Lit Lab Lecture: "Straight Talk in the American Novel"

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February 22, 2016

On March 10th, the Nebraska Literary Lab will host digital humanities scholar Marissa Gemma. Her lecture, "Straight Talk in the American Novel: A Quantitative Study," will take place March 10th at 5:00 pm in Andrews Hall's Bailey Library (Room 229).

This talk will bring the scale of evidence offered by computational literary studies to bear on the long-standing hypothesis that colloquial style -- the narrative stylization of common speech -- is on the rise in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century American literature. By analyzing various features of spoken English in a corpus of about 1000 novels, Gemma will offer a revised history of straight-talking, colloquial narrative styles in American literature. She argues that colloquial styles, far from being an invention of a handful of elite literary authors in the Gilded Age and thereafter, instead play an important role in low-prestige genres earlier in the century, and are significantly linked, throughout the century, to specific narrative technologies of perspective.  

Photo of Marissa Gemma
Marissa Gemma (Courtesy Photo)
Marissa Gemma is a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany, where she does research on style, digital literary analysis, and nineteenth-century American literature. She is currently working on a book manuscript, The Making of Middle American Style, about nineteenth-century American fictional styles inspired by the common speech. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University, where she was a core member of the Literary Lab, and did post-doctoral research at the Sorbonne's Observatoire de la vie littéraire. Her article, "Operationalizing the Colloquial Style," recently appeared in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, and her latest collaborative project with the Stanford Literary Lab, "Canon/Archive. Large-Scale Dynamics in the Literary Field," was published in January 2016.