Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Book Industry and American Literature

The DOECL’s Critical Speakers Series has three fascinating speakers visiting campus this semester. Next week, we begin our slate of events with a visit from Daniel Sinykin, Assistant Professor of English at Emory University. Thursday, January 25th at 2:00-3:30 PM in Greenlaw 305, Dr. Sinykin is presenting a lecture entitled “Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Book Industry and American Literature” His faculty bio explains, “Sinykin’s second book, The Conglomerate Era, is under contract with Columbia University Press. How has the conglomeration of publishing changed literature? The scope of conglomeration poses a methodological challenge, and to answer it Sinykin enlists computational analysis alongside more traditional literary critical techniques of attending to form and historical context, including archival research.

Sinykin has built corpora on publishers, prizewinning and bestselling American literature, and reviews of tens of thousands of American novels toward writing large scale analyses of the field and revealing how money and power in publishing have shaped the state of contemporary literature” (https://english.emory.edu/home/people/bios/sinykin-dan.html).

This lecture will end with a Q&A session.