Readerly Revisions: Letters to the Editor in the Crisis

This essay examines how the editorial staff of the positioned readers as collaborators and literary activists. Looking at letters to the editor, I argue that readers helped reevaluate representations of blackness in American literary taste. These letters bridge past, present, and future issues of th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American literature 2020-06, Vol.92 (2), p.257-280
Main Author: Quinn, William Reed
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
American Studies
Cultural Studies
Letters to the editor
Literary Theory
Literature and Literary Studies
Racism
Text analysis
Time
Citations: Items that this one cites
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Summary:This essay examines how the editorial staff of the positioned readers as collaborators and literary activists. Looking at letters to the editor, I argue that readers helped reevaluate representations of blackness in American literary taste. These letters bridge past, present, and future issues of the magazine and, therefore, evoke a temporality that exceeds the critical capacities of close reading. To address how editors, readers, and authors responded to each other over time, I combine close reading with topic modeling, a method of computational text analysis. This mixed methodology shows how readers participated in the magazine’s cultural campaign against racism by calling for socially progressive depictions of blackness.
ISSN:0002-9831
1527-2117
DOI:10.1215/00029831-8267732