Showing papers in "Modern Language Quarterly in 2016"

What Is Historical Poetics

Abstract: In posing questions about what is “historical” and what counts as “poetics,” historical poetics cannot separate the practice of reading a poem from the histories and theories of reading that mediate our ideas about poetry. While nineteenth-century verse cultures revolved around reading by generic recognition, a reading of poetry as a form of cognition emerges among later critics like I. A. Richards, who illustrates how a line from Robert Browning is read in the mind’s eye, as if in the present tense. But Browning was already doing a version of historical poetics, in writing “Pan and Luna” as a poem about reading other poems about Pan, among them “A Musical Instrument,” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the composition and reception of her poem, we see how Victorian poetry foregrounds its multiple mediations, including the mediation of voice by meter as a musical instrument. The recirculation of her popular poem through citation and recitation, illustration and anthologization, prosody and parody, demonstrates a varied history of thinking through—simultaneously “about” and “in”—verse.

The Longue Durée of Literary Prestige

Abstract: A history of literary prestige needs to study both works that achieved distinction and the mass of volumes from which they were distinguished. To understand how those patterns of preference changed across a century, we gathered two samples of English-language poetry from the period 1820–1919: one drawn from volumes reviewed in prominent periodicals and one selected at random from a large digital library (in which the majority of authors are relatively obscure). The stylistic differences associated with literary prominence turn out to be quite stable: a statistical model trained to distinguish reviewed from random volumes in any quarter of this century can make predictions almost as accurate about the rest of the period. The “poetic revolutions” described by many histories are not visible in this model; instead, there is a steady tendency for new volumes of poetry to change by slightly exaggerating certain features that defined prestige in the recent past.

Turbulent Flow A Computational Model of World Literature

Abstract: 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.

Shifting Scales Between Literature and Social Science

Abstract: S cale, from the Latin scala (ladder) via Old French escaler (climb), refers to valuation (“a graduated range of values forming a standard system for measuring or grading”) as well as to dimensionality (“the relative size or extent of something”) (Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 12th ed., 1282).We have assembled this special issue ofMLQ to highlight important new work of literary-historical inquiry, partly though not exclusively pertaining to the digital humanities, in which problems arising from the nexus of scale and value have become conspicuous concerns of method. In doing so, we are not implying that our discipline’s current perturbation over these problems is without precedent. Every field of study must, at every stage in its development, define its proper scope, locating workable boundaries between its own objects, zones, and tools of research and those external to it. To engage in literary studies has always meant operating in a specially constructed and privileged space of the “literary,” a field of practice scaled to incorporate everything relevant to an understanding of literature, while redlining adjacent neighborhoods as precincts of extraor subliterary concern, subject to the authority of other disciplines. Within this discipline-shaped space, we rely on a host of other scalar constructs. Certain temporal spans (century, literary period, artistic generation), geocultural categories (national literature, regional literature, diasporic or exilic literature), formal entities (protagonist, genre, individual work), and so forth supply us with the basic units we need to organize our research projects and structure our intellectual and institutional divisions of labor. The degree of prestige attaching to these built units of study is hierarchized, such that some national literatures,

Reading Historical Poetics

Abstract: T his special issue of Modern Language Quarterly originated in a 2014 conference we organized at the University of Chicago, “Poetic Genre and Social Imagination: Pope to Swinburne.” The conference was intended to highlight compelling new approaches to an old question: the relation between culture and poetic form. The focus on British poetry from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century was partly motivated by our own scholarly interests and partly meant to expand the concentration on the latter half of the nineteenth century that has typified British historical poetics in American English departments. Listening to the lively presentations and conversations at the conference, however, we realized that there was not much consensus about what historical poetics is (or should be). In fact, the label historical poetics is associated with two quite different contemporary critical movements. It is also true that “historical” and “poetics” are contested concepts, as Yopie Prins notes in this issue. And before they are contested, they are ambiguous: althoughAnglo-American specialists in poetry often describe what they do as “poetics,” for example, this word has long beenused (and is still used by scholars like Tzvetan Todorov and Gerard Genette) to refer to the theory of literature as such—a usage more recently extended, on both sides of the Atlantic, to the theory of anything at all (the poetics of speech, of prose, of space, of identity, etc.). At the theoretical

Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America

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Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and the Value of Scale

Abstract: Through a reading of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, which readers inside and outside the academy have valued for decades, this essay teases out how literary critical value is often aligned with scale: big claims, minutely close readings, and the ability to move gracefully between them. The essay also identifies and discusses four techniques basic to literary criticism: description, interpretation, explanation, and evaluation. A coda speculates about the links between Mimesis and a visual technology introduced into university lecturing a few decades before Auerbach wrote his magnum opus: the slide projector.