Charting the Digital Literary Sphere

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Access provided by James Madison University & (Viva) (4 Oct 2016 20:51 GMT) SIMONE MURRAY Charting the Digital Literary Sphere

hat is the relationship between digital communication technologies and contemporary literary cul- W ture? In some ways, it is a question rarely posed at present, largely because it has been posed so often before and the often grandiose predictions formulated in response have so lamentably failed to materialize. Since the late 1980s, pro- ponents of literary hypertext and later network-inspired variants such as interactive ﬁction and Twitterature have challenged literature’s traditionally linear-narrative and single-author characteristics.1 Roughly simultaneously, from the early 1990s, constant academic speculation over the imminent “death of the book” cast doubt upon literature’s traditional print-culture format.2 That e-books have demonstrably failed to date to eliminate codex book sales, and that even the most critically acclaimed hypertext ﬁctions remain curiosities in the literary canon, their dissemination beset by problems of software and hardware obsolescence, has rendered the question of digital technologies’ impact on contemporary literary culture

Research and writing of this article were made possible by the Australian Research Coun- cil’s Discovery Projects grant scheme (2012) and Monash University’s Advancing Women’s Research Success grant project (2014). 1. For examples of “ﬁrst-generation” digital literary theory and criticism, see Bolter; Coover, “End of Books” and “Hyperﬁction”; Delany and Landow; and Landow, Hypertext 3.0 and Hyper/Text/Theory. For more recent research, including into literary uses of social media, see Douglas; and Page and Thomas. 2. For a feminist take on these changes, see Spender. An indicative range of mid-1990s perspectives can be found in Nunberg.

Contemporary Literature 56, 2 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/15/0002-0311 ᭧ 2015 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 312 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE a passe´, almost embarrassingly naive, inquiry.3 There is a weary sense that, as a discipline, we have been around this block before. Yet the manifest failure of futurists’ more eschatological predictions to come to pass is not reason to abandon the question of the digital’s signiﬁcance for literary culture. Rather, it should serve as a spur to provide better answers—newer, alert to the risks of rhe- torical overreaching, and attentive to the varied and sometimes con- tradictory permutations of contemporary culture. For the Internet offers an abundance of what in earlier print- and broadcast- dominated eras was collectively termed “book talk”: book review websites, self-cataloguing library networks, author home pages, publishers’ portals, online book retailers, archived writers’ festival sessions, and recorded celebrity author readings. Indeed, the chal- lenge for contemporary bibliophiles is not to locate literary content of interest online but, rather, to sift the perspicacious and illuminating wheat from the chaff of vapid adulation and naked self- promotion.4 For literary studies to ignore this rich seam of online biblio-enthusiasm simply because the question of the digital-literary interface has been posed before and the answers found wanting risks looking like smug self-satisfaction on the part of print-culture’s erstwhile defenders in the face of earlier waves of digital booster- ism. More pervasively, for a discipline fearful of the impact of neo- liberal political agendas on research funding allocations, student enrollments, and graduate employment prospects, it is needlessly self-limiting to dismiss such ample evidence of continued public enthusiasm for matters literary.5 I do not mean to suggest that academe has, since the turn of the millennium, remained silent on the relationship of digital media to literary culture. Insightful and productive work on the signiﬁcance of electronic and self-publishing, the game-changing role of online

3. For discussion of problems of longevity and canonicity in digital literature, see Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin; and Ensslin. 4. For mainstream media discussion of how to find good book blogs, see Sullivan, “Suggested Trail” and “Bookworms.” 5. James F. English’s The Global Future of English Studies provides a perhaps surprisingly optimistic take on the future of literary studies as an academic discipline. Jim Collins withholds condemnatory rhetoric and investigates contemporary popular literary culture with enthusiasm in Bring on the Books for Everybody and “Reading, in a Digital Archive of One’s Own.” MURRAY ⋅ 313 book retailers, and the impact of digital media on reading practices exists.6 But most striking is how often it is found, piecemeal, at the fringes of better-established disciplines, such as book history (whose very choice of name signals its unease with contemporary developments), nationalist literary studies (despite the Internet’s structural undermining of national boundaries), cultural sociology (though traditionally restive with specifically literary judgments), and cultural studies (long more attuned to screen media than to the codex). Lacking is a unifying term that could give focus and coher- ence to a currently scattered body of work. I propose the umbrella term the digital literary sphere. This wording denotes not detailed close readings of specific digital literary experiments, nor the unfolding rivalries between specific e-book reader technologies, both of which are amply chronicled elsewhere. Rather, it encom- passes the broad array of book-themed websites and other digital content whose focus is contemporary literature and its production, circulation, and consumption, however blurry that tripartite distinction has been rendered in an era of Web 2.0 and social media. For it is clear that while e-book formats are undeniably encroaching upon the codex as literature’s dominant platform, and that pockets of specialist interest in niche digital-literary experiments remain, the vast majority of online literary discussion concerns traditionally linear, single-author narratives published either in print form or in e-book versions that closely mimic the codex experience. What is required academically to do justice to these developments is a sociocultural conceptualization of the digital-literature interface that is both contextual in focus (rather than belletristic or technocentric) and contemporary in outlook, so that we may gain greater insight into digital media’s role in fashioning twenty-first-century authorial careers, publisher prospects, public understandings of literature, critical judgments, and reader behaviors. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, digital environments have clearly ceased to be severable appendages to a properly print-focused literary uni-

6. For a masterful cultural sociology of U.S. book retailing, see Miller’s Reluctant Cap- italists. For an anthology of digital literary studies approaches, see Siemens and Schreib- man. For more general discussion of the book in the digital era, see Collins, Bring on the Books; Darnton, Case; Lang; and Striphas. 314 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE verse. But it is equally true—perhaps contrary to some of the more imperializing claims of media studies—that literary discourse and its characteristic dispositions continue to shape the nature and norms of online book talk, rendering it distinct from online discussion of other cultural forms. It is this complex interface of literary- digital mutual interpenetration that demands detailed analysis, so that literary studies may document and better comprehend an epochal moment in literary culture’s adaptation to and colonization of a newer communications format—an era of veritable digital incunabula.

