ACL[x]

I'm very excited to be a part of ACL[x], an experimental conference under the aegis of the American Comparative Literature Association. I'll try to revise this post later, but for now I wanted to share a copy of my presentation for those who'd like to follow along on their own devices.

If the embedded version below fails you, try this link instead.

A Field Guide to Literary Networks on Prezi

My Hat's Off to Thinking Cap

I'm really delighted to announce that Patricia Cohen wrote up my recent essay on David Foster Wallace for her Thinking Cap column this week at The New York Times. Readers can download the full pdf of the essay here. A version of this research that I gave as a talk at Digital Humanities 2011 also got a nod from William Pannapacker in The Chronicle of Higher Education over the summer. I'm very grateful to these writers for covering my work as well as the editors, advisors and one extremely patient spouse who did so much to improve the final product.

Pamphlet #3

I'm very excited to announce that a version of my essay on David Foster Wallace has just been published online as the Stanford Literary Lab's third pamphlet. Here's the lead-in:

If there is one thing to be learned from David Foster Wallace, it is that cultural transmission is a tricky game. This was a problem Wallace confronted as a literary professional, a university-based writer during what Mark McGurl has called the Program Era. But it was also a philosophical issue he grappled with on a deep level as he struggled to combat his own loneliness through writing. To really study this question we need to look beyond the symbolic markets of prestige to the real market, the site of mass literary consumption, where authors succeed or fail based on their ability to speak to that most diverse and complicated of readerships: the general public. Unless we study what I call the social lives of books, we make the mistake of keeping literature in the same ascetic laboratory that Wallace tried to break out of with his intense authorial focus on popular culture, mass media, and everyday life.

First Post at Arcade

This morning my first post at Stanford's Arcade project went live. I responded to some interesting questions Lee Konstantinou posed about the contemporary novel. I'm really excited to join the Arcade fold and will make sure I cross-link to posts on my new blog there.