Can literature make sense of modern information? This course examines the fates and functions of narrative in Anglophone information societies. While the rise of information technology might threaten to flatten knowledge and storytelling into data and content, we examine how narrative forms (principally the novel, short story, and life writing) and narrative theories have long incorporated, revised, and resisted information theory, informational media (including and beyond the digital), and information economies. Along with narrative theory, this seminar introduces students to science and technology studies, communication and media studies, and book history.
Assignments
Assignments in this seminar are designed to equip graduate students with some of the essential skills for successful academic research, writing, and professionalization. Regardless of whether the subject of this course ends up being relevant for your future work, you will complete the course with concrete and portable skills in:
- Communication and Collegiality: giving and receiving written and oral feedback (formulating comments that are rigorous, helpful, and generous; handling and incorporating critiques and suggestions about your work); asking good questions.
- Organization: taking useful notes; building a system for managing, retrieving, and connecting fragmentary ideas, sources, and quotations; not repeating/losing work to a black hole of disorganization and distraction in our attention economy
- Speculation: crafting a compelling proposal for a project before you’ve actually completed the work; establishing preliminary questions, stakes, and interventions with only partial knowledge.
- Writing: practice writing in a professional genre; reading academic writing for form and craft. Instead of completing a conventional seminar paper with an audience of one (me), you will select a major academic genre, review models and guides, and complete either a full draft or partial draft with a plan for future revision and completion. (It’s not possible/plausible to write a strong journal article draft in a semester while completing multiple seminar papers; more productive to write a partial draft with a plan for future revision and completion. For shorter forms, like conference presentations, proposals for a conference panel/roundtable/workshop or journal special issue, we will discuss.)
The four skills above correspond to the graded components of the seminar:
| Element | Grading |
|---|---|
| Communication and Collegiality | Participation: 15% Keyword Presentation: 15% |
| Organization | Notetaking System: 10% |
| Speculation | Final Assignment Proposal: 10% |
| Writing | Final Assignment: 50% |
Keyword Presentation
More information TK. Will discuss assignment in class. For now, see “What is a ‘Keyword’” in the University of Pittsburgh Keywords Project & introduction to Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976)
Suggested Keywords
- Content
- Data
- Detail
- Dissimulation
- Evidence
- Fact
- Fictionality
- Hermeneutics
- Informant
- Information Society
- Information Technology
- Intelligence
- Interpretation
- Knowledge
- Meaning
- Network
- Secret
- Sense Making / Making Sense
- Signal
- Storytelling
- Suspense
- Temporality
- Testimony
- Text
Notetaking System
An exercise in literary and scholarly information management.
This assignment is an opportunity to develop a clear, effective system for taking notes and managing references, quotations, and ideas (or to refine your system, if you already have one). While you are only required to use this notetaking system to organize materials for this class, you should develop a system that you could realistically use for substantially larger-scale and longer-term projects (like articles, chapters, dissertations, or books).
I will suggest or introduce various models, systems, and software (e.g., notetaking software like Notion, Obsidian, OneNote, Evernote, Apple Notes, or Scrivener; the Zettelkasten method; and citation management software like Zotero, Mendeley, and Endnote). However, you may use any system that works for you, including non-digital/pen-and-paper options. At the end of the semester, you will share your notes with me, along with a brief, informal description (2-3 pages) about how and why you’ve organized your notes & how you plan to use this system going forward.
For some preliminary inspiration, please see my Commonplace Book Assignment for information and examples from an undergraduate-level version of this assignment.
Schedule
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?– T.S. Eliot
Part 1: Books and Other Information Technologies
Week 1: Narrative Theory and the History of Information
- Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (Vintage Books, 1990).
- Mieke Bal, “The Point of Narratology,” Poetics Today 11, no. 4 (1990): 727–53.
- Jonathan Culler, “Literary Theory in the Graduate Program,” The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Routledge, 1981), 234-252.
- James Gleick, excerpts from The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (Vintage, 2012).
- Too much information! Devise a procedure to browse, skim, and catalog these recommended sources for future reference.-
- Ann Blair et al., eds., Information: A Historical Companion (Princeton University Press, 2021).
- Peter Brooks, “Stories Abounding: The World Overtaken by Narrative,” Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative (New York Review Books, 2022), 3-26.
- Eric Hayot, Lea Pao, and Anatoly Detwyler, eds., Information: A Reader (Columbia University Press, 2021).
- Michele Kennerly, Samuel Frederick, and Jonathan E. Abel, eds., Information: Keywords (Columbia University Press, 2021).
- Benjamin Peters, ed., Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture (Princeton University Press, 2016).
- Kent Puckett, “Introduction: Story/Discourse,” Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1-23.
- Nanna Bonde Thylstrup et al., eds., Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data (MIT Press, 2021).
Week 2: Taking Note
- Ann Blair, excerpt from “Note-Taking as Information Management,” Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (Yale University Press, 2010)
- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (Vintage Books, 1989).
- John Durham Peters, “Information: Notes Toward a Critical History,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 12, no. 2 (July 1988): 9–23.