My project’s charting of the digital literary sphere operates at the confluence of three dynamic academic fields: book history or print culture studies; digital media studies; and electronic or digital literary studies. While each discipline is expanding, they have thus far typically failed to engage with one another directly. While the Author is a foundational concept in literary studies, its theorization was not prevalent in the Anglophone scholarly world until translations of Roland Barthes’s and Michel Foucault’s books of the late-1960s drew attention to the way in which academic ven- eration of the “author figure” functioned to shut down the innate polysemy of texts. During roughly the same period, but starting from a diametrically opposed, empiricist position, the bibliograph- ically inspired discipline of book history has sought to reconstruct the historical, institutional, and material characteristics of authorship’s development. These crystallized in the early twentieth-century appearance of the professional (typically male) author—able to live by his pen, vigilant in protecting his international copyrights through the medium of a literary agent, and staging strategic inter- ventions into the public sphere.7 Situated methodologically between these two approaches has been a third strand of culturally inflected legal scholarship which traces the emergence of the Author as a

7. For studies of the rise of literary agents from the late nineteenth century to their contemporary kingmaker role in the literary industry, see Delany, Gillies, Hepburn, McDonald, and West. MURRAY ⋅ 315 foundational concept in the growth of intellectual property.8 The most recent wave of book history–inspired authorship studies has emerged over the last decade and a half. It focuses upon the intriguing phenomenon of celebrity literary authorship. Such studies constitute a subset of the exponentially growing field of celebrity studies within media and cultural studies generally. But they can be distinguished from this larger field in key regards. In the first place, their focus is the avowedly minority interest of self-described “literature” (as opposed to popular mass culture). Secondly, they display an uncharacteristic attention to a print medium (as opposed to most celebrity studies’ preoccupation with screen media).9 The contextual preconditions for the late-twentieth-century celebrity author include structural realignments such as the concentra- tion of publishing houses within multimedia conglomerates, the related shift to marketing- and sales-driven front-list publishing, and the proliferation of creative writing courses in universities (including outside their traditional heartland of North America). In such a context, the author does not (as poststructuralists might have it) disappear from the text so much as continuously offer pronouncements on how readers should interpret it. These can be prof- fered via public readings and meet-the-author events, profile pieces in broadsheet newspapers, or personality-centered arts (and even news) television programming. The fact that many scholars of celebrity authorship are trained in literary studies predisposes the majority of their work toward sequential textual analysis—scrutinizing the works of star authors for signs of their invocation, evasion, or subversion of the celebrity author trope.10 This disciplinary tic has often had the unfortunate effect of confining the contextual and sociological conditions for the rise and maintenance of celebrity authorship to the introductory chapters of such full-length studies. But still more problematically for a discipline striving to interpret

8. For important examples of this critical legal studies research tradition, see Biriotti and Miller; Rose; and Woodmansee and Jaszi. 9. From the turn of the millennium alone, such work has included Brouillette; Gardi- ner, “Recuperating the Author” and “What Is an Author?”; Glass; Moran; Ommundsen; Rooney; Squires; and York. 10. Studies by Sarah Brouillette, Loren Glass, Joe Moran, and Lorraine York all employ this model of sequential chapters focused on the work of specific literary authors. 316 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE contemporary cultural formations, celebrity author studies are overwhelmingly biased toward print and broadcast media; they offer only the most glancing analysis of how the characteristic affordances of the digital literary sphere may be redrawing the con- tours of contemporary celebrity authorship. The rapid expansion and uptake of the Internet during the 1990s initially made “new media studies” a burgeoning subfield of media and cultural studies. But now, given all communications formats’ conversion to binary-based systems, the entire discipline of media studies is by definition digital in nature. As with the emergence of any new medium, attention was initially on how the Internet dif- fered from extant communication formats, particularly the formerly dominant medium of broadcast television. To this end, the decen- tralized, networked structure, interactive capability, global reach, and lower barriers to entry characterizing digital media have been thoroughly analyzed in social theory and media studies since the early-1990s. In spite of these fields’ predominant attention to television and film, the implications of networked logics began to make themselves felt during roughly the same period in the discipline of print culture studies. Indeed, “the future of the book” became some- thing of a clicheín scholarly book chapters, special journal issues, and academic conferences during the 1990s. Many of the more dire predictions of the “death of the book” may appear risible in retro- spect. But digital networks’ tendency to disintermediate the formerly linearly conceived “publishing chain” by cutting out various middlemen, the fragmenting of the once-singular book into a bun- dle of adaptable rights, and the potential usurpation of the publisher’s role by other communication-circuit agents are all revolu- tionizing trends.11 The technophoria of the mid-1990s has, however, left an unfortunate legacy: digital media and print culture studies’ avid attention to changing e-book formats and digital rights skirmishes has distracted both fields from considering the surprising resilience of literary discussion on the Internet itself. Such literary habits persist, as mentioned above, in the form of digital-sphere

