New year, catch-up news. I have an article in CA, the journal of cultural analytics, on computational approaches to genre detection in twentieth-century fiction. The piece came out back in November, but, well, it’s been a busy year.

The big finding — beyond what I happen to think is a nifty way of considering genre — is that certain highly canonical, male-authored novels of the mid-late twentieth century (by the likes of Updike, Bellow, Vonnegut, DeLillo, etc.) resemble one another about as closely as do mid-century hard-boiled detective stories. That is, very closely indeed. There are a couple of conclusions one might draw from this; my preferred interpretation is that the functional definition of literary fiction in the postwar period (and probably everywhere else) remains much too narrow. But there are other possibilities as well …

CA, by the way, has had some really great work of late. Andrew Piper’s article on “fictionality” is especially worth a read; Piper shows that it’s not just possible but really pretty easy to separate fiction from nonfiction using a basic set of lexical features.