Readerly Revisions: Letters to the Editor in the Crisis

• William Reed Quinn ^[1]
  1. [1] Northeastern University, Estados Unidos
• Localización: American literature: A journal of literary history, criticism and bibliography, ISSN 0002-9831, ISSN-e 1527-2117, Vol. 92, Nº 2, 2020, págs. 257-280
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This essay examines how the editorial staff of the Crisis positioned readers as collaborators and literary activists. Looking at letters to the editor, I argue that readers helped reevaluate representations of blackness in American literary taste. These letters bridge past, present, and future issues of the magazine and, therefore, evoke a temporality that exceeds the critical capacities of close reading. To address how editors, readers, and authors responded to each other over time, I combine close reading with topic modeling, a method of computational text analysis. This mixed methodology shows how readers participated in the magazine’s cultural campaign against racism by calling for socially progressive depictions of blackness.