11. For studies of the impact of digital technology on the book industry, see Epstein; Murray, “Content Streaming” and “Generating Content”; Thompson, Books in the Digital Age and Merchants of Culture; and Wirteń. MURRAY ⋅ 317 cultural magazines, heavily trafficked book blogs, and book cataloguing and recommendation sites. The forum in which we might reasonably expect the digital literary sphere to be most fully analyzed is the currently burgeoning discipline of electronic (or digital) literary studies, itself a subset of the modishly named “digital humanities” (also known by the acronym DH). Digital literary studies, though still emergent and hence incho- ate, can nevertheless be observed to be cohering around several established nodes. The first of these, qualitative studies, typically uses digital databases and archives to undertake philological, bibliographical, and textual scholarship of past works, primarily those by a particular author or within a historical period (for example, digitized medieval manuscripts, Early English Books Online, even early versions of Jerome McGann’s The Rossetti Archive).12 This alignment with a broadly chronological literary taxonomy is revealing; such studies tend to conceive of digital resources principally as helpmeets (or impediments) to standard paper-based critical methodologies and rarely as subjects of scholarship in their own right.13 As Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, a leading digital literary studies scholar, states, “textual critics have tended to treat the computer mainly as a platform-independent venue for studying the artifacts of other media” (16). A related qualitative digital literary method- ology involves computer-assisted analysis of literary or linguistic characteristics through text-mining (for example, digital concor- dances, pattern-matching, and author attribution studies), which Thomas Rommel clusters under the useful term “[s]tylo-statistical studies” (94). A third qualitative research stream engages with the theory of or, more recently, performs textual analysis of born-digital literary works such as hypertext fictions.14 While to many in the literary studies mainstream such digital humanities approaches may appear radically confronting, they are in some ways simply

12. For McGann’s own discussion of this early multimedia digital literary studies data- base, refer to Radiant Textuality. 13. Similar observations are made by McGann in Radiant Textuality (17) and “Note” (411). 14. For work by N. Katherine Hayles, the leading scholarly proponent of this approach, see Writing Machines, My Mother Was a Computer, and Electronic Literature. For recent work see also Bell; Bell, Ensslin, and Rustad; and Kirschenbaum. 318 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE standard literary-critical hermeneutic operations carried out by means of a new tool. Each of these diverse approaches remains obdurately text-, author-, or medium-centric, rather than adopting a cultural-sociological approach focusing upon the context or material and institutional cultural system influencing the emergence and circulation of specific literary texts. Complementing these text-based, close-reading approaches is another digital literary studies substream of quantitative studies which use digital technology to engage in “distant reading”— compiling statistical data on the literary experiences of mass sample groups.15 This approach, unlike the others, moves beyond the aesthetic or cultural-political considerations of an individual text to incorporate a more sociological, systematizing dimension. How- ever, its gaze is typically retrospective, with a marked preference for earlier literary-historical periods, and hence throws little light on contemporary literary developments. A third and final digital literary studies research node is institutional studies, which features a diverse array of work on digital libraries and archives, especially relating to budgets, informational access, and preservation; electronic scholarly publishing, open access, and peer review; the implications of these new formats for hiring and tenure decisions; the changing patterns of academic careers; and pedagogical uses for digital resources.16 While the outward-looking, materially engaged, and strongly contemporary orientation of such research recom- mends itself, literary studies per se—or even the humanities more broadly—is rarely the focus of attention. Digital literary studies as it currently stands thus largely divides into using computers to study either texts which manifestly predate the arrival of digital media or texts which can be understood only through digital platforms because they presuppose reading in digital environments. Recreating this scholarly lacuna on a more macro, interdisciplinary level, scholarly dialogue that might have been expected to take place between book history/print culture studies,

15. For such approaches, as applied to a variety of geographical and chronological literary contexts, refer to Bode and Dixon; Moretti; and St. Clair. 16. See, for example, Darnton, Case; Fish; and Thompson, Books in the Digital Age and Merchants of Culture. MURRAY ⋅ 319 digital media studies, and electronic/digital literary studies has to date largely failed to occur. Too often kept apart by departmental structures, different academic conference circuits, and, in some cases, divergent entrenched research methodologies, each of these disciplines has so far gestured toward rather than explored the contemporary digital literary sphere. Omitted by all parties, as a result, is the vast range of contemporary literary discussion that takes place at the liminal zone between print and digital, such as online discussion of predominantly print texts or examination of how digital technologies publicize, market, and retail fiction which is then read (perhaps) in print, only for readers to then reconnect online through book clubs, fan sites, personal library cataloguing sites, book review blogs, and so on. Put briefly, what is currently missing and is urgently needed is a digital literary studies that is both contemporary and contextual. This hinterland zone of contemporary print and digital literary overlap is a research project for which the current discussion serves as a scoping paper. My motivation is partly to better comprehend the key transitional period through which we are living, but also, more self-reflexively, to examine the effects of this print-digital coexistence for our broader conceptualization of the literary studies discipline. In short, my project asks, What is the significance of digital media for contemporary Anglophone literary culture?

