Book
Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Moralizing in Victorian Fiction (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), Honorable Mention for 2018 Best Book of the Year by the North American Victorian Studies Association (here). Reviewed in Review of English Studies by Natalie Houston (here), in Nineneenth-Century Literature by Matthew Sussman (here), and in Victorian Studies by Danny Wright (here). It was also featured on the V21 Collective Book Forum (here) and discussed by Nan Z. Da in her "Critical Response III" essay in Critical Inquiry (here). It was mentioned in a New Yorker "Talk of the Town" essay by Antonia Hitchens (here).
Reductive Reading takes up critical methods that call attention to how they subordinate, or reduce, textual complexity. The book uses a reductive lens to argue that the moral force of Victorian fiction lies not only in the examples of conduct offered by its characters or the wise words delivered by its narrators, but in the structures of judgment encoded in its syntax. The first chapter reads censorious mid-nineteenth-century book reviews, which paid careful attention to form because textual detail in the period was understood to be saturated with moral as well as aesthetic significance. Three case studies follow: In the George Eliot's essays and novels, clauses that modify major nouns create space for critical reflection; in the sketches and novels of Charles Dickens, speech-tags that describe a character’s manner of speaking invest even the shortest speech with dramatic irony; in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel-epic, present-tense digressions disrupt the developmental narrative of the plot to exercise provisional judgment in the middle of unfolding events.
Refereed Articles and Book Chapters
* “Why Always Dorothea? The Rhetorical Question in Canon & Archive,” in On Style in Victorian Fiction, edited by Daniel Tyler, Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 58 - 74.
* “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Harriet Martineau: On the Limits of White Ladyism,” in “Miscellany as Method: A Trio of Approaches to ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ and the 1848 Liberty Bell Gift Book.” With Lucy Sheehan and Jennifer Sorensen. Victorian Poetry 59.3 (2021): 261-308.
* “Literature.” Victorian Literature and Culture, Keywords, 46, no. 3/4 (2018): 745–49. My contribution to the Special Issue on Keywords.
* “Canon/Archive. Largescale Dynamics in the Literary Field”; “Style at the Scale of the Sentence”; and "Quantitative Formalism: An Experiment," collaboratively-written Stanford Litlab pamphlets subsequently collected in Canon/Archive (n+1 books, 2017).
* “Narrative Form and Facts, Facts, Facts: Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë,” Genre 50.1 (2017). On reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë against Jane Eyre : An Autobiography (1848), in special issue on “Narrative Against Data” edited by Adam Grener and Jesse Rosenthal .
* "Other People's Data: Humanities Edition," Journal of Cultural Analytics (Dec 2016). This essay argues that that we need to make better use of the excess data produced by projects that use numbers to make sense of literature.
* “George Eliot’s Discerning Syntax,” in ELH 81.4 (2014).
Selected Public Writing
* "Jane Austen Was Not Fucking Around about Home School." Avidly, Sept 10, 2020. On reading Mansfield Park in 2020.
* "Death Poetry During a Pandemic" The Rambling, Oct 25, 2020. On the intersection of teaching and grief, and also Tennyson,
* "Authorship After AI." Digital Humanities Section. Public Books, June 26, 2019. On authorship attribution and its limits.
* “Harry Potter’s Scar, or Book Recs from a Columbine Grad.” Public Books, April 20, 2018. Review of The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma Bessel van der Kolk and a few Harry Potter books.
* “Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter” (Spring 2014) and “Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen” (Winter 2013), New Orleans Review. Experiments in the form of the nineteenth-century review: long excerpts connected by impressionistic ligaments.
Works in Progress:
Portraits of the Author with Pen in Hand: Transatlantic Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century is currently under contract with Columbia University Press. It is a study of the figure of author in the age of reprinting. As Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe fought for stronger copyright protections for their novels, other players in the literary marketplace developed new strategies to make money off authors’ names, developing collections of signatures, anthologies, and biographies that created a separate revenue stream associated with the person of the author: this book ignores the author's work to focus on the author’s brand. Portraits of the Author offers an account of brand development as a chaotic, collective enterprise, and one that raised questions about the right to privacy and the use of one’s name that continue to shape celebrity culture today. Then as now, readers were fascinated by the relationship between an author’s life and work, with everything that cannot be known from a study of the text alone. My book argues that the history of the relation between life and work--the notion of the author as a person who writes--is written in the outer edges of the literary field, through portraits of the author at work.
Because literary history tends to be organized by author or genre, the miscellaneous sea of texts just adjacent to major works has been invisible. To reveal the broader literary field, Portraits of the Author draws on interlocking computational approaches to genre: book history, digital archives, and algorithmic criticism. Such methods also illuminate the many ways texts get co-created—rewritten, edited, and packaged—on their way to publication. In the age of reprinting, many hands produce the figure of the author.
Escape Reading: Wherever You Go, There You Are reflects my experience as a survivor of the 1999 Columbine shooting as well as my expertise in books as a lifelong binge-reader with a PhD in English from Stanford University. This book argues that escape reading is not only the hot cousin of avoidance, but an oblique way to encounter otherwise intolerable feelings and memories.
Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Moralizing in Victorian Fiction (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), Honorable Mention for 2018 Best Book of the Year by the North American Victorian Studies Association (here). Reviewed in Review of English Studies by Natalie Houston (here), in Nineneenth-Century Literature by Matthew Sussman (here), and in Victorian Studies by Danny Wright (here). It was also featured on the V21 Collective Book Forum (here) and discussed by Nan Z. Da in her "Critical Response III" essay in Critical Inquiry (here). It was mentioned in a New Yorker "Talk of the Town" essay by Antonia Hitchens (here).
Reductive Reading takes up critical methods that call attention to how they subordinate, or reduce, textual complexity. The book uses a reductive lens to argue that the moral force of Victorian fiction lies not only in the examples of conduct offered by its characters or the wise words delivered by its narrators, but in the structures of judgment encoded in its syntax. The first chapter reads censorious mid-nineteenth-century book reviews, which paid careful attention to form because textual detail in the period was understood to be saturated with moral as well as aesthetic significance. Three case studies follow: In the George Eliot's essays and novels, clauses that modify major nouns create space for critical reflection; in the sketches and novels of Charles Dickens, speech-tags that describe a character’s manner of speaking invest even the shortest speech with dramatic irony; in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel-epic, present-tense digressions disrupt the developmental narrative of the plot to exercise provisional judgment in the middle of unfolding events.
Refereed Articles and Book Chapters
* “Why Always Dorothea? The Rhetorical Question in Canon & Archive,” in On Style in Victorian Fiction, edited by Daniel Tyler, Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 58 - 74.
* “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Harriet Martineau: On the Limits of White Ladyism,” in “Miscellany as Method: A Trio of Approaches to ‘The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point’ and the 1848 Liberty Bell Gift Book.” With Lucy Sheehan and Jennifer Sorensen. Victorian Poetry 59.3 (2021): 261-308.
* “Literature.” Victorian Literature and Culture, Keywords, 46, no. 3/4 (2018): 745–49. My contribution to the Special Issue on Keywords.
* “Canon/Archive. Largescale Dynamics in the Literary Field”; “Style at the Scale of the Sentence”; and "Quantitative Formalism: An Experiment," collaboratively-written Stanford Litlab pamphlets subsequently collected in Canon/Archive (n+1 books, 2017).
* “Narrative Form and Facts, Facts, Facts: Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë,” Genre 50.1 (2017). On reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë against Jane Eyre : An Autobiography (1848), in special issue on “Narrative Against Data” edited by Adam Grener and Jesse Rosenthal .
* "Other People's Data: Humanities Edition," Journal of Cultural Analytics (Dec 2016). This essay argues that that we need to make better use of the excess data produced by projects that use numbers to make sense of literature.
* “George Eliot’s Discerning Syntax,” in ELH 81.4 (2014).
Selected Public Writing
* "Jane Austen Was Not Fucking Around about Home School." Avidly, Sept 10, 2020. On reading Mansfield Park in 2020.
* "Death Poetry During a Pandemic" The Rambling, Oct 25, 2020. On the intersection of teaching and grief, and also Tennyson,
* "Authorship After AI." Digital Humanities Section. Public Books, June 26, 2019. On authorship attribution and its limits.
* “Harry Potter’s Scar, or Book Recs from a Columbine Grad.” Public Books, April 20, 2018. Review of The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma Bessel van der Kolk and a few Harry Potter books.
* “Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter” (Spring 2014) and “Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen” (Winter 2013), New Orleans Review. Experiments in the form of the nineteenth-century review: long excerpts connected by impressionistic ligaments.
Works in Progress:
Portraits of the Author with Pen in Hand: Transatlantic Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century is currently under contract with Columbia University Press. It is a study of the figure of author in the age of reprinting. As Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe fought for stronger copyright protections for their novels, other players in the literary marketplace developed new strategies to make money off authors’ names, developing collections of signatures, anthologies, and biographies that created a separate revenue stream associated with the person of the author: this book ignores the author's work to focus on the author’s brand. Portraits of the Author offers an account of brand development as a chaotic, collective enterprise, and one that raised questions about the right to privacy and the use of one’s name that continue to shape celebrity culture today. Then as now, readers were fascinated by the relationship between an author’s life and work, with everything that cannot be known from a study of the text alone. My book argues that the history of the relation between life and work--the notion of the author as a person who writes--is written in the outer edges of the literary field, through portraits of the author at work.
Because literary history tends to be organized by author or genre, the miscellaneous sea of texts just adjacent to major works has been invisible. To reveal the broader literary field, Portraits of the Author draws on interlocking computational approaches to genre: book history, digital archives, and algorithmic criticism. Such methods also illuminate the many ways texts get co-created—rewritten, edited, and packaged—on their way to publication. In the age of reprinting, many hands produce the figure of the author.
Escape Reading: Wherever You Go, There You Are reflects my experience as a survivor of the 1999 Columbine shooting as well as my expertise in books as a lifelong binge-reader with a PhD in English from Stanford University. This book argues that escape reading is not only the hot cousin of avoidance, but an oblique way to encounter otherwise intolerable feelings and memories.
