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Papers by Jordan Brower
Post45 Contemporaries, 2021
Modern Language Quarterly, 2020
Modernism/Modernity , 2019
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/hacking-it-blade-runner-2049
Critical Inquiry, Jul 24, 2017
The first two parts of this essay examine a pair of questions associated with Chad Wellmon and An... more The first two parts of this essay examine a pair of questions associated with Chad Wellmon and Andrew Piper's effort to analyze prestige bias and patronage in humanities publishing. First, how closely does Wellmon and Piper’s constructed measure of heterogeneity reflect what is usually meant by heterogeneity? Second, are the data collected representative of the field of the humanities that they seek to analyze? In our final section, we turn to a brief consideration of the broader cultural and political motivations for and implications of this study.
We conclude that the heterogeneity metric is inappropriate. We also worry that the data may not be representative of the field of the humanities due to numerous recording errors and a lack of conceptual clarity about what constitutes a publication. As two pillars of statistical analysis are the representativeness of the sample and the consistency of measure, we believe the study fails to achieve the level of methodological rigor demanded in other fields. There are many aspects of Wellmon and Piper’s study that live up to the highest standards of scientific method. Our criticism would not have been possible had the authors’ data and methods not been transparent or had the authors not willingly engaged in lengthy correspondence. However, the shortcomings of their quantitative analysis corrupt the foundations of their study’s conclusions.
Our essay is also a call for digital humanists to take seriously the multidisciplinary nature of their project. At a time when universities are clamoring to produce DH scholarship, it is imperative that humanities scholars subject that work to the same level of rigorous criticism that they apply to other types of arguments. At the same time, DH scholars must admit that the criticism they seek is different in kind. This is to say that in order to take DH work seriously, scholars must take the methods seriously, which means an investment in learning statistical methods and a push towards coauthorship with others willing to lend their expertise.
In the early 1910s the extension of copyright protection to moving-picture adaptations of literar... more In the early 1910s the extension of copyright protection to moving-picture adaptations of literary works resulted in the emergence of film rights, altering the economic and institutional constitution of the American literary field. In letters, industry documents, and journalistic articles, authors and studios alike reflected on the importance of preparing fiction for adaptation. The capacity of authors to imagine the afterlives of their prose works at the moment of composition may be called the " transmedial possibility " of fiction. Transmedial possibility, the theoretical complement to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's concept remediation, inflected the form of several works of the 1920s, including F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby .
Much criticism of Joyce falls into three camps: one that understands Joyce as an exemplar of arti... more Much criticism of Joyce falls into three camps: one that understands Joyce as an exemplar of artistic autonomy; another that finds in the author’s language a hybridity that resists the logic of colonialism; and a third that locates his works’ politics in their narrative material. This paper argues for a fourth position: that a distinct anti-imperial politics can be located in the style of Ulysses, if style is construed not at the level of the sentence but rather of the word. In the inauguration (in “Proteus”) and strategic and asymmetrical deployment (in “Scylla and Charybdis”) of the portmanteau, Joyce attempts to create a language that surpasses Standard English and the political project it supports.
This essay studies the mysterious circumstances of Mr. Tulliver’s loss at court in George Eliot’s... more This essay studies the mysterious circumstances of Mr. Tulliver’s loss at court in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860). Where the social world of the novel deems Tulliver overzealous and wrongheaded in “going to law,” this essay suggests that Eliot incorporated contemporary (1850s) developments in riparian doctrine (the law pertaining to access to and use of rivers) into her novel, such that Tulliver seems to have held a legitimate position under a previous legal paradigm and been stymied by a new way of thinking about river water. This central but unelaborated problem ramifies through the Tulliver family in the form of siblings Maggie and Tom’s respective “judgment pathologies.”
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2013
Public Humanities by Jordan Brower
The Washington Post, 2019
On the 6/23/2016 episode of Deep Focus, host Tom Breen talks about literature and the movies with... more On the 6/23/2016 episode of Deep Focus, host Tom Breen talks about literature and the movies with Jordan Brower, a recent Yale PhD whose dissertation looks at the profound influence of the Hollywood studio system on the development of American literature in the early 20th century. Breen and Brower focus on one particular work of American modernist fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, and discuss style and impact of the text side by side with its 1974 and 2013 movie adaptations.
Books by Jordan Brower
American Literature in the World is an innovative anthology offering a new way to understand the ... more American Literature in the World is an innovative anthology offering a new way to understand the global forces that have shaped the making of American literature. The wide-ranging selections are structured around five interconnected nodes: war; food; work, play, and travel; religions; and human and nonhuman interfaces. Through these five categories, Wai Chee Dimock and a team of emerging scholars reveal American literature to be a complex network, informed by crosscurrents both macro and micro, with local practices intensified by international concerns. Selections include poetry from Anne Bradstreet to Jorie Graham; the fiction of Herman Melville, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner; Benjamin Franklin's parables; Frederick Douglass's correspondence; Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders; Langston Hughes's journalism; and excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcom X as well as Octavia Butler's Dawn. Popular genres such as the crime novels of Raymond Chandler, the comics of Art Spiegelman, the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, and recipes from Alice B. Toklas are all featured. More recent authors include Junot Diaz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jonathan Safran Foer, Edwidge Danticat, Gary Shteyngart, and Jhumpa Lahiri. These selections speak to readers at all levels and invite them to try out fresh groupings and remap American literature. A continually updated interactive component at www.amlitintheworld.yale.edu complements the anthology. (from https://cup.columbia.edu/book/american-literature-in-the-world/9780231157377)
Book Reviews by Jordan Brower
Journal of American Studies, 2018
Post45 Contemporaries, 2021
Modern Language Quarterly, 2020
Modernism/Modernity , 2019
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/hacking-it-blade-runner-2049
Critical Inquiry, Jul 24, 2017
The first two parts of this essay examine a pair of questions associated with Chad Wellmon and An... more The first two parts of this essay examine a pair of questions associated with Chad Wellmon and Andrew Piper's effort to analyze prestige bias and patronage in humanities publishing. First, how closely does Wellmon and Piper’s constructed measure of heterogeneity reflect what is usually meant by heterogeneity? Second, are the data collected representative of the field of the humanities that they seek to analyze? In our final section, we turn to a brief consideration of the broader cultural and political motivations for and implications of this study.