To begin mapping the vast scope of the digital literary sphere, I propose a matrix diagram (see ﬁg.). This model incorporates various traditional literary “processes” along the horizontal axis: performing authorship; “selling” literature; curating the public life of literature; consecrating the literary; and entering literary discussion. The vertical axis, by contrast, comprises various subcategories of websites broadly based on sectoral origin. The dots represent points of intersection between items on the two axes, namely, websites engaged in particular literary processes. Thus the two axes acknowledge institutional processes created during the period of print culture’s dominance (and their continuing power) while also granting due attention to digital culture’s transformation, collapsing, and “disintermediation” of the traditional print-centric “com- 320 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE munications circuit” (Thompson, Books 310; Darnton, “What Is the History” 111). The diagram aims to capture English-language literary culture at a key period of transition, when the inﬂuence of the old ways perceptibly remains but the logics of the new, digital environment have wrought such changes that the digital can no longer be regarded as a mere supplement to inherited print-culture structures.17

Curating the public Entering Processes r Performing “Selling” life of Consecrating literary Website Categories f authorship literature literature the literary discussion

Print-originated media • • • • • Born-digital media ••• • • Author ••• • Publisher ••• • • Retailer •• • • Reader • • • Cultural policy entities • • •

It is impossible in a discussion of this length to do more than gesture toward the range of bibliocentric content falling into each of the seven website categories, but I will summarize some of the major players to indicate the ways in which they are instituting change in each of the ﬁve highlighted “processes.” I will then consider the analytical issues these changes raise for literary studies as a discipline. It is clear that print-originated literary supplements—The New York Times Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Guardian Books—have, since at least the mid–1990s, consciously parlayed their laboriously built

17. Compare Thompson’s Merchants of Culture, which devotes the ninth of its ten chapters to “the digital revolution” while structuring other chapters principally around resid- ual print-culture categories such as book retailers, literary agents, and publishers. Thomp- son’s gaze over trade publishing is also exclusively sociological, without delving into the specifically “literary” subfield of trade books, let alone examining how the digital revolution might be affecting the nature of contemporary literary writing. MURRAY ⋅ 321 status as offline literary arbiters into the digital environment. In so doing, they have increasingly adopted the technical affordances of digital media to engage their readerships in a variety of ways that wed consumers more closely to the masthead’s brand, for example, blogs, podcasts, PowerPoint slide shows, discussion forums, competitions, reader reviews, online reading groups, Twitter feeds, archives, personalized book lists, and audiovisual recordings of author readings, panel sessions, and public lectures. While long engaged with consecrating varieties of literary achievement through publishing influential book reviews, and thus to some extent also with undertaking a quasi cultural-policy role in shepherding public conceptions of literature, such mastheads’ digital incarnations are increasingly engaging in author-making and (e-)book retailing through self-publishing ventures. They clearly aim to be dominant players at all stages of book creation, circulation, and consumption. By additionally hosting interactive forums such as online book clubs, showcasing rotating rosters of literary bloggers, and archiving audiovisual book-event content, these print-originated brands aspire to convert offline reader-familiarity into online loyalty through becoming the discerning reader’s digital first port of call. Born-digital media incarnations—Salon, Slate, The Elegant Variation, Bookslut, The Complete Review, SlowTV—tend to foreground communicative modes not available to traditional print culture, including immediate interactivity, multimedia content, and hyperlinking. That being said, their print-originated rival websites have frequently cannibalized these formerly unique selling points. The rise of a new breed of book bloggers unaffiliated with traditional print- media outlets provides an intriguing case study of the assertion and accumulation of literary capital by those previously outside the network of established consecrators. Loudly proclaiming their freedom to provide frank and fearless literary reviews because they are uncompromised by the commercial conflicts of interest and indebted back-scratching allegedly characterizing their print-media rivals, amateur bloggers have nevertheless become increasingly enmeshed in commercial book-world realities through interblogger status rivalries and the potential to sell onsite advertising arising from high levels of Internet traffic. Certain book bloggers have banded together as the Litblog Co-op to increase participants’ 322 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE online visibility, while others promise publishers review coverage of submitted titles during an agreed period in exchange for free book copies. Such generation of online “book buzz” places “amateur” bloggers in direct competition with avowedly commercial entities such as NetGalley—a business distributing prepublication digital galley proofs to key opinion-influencers—and further prob- lematizes book reviewers’ already liminal status between the amateur and professional domains. It moreover illustrates the digital literary sphere’s dissolving of the traditional distinction between an autonomous, after-the-event “reader” and previously publisher- coordinated marketing and publicity functions. For literary authors, particularly in the star echelon, elaborate websites provide direct communication to readerships untram- meled by the potentially pesky agendas of publisher publicity departments, profile-compiling journalists, and literary festival organizers. Frequently such official websites are fairly standoffish, one-way, setting-the-record-straight affairs, often outsourced to a web design professional. Exceptions in this best-seller category include Joyce Carol Oates, whose characteristic prolificness now extends to sending multiple daily Twitter messages to her approx- imately 125,000 followers, and Margaret Atwood, dubbed “doyenne of digital-savvy authors” for her avid tweeting, experimentation with electronic serial publishing, and enthusiastic backing of the fan-celebrity interactive portal start-up Fanado (Baddeley n. pag.).18 More typically, younger and digital-native authors, especially those targeting young adult readerships, have enthusiastically embraced an interactive—even distributed—model of online presence- management, such as John Green’s “vlogbrothers” YouTube channel and even a competition for Green’s fans to design the paperback cover for his novel An Abundance of Katherines (2006). In the digital sphere, the author’s role extends far beyond the content provision, followed by production and marketing self-effacement, schema- tized in Robert Darnton’s influential “communications circuit”

18. Oates’s Twitter follower numbers are as of June 2015. For an example of Atwood’s enthusiasm for the Internet-sponsored serial publication revival, see Rothman. MURRAY ⋅ 323

