Amy Hungerford

Making Literature Now

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Amy Hungerford is Dean of the Humanities and Professor of English at Yale University.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 224
• Erscheinungstermin: 3. August 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 206mm x 168mm x 18mm
• Gewicht: 522g
• ISBN-13: 9780804795128
• ISBN-10: 0804795126
• Artikelnr.: 44383517

Autorenporträt

Amy Hungerford is Dean of the Humanities and Professor of English at Yale University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Writing from the Rabbit Hole
chapter abstract
This chapter argues that scholars of the contemporary, in acts of research
and ethnography, must step outside established archives and their
institutions to find cultural material as yet unclaimed by some enduring
enterprise or narrative. Inspired by contemporary sociology and focusing on
the example of McSweeney's, the chapter shows how extensive and how various
the network of writers, readers, and editors must be to sustain a single
small literary quarterly. The introduction thus sets up the book's central
questions: What do we learn about how literature is made now when we take
these networks into account? What forms of cultural capital are available
to writers aspiring to create new literature today? How can that
capital-prestige, fame, longevity, seriousness, avant-garde credibility-be
conferred on new writing?
1Making Literature Now
chapter abstract
This chapter examines the concrete effects of literary connectivity: How
does the feeling of connection produced by literary objects produce social
acts, and how do those acts in turn affect the making of literature? As a
case study, the chapter examines the connection between McSweeney's
Quarterly Concern and a nomadic English web designer, Russell Quinn. The
aesthetic experience of connection-of receiving the quarterly by
subscription every few months-prompted a collaboration between Quinn and a
McSweeney's editor named Eli Horowitz, leading to the very first
subscription app for mobile devices, McSweeney's Small Chair app. The
chapter argues that the ubiquitous feeling tone of connection produced by
contemporary social media can occupy older paper forms and suggests how a
particular modern life-in Quinn's case, a life in which a computer stood in
for a lost father-drives literature's traditional humane purposes back to
our most interactive media.
2McSweeney's and the School of Life
chapter abstract
This chapter examines how competing institutions-a press, a writing
program, and social structures we might just call life-shape the careers
and work of writers. Dave Eggers's early writing imagines the institution
of the school as a metaphor for the interchange between writer and reader,
only to show how the writing workshop fails to properly connect the two.
McSweeney's becomes Eggers's alternative to the school. The chapter then
follows the writer Deb Olin Unferth as McSweeney's becomes an institution
through which she builds her career. It shows how forces in Unferth's
education, the publishing industry, and McSweeney's itself come to bear
inside the process of literary production-in the writing itself as well as
in the work of publication. Through interviews, the chapter grapples with
what isn't written and isn't published, with the effects of gender in
publishing, and with the multiple institutions through which a writer
moves.
3Reading Novels in the Net
chapter abstract
This chapter shows how business concerns affect the contemporary evolution
of a literary form. It begins by tracking the diverging fortunes of
McSweeney's and another small publisher of literary fiction, Soft Skull
after the 2007 bankruptcy of the book distributor, Publishing Group West.
The story reveals otherwise invisible actors-in this case, Eli Horowitz at
McSweeney's and Richard Nash at Soft Skull-adapting their literary work in
response to material needs: to make a living, to save a business, to make
good on promises to writers. The chapter shows how the novel as a genre
evolves along with such responses to financial strain, as circumstances
force literary workers to reimagine-and monetize-the ways we read, write,
and think about novels.
4GPS Historicism
chapter abstract
This chapter investigates what we can learn about literary culture from an
innovative novel: The Silent History, the first novel built into an app
running on GPS-enabled mobile devices. The chapter argues that the virtual
form of this novel has remarkable effects on the imaginative structures of
the story, the reading practices we might use to enjoy it, and what we can
know about reading and the social networks a novel creates. But these
innovations, despite their promise, depend upon the existence of unusual
literary workers, people who possess both advanced technical skills and a
commitment to literature. Widespread formal innovation of the kind found in
The Silent History, and better methods for the historical study of
literature, are thus revealed to depend upon makers' access to specific
kinds of training (in programming and in literacy) and on their willingness
to enter the difficult literary labor market.
5How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love
chapter abstract
What are the conditions under which the debut novelist can elicit the love
of a literary business that relies on established names for big sales? How
does the novelist capitalize on novelty? This chapter examines how literary
fame is made today by studying how the right kind of attention-and love-can
be recruited by a first-time novelist. Using tools of literary sociology
and aesthetic analysis, the chapter takes up the case of Jonathan Safran
Foer's first novel, Everything Is Illuminated. Tracing how it was framed in
the literary press and university newsletters, and analyzing the novel's
narrative structure, reveals how Foer's success was made and how Foer's
work was driven internally by the author's fascination with what it means
to love an aesthetic object. The chapter concludes by showing how this kind
of fascination is fed and watered by the very institutions that help to
launch literary careers.
6On Not Reading DFW
chapter abstract
This chapter asks how we choose what to read in the crowded world of
contemporary literature. What kinds of arguments can we make about what not
to read in the face of massive over-production? Arguing that there is a
fundamental link between David Foster Wallace's art and the misogyny made
apparent in a new biography of Wallace, this chapter uses his case to
consider whether such a link should affect our decisions about whether to
read his work. It analyzes the machinery of literary fame that serves
Wallace's reputation, including the contributions of Dave Eggers.
Highlighting the choices that remain available to the writers, readers, and
teachers of literature who are the targets of such efforts to secure the
legacies of certain writers, the chapter concludes by considering a
contrasting case: the contemporary fortunes of a classic novel, George
Eliot's Middlemarch.
Afterword: Present Tense Archive
chapter abstract
The afterword documents the fate (to date) of the ephemeral archives and
enterprises that are discussed in the book, highlighting the fluid nature
of real-time literary history and the methodological challenges for those
who wish to study it.