6.3 Narrative, Database, Archive: A Discussion with Tom Comitta and Deidre Lynch (AV)

12 tables; 300 novels, 1500 pages of nature description: This is how Tom Comitta created The Nature Book, a one-of-a-kind novel cut from 300 years of English literary tradition. It has no human characters, no original writing, and it is astoundingly good! Tom sits down with distinguished Harvard prof, Deidre Lynch and host Aarthi Vadde to talk about how Tom wrote a book out of found language. The conversation reveals why The Nature Book is so compelling: it scrambles the usual distinctions between narrative and database. It is fast-paced, propulsive, full of cliffhangers and yet also a “mood collage” composed of macro, micro, and nanopatterns that Tom identified in their corpus. Writing through a complex set of Oulipo-like constraints, they checked their own authorial freedom to create a book in which the human hand becomes distant and ghostly – its traces felt in the change of seasons and at the bottoms of oceans yet nowhere seen.
Deidre connects Tom’s “literary supercut” (their own term for their practice) to the centuries-old tradition of commonplacing in which ordinary readers would cut and paste favored passages into books that then became archives of personal experience and collective memory. The Nature Book thus finds its place in a countercultural tradition of authorship where recycling takes precedence over invention. Copying, curation, and rearrangement become a novelistic style of “degrowth” in which writers discover that, in lieu of developing new language, they can plumb the depths of our already existing language. The episode ends with a series of surprising answers to the signature question: narratives and databases cross paths with hookups and keepsakes!

Mentioned in this Episode:

Kota Ezawa
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Fiction for Dummies
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
It Narratives – narratives in which protagonists are often manufactured objects (e.g. Adventures of a Corkscrew (1775))
Elvia Wilk, Death by Landscape
Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith et al.

Listen and Read:

Audio: Narrative, Database, Archive

Transcript: 6.3 Narrative, Database, Archive

11.2 Taking Apart a Metaphor: Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette on the Literary Ecosystem – Novel Dialogue

Our second episode on “The Literary Ecosystem” features scholars of contemporary literary culture Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette in conversation with host Aarthi Vadde. Like the good close readers we all are, we begin by thinking about how the metaphor of the “literary ecosystem” works. Sarah values the way it brings relationships between cultural institutions to the foreground but prefers the base-superstructure model of Marxian critique. Dan, too, moves away from “naturalizing” metaphors although he sees the ecosystem’s potential for pithily naming the interplay of literary production, circulation, and reception.From here the conversation ranges widely as we consider the economic and social forces shaping contemporary literature – be they the conglomeration of publishing houses (see Dan’s Big Fiction) or the impact of platform capitalism upon authorial labor (see Sarah’s Content Machinesand Aarthi’s We the Platform).  We acknowledge the hollowing out of institutions meant to cultivate appreciation for literature and ponder the viability of platforms like Substack for reconstituting a literary sphere. Finally, what would a discussion of the literary ecosystem be without addressing the elephant in the room: AI. We bracket the author scandals to address the supporting players under threat: the translators, the audiobook narrators, the humans who bring books to readers across languages and formats. Come for the literary sociology; stay for the inside scoop on “prompting” a dark romance novel.MentionsMarx – base-superstructure modelBruno Latour – actor-network theorySophie Bishop – Influencer CreepAndrew de Waard –  Derivative MediaPierre Bourdieu – The Rules of Art Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

1. 11.2 Taking Apart a Metaphor: Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette on the Literary Ecosystem 31:19
2. 11.1 Indie Presses and the Literary Ecosystem: Meg Reid and Will Evans 38:10
3. 10.5 The Novel as Instrument: Sinan Antoon and Michael Allan (MAT) 43:59
4. 10.4 Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (MAT) 39:55
5. 10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH) 37:55