(“What Is the History”).19 Now, the author is engaged in one-to- many or even one-to-one real-time relationships with readers, providing updates on the progress of writing projects, plugging future in-store or media appearances, intervening in current political or cultural debates, passing judgment on the work of other writers (whether established or novice), and selectively endorsing, correct- ing, or otherwise mediating reader discussions of their work. Instead of the broadcast era’s authorial phasing in and out of public consciousness according to the publicity cycle for a new book, the digital-era author now aims for consistency and “stickiness” (in web parlance) in reader-writer relationships. As Anne Groell, fantasy author George R. R. Martin’s editor at Random House, recently summarized the contemporary author’s role, “Outreach and building community with readers is the single most important thing you can do for your book these days. You need to make them feel invested in your career” (qtd. in Miller, “Just Write It!” n. pag.). While the websites of book publishers have, since their mid-1990s inception, been primarily geared toward publicizing and retailing house titles, contemporary websites of both multinational firms and independents have more recently expanded their ambit. They are now involved in activities that might be described as consecrating the literary in a manner previously left to literary critics or cultural- policy bodies, as well as facilitating readers’ entry into literary discussion. This expanded range of activities is manifested in phenomena such as publisher-awarded prizes (especially for unpublished manuscripts), audiovisual recordings of literary events, social- media feeds, and online book clubs. Digitally savvy publishers have even established dedicated YouTube channels hosting book trailers for house titles, as well as Pinterest “pin boards” filled with bibliophilic images for digital sharing, to encourage further reader- publisher identification.20 As digital media threatens to render redundant publishers’ traditional intermediary role between author and reader, publishers have retaliated in part by insisting on their

19. Padmini Ray Murray and Claire Squires make a similar point in their redrawing of Darnton’s communications circuit for the digital era. 20. See, for example, Penguin Books UK and Penguin Books USA’s forays into YouTube and Pinterest, respectively. 324 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE colophon as a guarantee of quality control. Ambitiously, they have attempted to inveigle themselves into every phase of the author- reader encounter, acting as points of information on author back- grounds and new releases, retailer-independent sources of codex and e-book sales, arbiters of literary value, and curators of book lovers’ online homes. Book retailers, whether traditional bricks-and-mortar or solely online, have not taken lying down publishers’ attempts to bypass them by selling directly to the consumer. Rather, retailers have retaliated by invoking a similar tactic and attempting to exclude publishers themselves from the publishing chain. In perhaps the digital literary sphere’s most dramatic imperializing gesture, book- retailer websites, principally industry behemoth Amazon, have attempted to dominate all phases of books’ lives, across all media. Book-retailing websites have expanded from mere sales outlets to become diverse and highly active literary communities through reader reviews (frequently ranked, to stoke inter-reviewer competition), algorithmically generated “personalized” book recommendations, book-browsing functionality, online, self-, and serial publishing, author home pages, blogs, e-mail newsletters, and book groups. Avowedly commercial in intent, such book-retailer websites nevertheless frequently invoke the seemingly disinterested language of cultural connoisseurship and curatorship formerly the province of academic literary studies. Indeed, despite their online location and typically international customer base, some bookselling websites, particularly those derived from city- or nationally based independent stores, may invoke the ethical consumerist rhetoric of supporting local businesses as a mark of enlightened cultural consumption.21 One of the digital literary sphere’s most intriguing phenomena is the emergence of what present as user-generated forums—for example, Goodreads, LibraryThing, and Shelfari—allowing avid readers to catalogue and annotate their book collections, connect with those of similar tastes, receive and make recommendations, and rate and discuss particular titles. Omnipresent in the self-

21. See, for example, Melbourne-based independent chain Readings, whose online masthead pointedly proclaims “Australia’s Own since 1969.” MURRAY ⋅ 325 descriptions of such sites is the rhetoric of selfhood and individu- ality, with membership in an online bibliophilic community pro- moted as providing opportunities for cultural self-fashioning and literary display to a global audience of presumably like-minded types. Despite their air of community co-creation, these sites are typically corporate undertakings and have in many cases been par- tially or wholly acquired by Amazon as it has attempted to concen- trate all varieties of online bibliophilia under its own umbrella.22 Public criticism of these sites has tended to focus on various self- reviewing scandals facilitated by reviewer pseudonyms, as well as on site owners’ responses to these in tightening their reviewer guidelines. This focus has occluded deeper investigation of how such sites extensively infiltrate ostensibly cultural evaluations with commercial agendas, such as listing “sponsored links” (that is to say, advertising) next to search results for specific titles or authors. In a telling instance of what new-media theorist Jodi Dean refers to as “communicative capitalism” (102), the core content of such “reader” websites—the reviews themselves—is created entirely by volunteer labor, with the sites’ “conditions of use” policies reserving all intellectual property in reviews for the corporation, including the power to sell reviewer-created content to third parties, but making reviewers themselves solely liable for any damage their reviews may generate.23 Conspicuous cultural consumption here morphs into unwaged content provision in a manner characteristic of Web 2.0 environments but new to the realm of literary connoisseurship. Because cultural policy has traditionally been formulated and enacted by national or state governments through arts councils and ministries for the arts, its geographic specificity made it a natural partner for promoting nationalist (and especially postcolonial) literary paradigms during the second half of the twentieth century. But cultural policy, for the same reason, represents a less natural bedfellow for the jurisdiction-defying Internet. Curiously, during the same mid-1990s period that national and state boundaries were

