Neoliberalism & Literary Geography of the 20th Century: Statistical Models

Abstract

Computational methods allow literary scholars to test their claims against a much larger and more diverse body of texts than would otherwise be possible. Recent examples include work on the evolution of poetic diction in the nineteenth century, on comparative social networks in American and Asian modernism, and on urban space in several centuries of British fiction. But there has been very little such research on contemporary literature, where problems of scale are most acute. This talk presents new computational work on neoliberalism and the literary geography of the twentieth century. To shed light on the extent to which fiction today is shaped by the logic of late capitalism, it assesses the relationship between the century’s significant changes in economic output and the shifting distribution of geographic attention in 10,000 American novels published between 1880 and 1990, finding a surprising — and growing — degree of geographic conservatism in postwar US fiction. This result calls into question the widespread critical assumption that neoliberal ideology demands an increasingly close alignment between market functions and aesthetic production.