The rise of online platforms for buying and discussing books such as Amazon and Goodreads opens up new possibilities for reception studies in the twenty-first century. These platforms allow readers unprecedented freedom to preview and talk to others about books, but they also exercise unprecedented control over which books readers buy and how readers respond to them. Online reading platforms rely on algorithms with implicit assumptions that at times imitate and at times differ from the conventions of literary scholarship. This dissertation interrogates those algorithms, using computational methods including machine learning and natural language processing to analyze hundreds of thousands of online book reviews in order to find moments when literary and technological perspectives on contemporary reading can inform each other. A focus on the algorithmic logic of bookselling allows this project to critique the ways companies sell and recommend books in the twenty-first century, while also making room for improvements to these algorithms in both accuracy and theoretical sophistication. This dissertation forms the basis of a re-imagining of literary scholarship in the digital age that takes into account the online platforms that mediate so much of our modern literary consumption.
Consumers in the U.S. have increasingly (and often paradoxically) turned to their consumption as a space from which to address social and environmental problems that range from sweatshop labor to global warming; the diverse consumption strategies that they have embraced –boycotts, local and organic food, fair trade, downshifting and more – are all a part of a larger movement and discourse called ethical consumption. A flood of recent novels, memoirs and nonfiction books make this activist, productive, expressive kind of consumption their central theme (and in the case of several of the memoirs, their organizing conceit). The authors of these works have suggested interesting expansions of the ethical role not just of commodity consumption but of media consumption as well: the imaginative literature of ethical consumption models ethical consumption for its readers, and it sees itself shaping attitudes about consumption that will in turn shape economic, social and environmental realities in the world. The ambition of that project (and the enthusiasm with which readers have taken it up) lends a sense of urgency to my own. My dissertation looks at representations of ethical consumption in this growing body of imaginative literature in order to understand how and on what terms it intervenes in consumption. I argue that the language and forms that these texts use to imagine ethical consumption matter: that they privilege particular perspectives, communicate ideological investments, and shape the interpretation of events in ways that inflect their interpretation of both the practice of ethical consumption and the real-world problems that ethical consumption responds to. I frame the contribution of literary criticism in terms of its interrogation of those forms.
Cookie SettingseScholarship uses cookies to ensure you have the best experience on our website. You can manage which cookies you want us to use.Our Privacy Statement includes more details on the cookies we use and how we protect your privacy.