22. Amazon acquired online book-traffic rivals Shelfari and Goodreads outright in 2008 and 2013, respectively. Amazon had taken a 40 percent stake in LibraryThing in 2006. For useful discussions of the political economy of literary self-cataloguing sites, see Newman and Nakamura. 23. See “Conditions” for Amazon’s current terms of use. 326 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE losing their robustness in cultural-policy spheres, the role of the city as a key site for cultural innovation began to expand with the main- streaming of creative-industries discourse in both politics and academe.24 Such works’ proposal of a loose international network of significant creative cities has been foregrounded in literary terms by UNESCO’s dubbing of specific metropoles “Cities of Literature”: first Edinburgh (2004), then Melbourne (2008) and Iowa City (2008), and since Dublin (2010), Reykjavik (2011), Norwich (2012), Krakow (2013), and Dunedin (2014), among a growing list.25 The concept of a network of cosmopolitan sites concentrating literary activity echoes (and in some cases has piggybacked upon) an existing circuit of prominent international Anglophone literary festivals and writers’ workshops, such as the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Melbourne and Sydney Writers’ Festivals, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Hay Festival, Adelaide Writers’ Week, and Toronto’s International Festival of Authors.26 The digital literary sphere has found a natural complementarity with such a denationalized and disseminated pattern of literary festival-going. Rather than being rendered obsolete by the Internet’s year-round, 24/7, global literary discussion, literary festivals have seized upon digital technology’s potential to extend the life and audience for face-to-face events through audiovisual recordings, podcasts, guest blogs, Twitter feeds, real-time web chats, and interfestival live linkups. Indeed, several online-only writers’ festivals have emerged in recent years which celebrate their freedom from geographical limitations.27 Even the online incarnations of embodied literary festivals not only pre- serve festival events ex post facto, but increasingly comprise the con-

24. For ebullient early examples of this discourse, through to more nuanced recent articulations, see Anheier and Isar, Florida, Hartley, Hesmondhalgh, Landry et al., and Leadbeater. 25. For discussion of the significance of the “City of Literature” tag for Melbourne, see Driscoll; and Hamilton and Seale. 26. For discussion of the growth of the literary festival phenomenon since the last decades of the twentieth century, see Murray, The Adaptation Industry. 27. Examples include the #TwitterFiction Festival (2012– ) and the Digital Writers’ Festival (2014– ). Interestingly, the inaugural Digital Writers’ Festival, organized from Melbourne, remains keenly attuned to the significance of place in literary activity, in its first year hosting a live meet-up between representatives of the (then) seven UNESCO Cities of Literature. MURRAY ⋅ 327 tent of the festival itself, with online competitions prior to the event’s start, live tweeting throughout the proceedings, and guest bloggers providing commentary on a program frequently still underway. Such a digital efflorescence of the writers’ festival permits organizers to make compelling arguments to government sponsors about expanding audiences and extending the life of events at a time of shrinking cultural policy budgets. This tactic, in symbiotic fashion, permits successful festivals in turn to lend their weight to local government pitches for UNESCO recognition of the host city.

The characterizing of authorship as a performance in the matrix diagram signals my project’s concern with the increasing importance of authorial personae for literary texts. This contention may initially appear counterintuitive. After all, compared with exclusively oral cultures, the defining characteristic of written communication is its detachment of the communicative message from its originating author.28 By contrast, scholars of celebrity media culture have elab- orated since the 1950s upon radio, film, and television’s creation of a “para-social” dynamic whereby audiences feel a quasi kinship with the persona of the communicator (be it program host, charis- matic star, or special guest).29 Celebrity studies recognizes these consciously constructed and deployed communicative personae as having no necessary relationship to the biological being with whom they are customarily associated. So long as the literary author’s physical image and personal biography remained largely tangential to book culture (confined, perhaps, to paratextual matter such as back-flap author photographs and brief biographical notes), the wri- terly persona could be considered largely a matter of textual effects and implied author roles.30 But the late-twentieth-century flourishing of author tours, writers’ festivals, television and radio book-talk

28. Medium theorists have long explored the distinctiveness of written, and especially print, communication compared to exclusively oral cultures. See McLuhan, Ong, and Olson. 29. The term “para-social” was coined by Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl in 1956 and has been revived in recent celebrity studies, such as Marshall and Turner. 30. For the classic study of literary paratexts, see Genette. For the theoretical elucida- tion of the implied author role, see Iser. 328 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE programs, live broadcasts of book-prize ceremonies, real-time crosses between book-festival events, and the archiving of these online via massively popular audiovisual content-aggregator sites such as YouTube has meant that authorial embodiment and perfor- mativity have come to be key—and controversial—criteria in the marketing, reception, and evaluation of literary fiction.31 Routine advice columns in professional publications such as the Authors Guild Bulletin and the U.K. Society of Authors’ The Author on how to perform at writers’ festivals, create a podcast, or engage readers through social media testify to the fact that theatrical norms of performance and conscious self-fashioning increasingly infiltrate the literary sphere. Despite their everyday familiarity to humanities academics, these manifestations of what David Carter and Kay Ferres broadly term “the public life of literature” have to date been barely acknowledged in literary studies proper. Their specifically digital-realm manifestations remain, as outlined above, even more lamentably underexplored. This omission is particularly glaring regarding the ways in which disintermediation and real-time interactivity fundamentally alter the nature of writer-reader encoun- ters—even to the extent of collapsing that traditional print-culture dyad. My focus on specifically literary creative writing also requires some explanation, as it may seem to fly in the face of cultural studies’ now decades-old project to dismantle cultural hierarchies. Owing perhaps to the discipline-changing impact of British cultural studies’ anti-Arnoldian critiques of literary canon-formation, the majority of academic research about creative writing on the Internet focuses on popular fiction, the exponentially growing category of fan fiction, and mass-authored wikinovels.32 Such genres and forms represent easier fits with the democratically oriented,

