Haverford College

Please join us for a talk by James Draney, Duke University, who is a candidate for the Writing Fellows position in the Writing Program at Haverford.  James is a literary scholar whose work examines the relationship between fiction and media. His writing has appeared in Journal of Modern Literature and NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction He received a PhD in English from Duke University.

Talk:  The Author as Quantified Self: Online Reputation in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) and Natasha Stagg’s Surveys (2016).

Today, the internet has heightened the importance of reputation management. Digital platforms have given rise to a new kind of quantified self whose reputation is measured by various metrics, such as follower count, average ratings, engagement numbers, likes, and retweets. I argue that the reputation economy of social media has transformed what Pierre Bourdieu called “the rules of art.” I combine sociological analysis, media theory, and close readings to show how twenty-first-century novelists are embedded in this logic of real-time feedback and quantified assessment. To do so, I read novels by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Natasha Stagg, two writers who made their literary reputations using platform logics of virality, rating, and ranking. By situating their respective novels—Americanah and Surveys—within their authors’ first-hand accounts of the volatile reputation economy, I show how twenty-first-century fiction has internalized strategies of online reputation management.

The talk will be held on Tuesday, May 28, at 4:15 p.m. via Zoom and is open to all; interested faculty and students are encouraged to attend:  https://hav.to/kgw

DEBORA SHERMAN * DIRECTOR OF COLLEGE WRITING AND ASST. PROF. OF ENGLISH * HAVERFORD COLLEGE * HAVERFORD, PA 19041 * (610) 896 1255 * dsherman [at] haverford.edu