About Me
Beginning in the fall, I will be an assistant professor of English at Emory University. My first book, American Literature and the Long Downturn, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Apocalypse shapes the experience of millions of Americans. Not because they face imminent cataclysm, however true this is, but because apocalypse is a story they tell themselves. It offers a way out of an otherwise irredeemably unjust world. Adherence to it obscures that it is a story, rather than a description of reality. And it is old. Since its origins among Jewish writers in the first centuries BCE, apocalypse has recurred as a tempting and available form through which to express a sense of hopelessness. Why has it appeared with such force in the US now? What does it mean?
This book argues that to find the meaning of our apocalyptic times we need to look at the economics of the last five decades, from the end of the postwar boom. After historian Robert Brenner, I call it the long downturn. Though it might seem abstract, the economics of the long downturn worked its way into the most intimate experiences of everyday life, including the fear that there would be no tomorrow. This fear takes the form I call neoliberal apocalypse.
The varieties neoliberal apocalypse—horror at the nation’s commitment to a racist, exclusionary economic system; resentment about threats to white supremacy; apprehension that the nation has unleashed a violence that will consume it; claustrophobia within the limited scripts of neoliberalism; suffocation under the weight of debt—together form the discordant chord that hums under American life in the twenty-first century. For many of us, for different reasons, it feels like the end is coming soon. This book explains how we came to this, and what it has meant for literature.
My second book, The Conglomerate Era, is under contract with Columbia University Press. How has the conglomeration of publishing changed literature? I answer with two interventions in literary history. I reveal trends in literary fiction that transcend individual publishers, and I differentiate literary production by publisher. Concerning the former, I illustrate—as just one example—how the conglomerate era has created the conditions for literary genre fiction, in which literary writers adopt genre forms like fantasy, the western, the detective novel, or the post-apocalyptic novel. Literary genre fiction is a dream for publishers in the conglomerate era because, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, marries literary fiction’s symbolic capital with genre fiction’s financial capital. Books in this category bear the promise of becoming both prizewinners and bestsellers.
My findings draw on my use of natural language processing to show the emergence of literary genre fiction from the 1980s to the present, and I analyze publisher data to explain how this hybrid genre satisfies budgetary demands. I also discover trends that distinguish publishers from one another. Is there a Random House style, and if so, how would we characterize it? How does the style of an enormous conglomerate publisher like Random House differ from that of a small, independent press? How do they differ in terms of the race and gender of their authors? With attention to subsidiary rights, fundamental to publishing but neglected by academics, I show how conglomeration has meant the globalization of American literature in material ways yet unregistered by the scholarship. The current debate centers on whether conglomeration has been good or bad for literature. I move beyond demonization and apologetics to develop a theory of literature in the era of conglomeration.
The scope of conglomeration poses a methodological challenge, and to answer it I enlist computational analysis alongside more traditional literary critical techniques of attending to form and historical context, including archival research. I have built corpora on publishers (Random House, W. W. Norton, Pocket Books, Grove, Graywolf, and others), prizewinning and bestselling American literature, and reviews of tens of thousands of American novels toward writing large scale analyses of the field. In doing so, I have gained experience managing big data projects, supervising student workers, acquiring and curating data, managing metadata, writing programs in Python, and synthesizing this data with current scholarly debates to produce innovative scholarship. Drawing on my training in traditional literary studies and critical theory, I use computational methods to offer an account of literary history that reveals how money and power in publishing have shaped the state of contemporary literature.
This book argues that to find the meaning of our apocalyptic times we need to look at the economics of the last five decades, from the end of the postwar boom. After historian Robert Brenner, I call it the long downturn. Though it might seem abstract, the economics of the long downturn worked its way into the most intimate experiences of everyday life, including the fear that there would be no tomorrow. This fear takes the form I call neoliberal apocalypse.
The varieties neoliberal apocalypse—horror at the nation’s commitment to a racist, exclusionary economic system; resentment about threats to white supremacy; apprehension that the nation has unleashed a violence that will consume it; claustrophobia within the limited scripts of neoliberalism; suffocation under the weight of debt—together form the discordant chord that hums under American life in the twenty-first century. For many of us, for different reasons, it feels like the end is coming soon. This book explains how we came to this, and what it has meant for literature.
My second book, The Conglomerate Era, is under contract with Columbia University Press. How has the conglomeration of publishing changed literature? I answer with two interventions in literary history. I reveal trends in literary fiction that transcend individual publishers, and I differentiate literary production by publisher. Concerning the former, I illustrate—as just one example—how the conglomerate era has created the conditions for literary genre fiction, in which literary writers adopt genre forms like fantasy, the western, the detective novel, or the post-apocalyptic novel. Literary genre fiction is a dream for publishers in the conglomerate era because, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, marries literary fiction’s symbolic capital with genre fiction’s financial capital. Books in this category bear the promise of becoming both prizewinners and bestsellers.
My findings draw on my use of natural language processing to show the emergence of literary genre fiction from the 1980s to the present, and I analyze publisher data to explain how this hybrid genre satisfies budgetary demands. I also discover trends that distinguish publishers from one another. Is there a Random House style, and if so, how would we characterize it? How does the style of an enormous conglomerate publisher like Random House differ from that of a small, independent press? How do they differ in terms of the race and gender of their authors? With attention to subsidiary rights, fundamental to publishing but neglected by academics, I show how conglomeration has meant the globalization of American literature in material ways yet unregistered by the scholarship. The current debate centers on whether conglomeration has been good or bad for literature. I move beyond demonization and apologetics to develop a theory of literature in the era of conglomeration.
The scope of conglomeration poses a methodological challenge, and to answer it I enlist computational analysis alongside more traditional literary critical techniques of attending to form and historical context, including archival research. I have built corpora on publishers (Random House, W. W. Norton, Pocket Books, Grove, Graywolf, and others), prizewinning and bestselling American literature, and reviews of tens of thousands of American novels toward writing large scale analyses of the field. In doing so, I have gained experience managing big data projects, supervising student workers, acquiring and curating data, managing metadata, writing programs in Python, and synthesizing this data with current scholarly debates to produce innovative scholarship. Drawing on my training in traditional literary studies and critical theory, I use computational methods to offer an account of literary history that reveals how money and power in publishing have shaped the state of contemporary literature.
Dan Sinykin
Department of English
University of Notre Dame
South Bend, IN 46556
Department of English
University of Notre Dame
South Bend, IN 46556