Contemporary Textual Scholarship, Canon, and Publishing

Eve, Martin Paul (2017) Contemporary Textual Scholarship, Canon, and Publishing. In: English: Shared Futures, 5-7 July 2017, Newcastle, UK. (Unpublished)

Abstract

In her broadside against Althusserian-derived symptomatic reading, Rita Felski has recently noted, on the matters of value and canon, that we undervalue many hidden types of publisher labour: “publishers, advertisers, critics, prize committees, reviews, word-of-mouth recommendations, syllabi, textbooks and anthologies, changing tastes and scholarly vocabularies” (The Limits of Critique, 170). On the other hand, Eaglestone laments that these sites of publishing labour “do not see the point of” academics ('Towards a Manifesto', 1096). This paper sets out the recent debates about canon, selectivity, labour, and textual scholarship in the field of contemporary fiction. Drawing on methods and practices from the digital humanities with respect to new paradigms of so-called 'distant reading', this paper focuses its remarks on canon through ideas of labour scarcity. Drawing on a historical range back to the 1890s at Yale, where the first university contemporary fiction course was taught, this paper asks just what the 'unknown unknowns' in our cartography of the contemporary canon represents.

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