Week 3: Commonplaces
- Ann Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550-1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 11–28;
- Robert Darnton, “Extraordinary Commonplaces,” New York Review of Books, December 21, 2000.
- Alan Moore, Providence Compendium (Avatar Press, 2021)
- Recommended (browse commonplace books)
- W. Ross Ashby, “Journal,” The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive, accessed January 24, 2025.
- E. M. Forster, Commonplace Book, ed. Philip Gardner (Stanford University Press, 1988).
- H.P. Lovecraft, “H.P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book,” Howard P. Lovecraft collection, Brown Digital Repository, Brown University Library.
Week 4: Paperwork
- Lori Emerson, “The Fascicle as Process and Product,” Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 129-162.
- John Guillory, “The Memo and Modernity,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (September 2004): 108–32.
- W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (Random House, 2001).
- Excerpts
- Craig Robertson, The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
- Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Zone Books, 2012).
- Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Duke University Press, 2014).
- Jordan Alexander Stein, When Novels Were Books (Harvard University Press, 2020).
Part 2: Cybernetics, Language, and Cognition
Week 5: Information Theory and Cybernetics
- Heather A. Love and Lea Pao, “Introduction, Literary Cybernetics: History, Theory, Post-Disciplinarity,” New Literary History 54, no. 2 (2023): 1193–1205.
- Christos H. Papadimitriou, Turing (A Novel about Computation) (MIT Press, 2005).[?]
- Excerpts - Ronald R. Kline, The Cybernetics Moment, or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (John Hopkins University Press, 2017). - Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke University Press, 2023). - Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press, 2007 [1948]) and The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Da Capo Press, 1988 [1950])
- Recommended - W. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (Chapman & Hall, 1957). - Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (University of Illinois Press, 1998). - N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999) - “Cybernetics for the 21st Century: Cybernetics to Come (Lecture Series),” Hanart Press, accessed January 24, 2025, https://hanart.press/events/.
Week 6: Models and Minds
- Peter Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot: A Model for Narrative,” in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 90–112
- Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021).
- Jonathan Kramnick, “Empiricism, Cognitive Science, and the Novel,” Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (University of Chicago Press), 101-118.
- Lydia H. Liu, “The Freudian Robot,” The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 201-248.
- Recommended - Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Théo Lepage-Richer, and Lucy Suchman, Neural Networks(University of Minnesota Press, 2024). - W. John Harker, “Information Processing and the Reading of Literary Texts,” New Literary History 20, no. 2 (1989): 465–81. - Joshua Gang, excerpt from Behaviorism, Consciousness, and the Literary Mind (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021)
Week 7: Architectures, Infrastructures, and Platforms
- Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” (1941) and “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941)
- Shannon Mattern, “Library as Infrastructure,” Places Journal, June 2014.
- Rianka Singh and Sarah Banet-Weiser, “Sky High: Platforms and the Feminist Politics of Visibility,” in Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan, ed. Sarah Sharma and Rianka Singh (Duke University Press, 2022), 163-175.
- Chris Ware, Building Stories (Pantheon, 2012)
- Recommended - Laura E. Helton, “On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading,” PMLA 134, no. 1 (January 2019): 99–120. - Jean-Christophe Cloutier, “‘At Once Both Document and Symbol’: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and the Lafargue Clinic Photographic Archive,” Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature (Columbia University Press, 2019), 145-208.
Part 3: Knowledge Asymmetries, Detection, and Intelligence
Week 8: Clues and Traces
- Charles Babbage, “On the Permanent Impression of Our Words and Actions on the Globe We Inhabit,” The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (Cambridge University Press, 2009 [1837]), 109–17.
- Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides (Picador, 2010).
- Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 96-125.
- Tzvetan Todorov, “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Cornell University Press, 1977), 42-51.
- Recommended - Rebecca R. Falkoff, Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding (Cornell University Press, 2021). - Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014). - Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).
Week 9: Mind Games
- Erving Goffman, “Expression Games: An Analysis of Doubts at Play,” Strategic Interaction (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 1-82.
- John Maynard Keynes, “Animal Spirits” [the “Keynesian Beauty Contest”], The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)
- Stephen Nachmanovitch, “This Is Play,” New Literary History 40, no. 1 (2009): 1–24.
- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter”
- Donna Tartt, The Secret History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).
- Recommended - Lydia H. Liu, “The Cybernetic Unconscious: Rethinking Lacan, Poe, and French Theory,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 2 (2010): 288-320.
Week 10: Secrets and Codes
- Friedrich Kittler, “The Im-possibility of Translations” and “Untranslatability and the Transposition of Media,” in Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford University Press, 1990), 70-76, 265-272.
- R.F. Kuang, Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (Harper Voyager, 2022).
- Brian Lennon, “Passwords: Philology, Security, Authentication,” Diacritics 43, no. 1 (2015): 82–104.
- Recommended - Barbara Cassin et al., eds., preface and introduction, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton University Press, 2014), vii-xx. - Marc Redfield, “Shibboleth: Inheritance,” Shibboleth: Judges, Derrida, Celan (Fordham University Press, 2021), 1-12. - Neal Stephenson, excerpt from Cryptonomicon (Avon, 1999).
