Additional Reading

This page is currently in process. It is meant to act as a starting point for your research for your reception analysis assignment and for your final project. The readings listed below are related to our course. In many cases, I considered including them in our syllabus, but there wasn’t enough room. They are organized below by topic or concept, and many of the readings not linked below, unless they are books, can be found in the “additional readings” folder on our course Canvas site (go to Files > additional readings).

Selected Reviews of and Scholarship on Some Course Texts

• Nevada
  • Stephanie Burt, “The Invention of the Trans Novel,” The New Yorker, June 20, 2022 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/27/the-invention-of-the-trans-novel-imogen-binnie-nevada
  • Jonathan H. Grossman, “Imogen Binnie’s Unreliable Narrators,” TSQ 11.3 (August 2024)
• Instagram poetry
  • Aarthi Vadde, “Platform or Publisher,” PMLA 136.3 (2021)
  • Tanja Grubnic, “Nosthetics: Instagram poetry and the convergence of digital media and literature,” The Australian Journal of Popular Culture 9.2 (2020)
• No One Is Talking About This
  • Adam Fales, “The Unpostable,” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 16, 2021, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-unpostable-on-patricia-lockwoods-no-one-is-talking-about-this/
  • Anna Schectman, “The Voice of the Internet,” Representations 168 (2024): 125-45
• The Bluest Eye
  • There is so much scholarship on this novel. This website is an interesting way to get an overview of some of the scholarship on Morrison’s novels: https://blacklitnetwork.org/data-gallery/scholarship_on_toni_morrison/index.html

Internet Histories

• Jia Tolentino, “The I in Internet” from Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019)
• Avery Dame-Griff, The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (2023)
• Kevin Driscoll, The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media (2022)

Amazon

• Wayne Koestenbaum, “Introduction: On the Take,” from Selected Amazon Reviews (2024)
• Kevin Killian, Selected Amazon Reviews (2024)
• Mark McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021) (we are reading chapter 1 of this book for class)

TikTok

• Kira Guehring, “From BookTok to Bookshelf: Algorithms and Book Recommendations on TikTok,” Master’s Thesis in Digital Culture, University of Bergen, Spring 2023
• Lindsay Thomas, “BookTok and the Rituals of Recommendation,” Post45 Contemporaries, Dec 8 2023, https://post45.org/2023/12/booktok-and-the-rituals-of-recommendation/
• Tess McNulty, “What’s On Top of TikTok?,” Public Books, November 8, 2023, https://www.publicbooks.org/whats-on-top-of-tiktok/
• Malin Hay, “BookTok,” London Review of Books, 45.2 (January 19, 2023)

Social Media and Contemporary Culture

• Tess McNulty, “Content’s Forms”, New Literary History, 53.4 (Autumn 2022): 795-851
• Lev Manovich, Instagram and Contemporary Image (2017)
• Simone Murray, “Dark Academia: Bookishness, Readerly Self-fashioning and the Digital Afterlife of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History,” English Studies 104.2 (2023): 347-364.
• Jennifer Burek Pierce, “When Voices Become Data: Reading Data Documenting Contemporary Reading,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 112.3 (2023): 201-2015
• Public Books Hacking the Culture Industries series: https://www.publicbooks.org/tag/hacking-the-culture-industries/
  • This series includes pieces on live-tweeting episodes of Euphoria, on what the data tells us about winners of the National Book Award, on queer characters in video games, on how The New York Times covers Black writers, on Spotify, on audio books, and much more!
• Federico Pianzola, Digital Social Reading: Sharing Fiction in the Twenty-First Century (2025) (available in open access edition)

AI and Literature

• Andrew Dean, “New research shows people can’t tell the difference between human and AI poetry…”, The Conversation, November 13, 2024, https://theconversation.com/new-research-shows-people-cant-tell-the-difference-between-human-and-ai-poetry-and-even-prefer-the-latter-what-gives-243593
• Brian Porter and Edouard Machery, “AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably,” Nature scientific reports, 14.26133 (2024) (plus supplementary materials)
• Matthew Kirschenbaum and Rita Raley, “AI and the University as a Service,” PMLA 139.3 (May 2024): 504-515
  • This article is the introduction to a series of articles about AI and the humanities: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/issue/48199E7E125C2966167AB2934310A464, scroll down to the “Theories and Methodologies” section

Romance Fiction

• Jan Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984)
• J.D. Porter, Angelina Eimannsberger, James English, May Hathaway, and Ashna Yakoob, “Genre Juggernaut: Measuring ‘Romance’,” Public Books, November 10, 2023, https://www.publicbooks.org/genre-juggernaut-measuring-romance/

Fans and Fandom Online

• Aarthi Vadde and Richard Jean So, “Fandom and Fictionality after the Social Web: A Computational Study of AO3,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 70.1 (Spring 2024): 1-29

Platform Capitalism

• Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Where Platform Capitalism and Racial Capitalism Meet: The Sociology of Race and Racism in Digital Society,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 6.4 (October 2020) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332649220949473 (pdf also available on Canvas)

Classics

• Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), especially the chapter “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”
• Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979, 1984) (available via Canvas)
• Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (1994) (we read a short excerpt from the first essay in this collection)
• Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (2002)
• McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (2006)