31. Many commentators have observed, and often lamented, this shift in the author’s role from closeted written communicator to live performer. For examples from cultural commentary, see Donadio, Lurie, and McPhee. For academic analyses making the same point, see Ommundsen, Squires, and Starke. 32. For work on fan fiction and the legal and cultural debates it raises, see Guthrie; Jenkins; Page and Thomas; Pugh; and Tushnet, “Legal Fictions” and “Payment in Credit.” For a research report on the relative success of the mass-authored wikinovel project “A Million Penguins,” see Mason and Thomas. MURRAY ⋅ 329 anti-aestheticist rubrics of cultural studies’ original intellectual project. Yet over the course of the last decade and a half, strong evidence has emerged from within cultural studies itself of dissatis- faction with such populist and relativist orthodoxies. Several critics have noted a public thirst for a surprisingly resilient brand of cultural self-improvement, investigating contemporary audiences’ willingness to seek out and act upon markers of cultural prestige such as book prizes, film awards, and blockbuster traveling art exhibitions.33 In play here are formerly settled assumptions about high- versus pop-cultural hierarchies, the relative determinism of cultural institutions, and the relationship between objectivist and subjectivist understandings of the category of “literature.” The chief aim of my broader research project is to straddle these shifting tectonic plates of literary studies and cultural sociology at a critical juncture in both disciplines’ development.34 My research situates itself squarely at their point of overlap—the subfield of the sociology of literature.35 This recently reenergized research area attempts to account for literature’s resilience as a book-world category outside of academic environments, as witnessed by phenomena such as the flourishing of book clubs in face-to-face, broadcast, and networked environments; city-based mass reading events; and the proliferation of “great books” applications for e-book devices such as Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices.36 Leading theorists in the most recent wave of literary sociology tackle this seeming discrepancy head-on. Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison, and John Frow undertake a Bourdieu-inspired, statisti- cally based analysis of contemporary Australian cultural life in Accounting for Tastes (1999), arguing compellingly that high culture now constitutes a distinct subsector of mass culture. Also invoking

33. For discussion of how audiences seek out and act upon such markers of cultural prestige, see Be´rube´; Buckridge, Murray, and Macleod; and Collins, High-Pop and Bring on the Books. 34. My forthcoming monograph, provisionally titled “Literary Culture in the Digital Era” (2017), is under contract with Johns Hopkins UP. 35. The revival of the term “sociology of literature” is the subject of an illuminating 2010 article by James F. English in a special issue of New Literary History co-edited by English and Rita Felski (“Everywhere”). 36. For a detailed study of mass reading events on the one book–one city model, see Fuller and Rehberg Sedo. 330 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of the “field” (champ), James F. English’s groundbreaking The Economy of Prestige (2005) posits a stock- exchange metaphor for the social evaluation of cultural commodi- ties. Here the agency of the cultural prize serves as the site of exchange between distinct forms of cultural and economic capital. Neither work, however—nor joint research into celebrity literary authorship undertaken by English and Frow—specifically addresses the flourishing online dimensions of contemporary literary culture. My project likewise adopts as its underpinning theoretical frame- work Bourdieu’s characteristically sociological, contextually minded, and anti-aestheticist perspective. But it does so to stage a critical encounter with Bourdieusian theory, interrogating its appli- cability to the twenty-first-century literary sphere. Bourdieu’s academically fertile theory of the “field” provides a capacious device to conceptualize the digital literary sphere in its totality. In fact, Bourdieu’s field theory appears especially applicable to the online environment, given the Internet’s rapidly fluctuating constellation of agents and institutions, as well as its demarcation as a “universe of belief” by all participants’ self-identification as “literary” adher- ents (a distinction literary and cultural theory has in recent decades held to be largely unsupportable on any objectivist grounds) (Bour- dieu, Field 82). That said, the advent of the Internet throws many of Bourdieu’s pronouncements into sharp relief, casting doubt upon the alleged universality of his structuralist-inflected “rules” of cultural functioning by highlighting their French (and especially Pari- sian) specificity. They are thus doubtfully applicable to the deterri- torialized (and in the case of the current project, Anglophone) digital domain. Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production (1993) and The Rules of Art (1996) trace a literary field whose agents are overwhelmingly elite actors collectively possessing a virtual monopoly on the award of symbolic capital in the form of access to publication, literary prizes, and critical endorsements. By contrast, it is precisely the contemporary digital literary sphere’s mass democratic acces- sibility, its vocal celebration of amateur self-expression, and the pre- ponderance of born-digital start-ups that generate its cultural energy and dynamism. Unlike Bourdieu’s cultural kingmakers, operating in the largely veiled contexts of literary coteries and exclu- MURRAY ⋅ 331 sive salons, the digital literary sphere renders the actual functioning of cultural brokerage more transparent and more readily docu- mentable than ever before. Further, how can Bourdieu’s cast of human and institutional actors account for the preeminence of algorithmically determined “discoverability” and search-engine opti- mization in online book marketing? In short, Bourdieu’s conceptual vocabulary provides a productive model for challenging the textu- ally exclusivist critical paradigms still constituting literary studies orthodoxy. But the extent to which Bourdieu’s models require refor- mulation and reframing to engage with twenty-first-century digital cultural phenomena lies at the heart of my project. Thus over and above the current project’s core objectives of charting and analyzing the digital literary sphere, my inquiry poses far-reaching theoretical questions for the broader sociology of literature, and for literary studies at large.