Week 11: Evidence, Testimony, and Belief
- Frances Ferguson, “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” Representations 20 (1987): 88-112.
- Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir (Viking Press, 2019).
- Excepts - Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins, Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt (Polity, 2023). - Leigh Gilmore, The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women (Columbia University Press, 2023).
Part 4: Speculation, Futurity, and Finance
Week 12: Speculation Colonizes the World
- Aimee Bahng, “Introduction: On Speculation: Fiction, Finance, and Futurity,” Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Duke University Press, 2018), 1-24.
- Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton University Press, 2006), 336–63.
- Gayle Rogers, “Conclusion: Speculative Risks, Inhuman Imaginations,” Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI (Columbia University Press, 2021), 172-183.
- James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Tachyon Publications, 2004).
- Recommended - Philip Mirowski, “Information in Economics: A Fictionalist Account,” Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch 136, no. 1 (2016): 109–31. - R. John Williams, “World Futures,” Critical Inquiry (2016): 473-546.
Week 13: The Limits of Communication
- Samuel Delany, Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand (Wesleyan University Press, 2004 [1984]).
- John Durham Peters, “Machines, Animals, and Aliens: Horizons of Incommunicability,” in Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 227–262.
- Gavin Steingo, “The Incomparable,” Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity (University of Chicago Press, 2024), 93-124.
Week 14: Money, Service Work, and Transactions
- Lucia Berlin, “A Manual for Cleaning Women”
- Raymond Carver, “Why Don’t You Dance?”
- Lydia Davis, stories - “Break It Down” - “Problem” - “Foucault and Pencil” - “Trying to Learn” - “Finances” - “A Position at the University” - “Boring Friends” - “How I Know What I Like (Six Versions) - “The Two Davises and the Rug”
- Mary Gaitskill, “Secretary”
- Annie McClanahan, “Introduction: The Spirit of Capital in an Age of Deindustrialization,” Issue 1: Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work, ed. Annie McClanahan, Post45 Journal, January 10, 2019.
- Recommended - Gary S. Becker, “The Economic Approach to Human Behavior” and “A Theory of Marriage,” in The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (University of Chicago Press, 1976), - Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah, “Three Different Modalities of Information in Neoclassical Theory,” The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information: The History of Information in Modern Economics (Oxford University Press, 2017), 101-123. - Robert J. Shiller, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events (Princeton University Press, 2019).
Week 15: Literature and Data
- Nan Z. Da, “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies,” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 3 (2019): 601-639.
- Dallas Liddle, “Could Fiction Have an Information History? Statistical Probability and the Rise of the Novel,” Journal of Cultural Analytics 4, no. 2 (2019).
- Andrew Piper and Sunyam Bagga, “Toward a Data-Driven Theory of Narrativity,” New Literary History 53, no. 4 and 54, no. 1 (2022, 2023): 879-901.
Additional Texts
- Mieke Bal, Narratology in Practice (University of Toronto Press, 2021).
- Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (Hill and Wang, 2000).
- Timothy Bewes, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (Columbia University Press, 2022).
- Zach Blas, Melody Jue, and Jennifer Rhee, eds., Informatics of Domination (Duke University Press, 2025).
- Søren Brier, Cybersemiotics: Why Information Is Not Enough! (University of Toronto Press, 2008).
- Natalia Aki Cecire, Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).
- Jack Wei Chen et al., eds., Literary Information in China: A History (Columbia University Press, 2021).
- Seo-Young Chu, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science Fictional Theory of Representation (Harvard University Press, 2010).
- Alice Crawford, ed., The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History (Princeton University Press, 2015).
- Nicholas Dames, The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2023).
- Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cornell University Press, 1983).
- Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Making Sense in Life and Literature, trans. Glen Burns (University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
- Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy, eds., Essentials of the Theory of Fiction (Duke University Press, 2005).
- Heather Houser, Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in an Age of Data (Columbia University Press, 2019).
- Yuk Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics (e-flux books, 2020).
- Carol Jacobs and Henry Sussman, eds., Acts of Narrative (Stanford University Press, 2003).
- John Johnston, Information Multiplicity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
- Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016).
- Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford University Press, 1999); Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. John Johnston (Taylor and Francis, 2013).
- Paul Kockelman, The Art of Interpretation in an Age of Computation (Oxford University Press, 2017).
- Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (MIT Press, 1994).
- Guido Mazzoni, Theory of the Novel (Harvard University Press, 2017).
- D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (University of California Press, 1988).
- John Durham Peters, “The Problem of Communication,” in Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1–32.
- Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
- Gerald Prince, “Narratology,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 8: From Formalism to Poststructuralism, ed. Raman Selden (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 110–30.
- Daniel Punday, Writing at the Limit: The Novel in the New Media Ecology (University of Nebraska Press, 2012).
- Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Fordham University Press, 2015).
- Avery Slater, “‘Hermenautics’: Toward a Disinformation Theory,” New Literary History 54, no. 2 (2023): 1257–61.
- Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans. Kevin Repp (Stanford University Press, 1999).
- Dennis Tenen, Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation (Stanford University Press, 2017)