Novel Devotions: Conversional Reading, Computational Modeling, and the Modern Novel

Abstract

What would it mean for a novel to turn us as we turn its pages? How are we not simply moved, but transformed—turned around —through the novel’s combination of gestural and affective structures? How might we think, in other words, about the correspondences between the novel’s technics and its tropes in its ability to assume meaning for us as a genre on a profound personal level? This essay explores the use of computational models to understand the novel’s relationship to the narration of profound change as a vehicle of readerly devotion. It aims to give us new techniques for thinking about the novel’s significance as a genre, a significance that depends less on forms of critical estrangement and more on felt experiences of pronounced transformation. In doing so, it outlines the potential impact that the practice of computational modeling might have on our own affective attachments as critical readers.

More than just a product: Strengthening literature in sociological analysis

“…Distant reading as advocated by Moretti (); (cf. Piper, ; Bode, ) looks at large‐scale movements such as the historical development of specific types of novels (Bode, ), the emergence of a “global science fiction field” (Milner, ), the systemic dynamics of literary fiction on climate change (Milner & Burgmann, ), and the development of the (post‐)apocalyptic genre (Määttä, ). Sometimes referred to as a “leading contemporary sociologist of literature” (Milner & Burgmann, , p. 1), Moretti became popular due to his ambition to see the “big picture.” However, his belief that distance “is a condition of knowledge” (Moretti, , p. 57) might lead to “naïve representationalism” (Frow, , p. 241), which “misleadingly construes the resulting quantifications as data that are independent of interpretation” (Bennett, , p. 290).…”

Do we know what we are doing?

“…9 She misnames authors of articles, mis-cites editions, mis-attributes arguments to the wrong book, and fails at basic math. 10 And yet each of these assertions always addsup to the same certain conclusion: failed to replicate.…”

Corpus Juris, Habeas Corpus, and the “Corporeal Turn” in the Humanities

“…For example, even when Andrew Piper argues for the integration of close reading within an iterative process of model construction, he does so in relation to a conception of the novel as possessing a "conversional force," a capacity for eliciting what he calls "devotionality." 8 And it is just this process of revisiting, change and allegiance, Piper argues, that a combination of distant and close reading can reproduce, owing to what he terms "the conversional nature of computational reading" -a model indeed for an evangelism of the corpus that wishes to convince us of the superiority of its methods. 9 While concerns about the digital humanities normally present themselves as a reaction to its scientific style, I shall argue that an important dimension of the power of the corpus can be traced to its theological origins.…”