The benefits of understanding the digital literary sphere are multiple. Charting the breadth, diversity, and major nodes of digital literary networks gives us a fix on how literatures are being made in the twenty-first century. This insight in turn illuminates the com- plementary role of print and digital formats and moves discussion on from dated and tired “death of the book” and binary print- versus-digital formulations. As I hope my quick survey of the digital literary sphere has illustrated, it allows us to analyze changes in the roles and types of literary stakeholders, both the blurring of production, distribution, and consumption contexts and the impact of nontraditional industry entrants (Amazon, Google, and Apple, for example). At its broadest level, my project calls into question literary studies’ still-marginal engagement with sociological perspectives and interrogates the boundaries between text-centric research in the humanities and contextual, social science–inflected research methodologies. And while textual analysis is far from the main focus of my project, more detailed analysis of medium and context promises to illuminate the genres and styles of literary writing now being produced and achieving popular and/or literary acclaim. But let me be frank about the challenges of such a research undertaking. How can we get a fix on a phenomenon so vast and con- 332 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE stantly mutating? How do we discern the bigger picture amid the cacophony of individual tweets, blog posts, online reviews, and authorial podcasts, each with its own mix of commercial and community-building motivations? How are we to rank the importance and influence of specific sites outside of the usual print-culture protocols for assessing significance (for example, publisher turnover, retailer sales-volume, newspaper circulation and syndication fig- ures, and the academic credentials of critics)? Clearly, quantitative rankings generated by the Internet industry itself are indispensable here (for example, site-hit calculators, Google search result rankings, Amazon reviewer hierarchies). Yet researcher reliance on such data must be tempered by awareness of the investment of the compiler in specific result outcomes. In the digital literary sphere—as in Hei- senberg’s uncertainty principle—there is no way to stand outside of the phenomenon in order to analyze it; the researcher is always already enmeshed in that which she researches. With these practical research caveats openly declared, let me con- clude by touching upon some of the more abstract disciplinary issues that the charting of the digital literary sphere promises to reframe. These potentially thorny topics go to the heart of especially productive, self-reflexive disciplinary debates. The digital literary sphere puts ever-greater pressure on the spe- cialized niche of “literature” within the broader category of print- based narratives. The distinction has been under sustained attack since at least the cultural-relativist incursions of cultural studies in the sixties and seventies, but the digital literary sphere further erodes many of the traditional gatekeeper roles (“publisher,” “editor,” “critic”) that had kept a vestigial literature/popular fiction distinction viable. The digital literary sphere radically undercuts the cultural-arbiter status of professional literary critics within an online context of mass amateur criticism and reflexive popular evaluation. Similarly, received understandings of a “real” writer as one who has been published are destabilized, if not rendered meaningless, in an era of self-publishing, online fan fiction, beta-readers, and the resul- tant reader-writer blurring. Hence the digital literary sphere pre- sents an unparalleled, real-time laboratory for examining “literature” not as a preexistent, aesthetically determined category, but as MURRAY ⋅ 333 a denomination of cultural value in the act of being brokered by a fluid assemblage of highly disputatious and sometimes fiercely con- testatory cultural agents. “Literature” thus represents not the simple acknowledgment of a work’s always evident (if at times misper- ceived) aesthetic superiority, but rather the veteran’s medal of having successfully navigated a hazardous terrain of valorizing and consecrating authorities. In a manner perhaps discomforting to traditional literary-studies self-conceptions, “literature” to a large extent becomes that which the digital literary sphere deems to be literature. The Internet’s demonstrably global infrastructure also puts severe pressure on nationalist conceptions of the literary canon by which departmental structures, research-funding bodies, and the academic conference circuit have long taxonomically classified the discipline. Nation-state cultural-policy bodies and professional authors’ asso- ciations have already had to wrestle with such issues, as literary careers defy neat national jurisdictions through the mechanisms of multinational publishing houses, transnational literary agencies, and foreign-rights sales. While replacing nationally prescribed geographical territories with a midlevel category such as language spheres as the key apparatus for classifying our object of study might appear a way out of the problem, a monolingual approach itself imposes paradigmatic distortions, bracketing off cross-cultural translation flows as the key determinant of the implicitly cosmopolitan “world republic of letters” (Casanova). While literary translation requires significant capital investment in individually unique cultural products, it clearly does not represent an insuperable bar- rier to the geographical expansion of authorial reputation (even if translation flows between the Anglosphere and elsewhere remain markedly asymmetrical). But if literary studies is to comprise the study of all creative writing in all languages (and potentially also cognate fields such as drama, film, television, opera, musicals, and computer gaming), there is a very real risk of it becoming analyti- cally unwieldy through being submerged into a general study of “culture.” Cultural studies’ veterans of academic skirmishes over the last few decades may remain placidly unruffled by such an eventuality, but intriguingly, the classification misrepresents the 334 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE sense of the “literary” as inherently different which pervades digital literary sphere participants’ rhetoric—thus risking misrepresenta- tion of the phenomenon itself. The subfield of electronic literary studies has, since the early 1990s, considered at length what new teaching practices, assessment protocols, and rethinking of the student-teacher hierarchy might be required to teach nonlinear, time-based, and manifestly unstable digital genres such as hypertext fiction, wikinovels, and Twittera- ture.37 Yet literary studies more broadly has been slow to grapple with how to make the wealth of online materials that our students routinely access in the course of their studies not just a slightly dis- reputable addendum to “proper” print-based literary resources, but revealing artifacts of contemporary literary culture in their own right. Internet-era literary phenomena such as book trailers, authorial blog-tours, online writers’ festivals, and social media–hosted book clubs constitute digital paratexts that crucially mediate the author-reader encounter and hence deserve the same scrutiny as “thresholds of interpretation” that Ge´rard Genette brought to the study of cover design, dedications, and prefaces. Book history coa- lesced as a discipline through taking issue with mainstream literary studies’ insistent dematerializing of the literary object as “text.” It should nevertheless not be beyond it to acknowledge that virtual literary phenomena come similarly charged with sociocultural and economic interpretive significance. In short, literary academe of all stripes has much to gain in shifting from a posture of sniffy dis- missal of a manifestly flourishing digital literary sphere to instead embracing digital environments as vital components of contemporary literary culture. Monash University

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