The generative dissensus of reading the feminist novel, 1995-2020: A computational analysis of interpretive communities

Abstract

This article furthers ongoing work on the merits of the feminist novel’s intrinsic variability by probing its dynamics in four publishing contexts: contemporary anglophone literary criticism, prestigious review publications, marketing materials, and online book reviews by social readers. We explore how these interpretive communities converge and diverge in their assessments of feminist fiction over the past twenty-five years by evaluating articles from the MLA International Bibliography, book reviews in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, and other prominent periodicals, blurbs from Amazon, and Goodreads reviews. We trace the feminist novel’s ambivalent fates—or rather, feminist novels’ ambivalent fates—in and across these four domains. To do so, we engage computational methods of topic modeling, most distinctive word analysis, and named entity recognition. We synthesize these quantitative results with qualitative attention to provocative examples from our corpus. In so doing, we consider how literary scholars can develop more robust understandings of what feminism and feminist fiction mean to contemporary readers and what we stand to gain by bringing this diverse interpretive labor into our scholarly conversations. Our synthetic interpretive approach reveals these communities’ shared topical investments in feminist fiction, though the communities talk about these topics in importantly different ways. Together, their discourse converges on two organizing concerns: embodied subjectivity and temporality. Different configurations of these aspects of personhood in time inform the communities’ vocabularies, their modes of self-address, the rationales they offer for reading feminist novels, and the forms of feminist subjectivity they promote. Our analysis thus demonstrates how novel reading can function as a mode of forging feminist knowledge and constructing feminist value systems: through imagined conversations with other readers, individuals and the interpretive communities in which they participate undertake this additive, pluralistic revisionary process with a connection to the past, a grounding in the present, and a commitment to ever-better futures.