reading and Machine Learning

Network Analysis and the Sociology of Modernism

Collaboration and Translation: Lin Yutang and the Archive of Asian American Literature

Turbulent Flow A Computational Model of World Literature

Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network