We conclude that the heterogeneity metric is inappropriate. We also worry that the data may not be representative of the field of the humanities due to numerous recording errors and a lack of conceptual clarity about what constitutes a publication. As two pillars of statistical analysis are the representativeness of the sample and the consistency of measure, we believe the study fails to achieve the level of methodological rigor demanded in other fields. There are many aspects of Wellmon and Piper’s study that live up to the highest standards of scientific method. Our criticism would not have been possible had the authors’ data and methods not been transparent or had the authors not willingly engaged in lengthy correspondence. However, the shortcomings of their quantitative analysis corrupt the foundations of their study’s conclusions.
Our essay is also a call for digital humanists to take seriously the multidisciplinary nature of their project. At a time when universities are clamoring to produce DH scholarship, it is imperative that humanities scholars subject that work to the same level of rigorous criticism that they apply to other types of arguments. At the same time, DH scholars must admit that the criticism they seek is different in kind. This is to say that in order to take DH work seriously, scholars must take the methods seriously, which means an investment in learning statistical methods and a push towards coauthorship with others willing to lend their expertise.
In the early 1910s the extension of copyright protection to moving-picture adaptations of literar... more In the early 1910s the extension of copyright protection to moving-picture adaptations of literary works resulted in the emergence of film rights, altering the economic and institutional constitution of the American literary field. In letters, industry documents, and journalistic articles, authors and studios alike reflected on the importance of preparing fiction for adaptation. The capacity of authors to imagine the afterlives of their prose works at the moment of composition may be called the " transmedial possibility " of fiction. Transmedial possibility, the theoretical complement to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's concept remediation, inflected the form of several works of the 1920s, including F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby .
Much criticism of Joyce falls into three camps: one that understands Joyce as an exemplar of arti... more Much criticism of Joyce falls into three camps: one that understands Joyce as an exemplar of artistic autonomy; another that finds in the author’s language a hybridity that resists the logic of colonialism; and a third that locates his works’ politics in their narrative material. This paper argues for a fourth position: that a distinct anti-imperial politics can be located in the style of Ulysses, if style is construed not at the level of the sentence but rather of the word. In the inauguration (in “Proteus”) and strategic and asymmetrical deployment (in “Scylla and Charybdis”) of the portmanteau, Joyce attempts to create a language that surpasses Standard English and the political project it supports.
This essay studies the mysterious circumstances of Mr. Tulliver’s loss at court in George Eliot’s... more This essay studies the mysterious circumstances of Mr. Tulliver’s loss at court in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860). Where the social world of the novel deems Tulliver overzealous and wrongheaded in “going to law,” this essay suggests that Eliot incorporated contemporary (1850s) developments in riparian doctrine (the law pertaining to access to and use of rivers) into her novel, such that Tulliver seems to have held a legitimate position under a previous legal paradigm and been stymied by a new way of thinking about river water. This central but unelaborated problem ramifies through the Tulliver family in the form of siblings Maggie and Tom’s respective “judgment pathologies.”
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2013
The Washington Post, 2019
On the 6/23/2016 episode of Deep Focus, host Tom Breen talks about literature and the movies with... more On the 6/23/2016 episode of Deep Focus, host Tom Breen talks about literature and the movies with Jordan Brower, a recent Yale PhD whose dissertation looks at the profound influence of the Hollywood studio system on the development of American literature in the early 20th century. Breen and Brower focus on one particular work of American modernist fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, and discuss style and impact of the text side by side with its 1974 and 2013 movie adaptations.
American Literature in the World is an innovative anthology offering a new way to understand the ... more American Literature in the World is an innovative anthology offering a new way to understand the global forces that have shaped the making of American literature. The wide-ranging selections are structured around five interconnected nodes: war; food; work, play, and travel; religions; and human and nonhuman interfaces. Through these five categories, Wai Chee Dimock and a team of emerging scholars reveal American literature to be a complex network, informed by crosscurrents both macro and micro, with local practices intensified by international concerns. Selections include poetry from Anne Bradstreet to Jorie Graham; the fiction of Herman Melville, Gertrude Stein, and William Faulkner; Benjamin Franklin's parables; Frederick Douglass's correspondence; Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders; Langston Hughes's journalism; and excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcom X as well as Octavia Butler's Dawn. Popular genres such as the crime novels of Raymond Chandler, the comics of Art Spiegelman, the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, and recipes from Alice B. Toklas are all featured. More recent authors include Junot Diaz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jonathan Safran Foer, Edwidge Danticat, Gary Shteyngart, and Jhumpa Lahiri. These selections speak to readers at all levels and invite them to try out fresh groupings and remap American literature. A continually updated interactive component at www.amlitintheworld.yale.edu complements the anthology. (from https://cup.columbia.edu/book/american-literature-in-the-world/9780231157377)
Journal of American Studies, 2018