Publishing, Literature, and Responsibility

26.09.2024, 11:00 → 27.09.2024, 15:00 Europe/Berlin

203 (ES)

Chiara Bullen, Chiara Bullen, Corinna Norrick-Rühl (English Department, Chair of Book Studies), Thea Henrike Rahel Charlotte Clasen

Considering the relationship between art, the artist, and society, Margaret Atwood states: “Let us suppose that the words the writer writes do not exist in some walled garden called ‘literature’, but actually get out there into the world, and have effects and consequences. Don’t we then have to begin talking ethics and responsibilities […]?” (2015, 87). Speakers participating in this symposium, hosted in-person within the Book Studies department at the University of Münster, will present their work interpreting “responsibility” in literature and publishing to generate discussions about the myriad of ways responsibility manifests in the field. 

 

 

PLR_Abstract+Information.pdf

Donnerstag, 26. September

Reception: Refreshments and light lunch

Publishing, Literature and Responsibility: Chiara Bullen

1 Is counting gender possible? A reflection on methodological contradiction

Feminist book history scholars often count gender to analyse systemic gender inequality (Cooter and Women in Publishing 1987; ‘VIDA Count – VIDA: Women in Literary Arts’, n.d.; ‘The Prize Count · The Stella Prize’, n.d.; Lamond 2011; Harvey and Lamond 2016; 2019; Marsden 2019; Dane 2020).Following this work during my PhD, I collected and analysed quantitative gender data on literary production and consecration in Scotland in the late 2010s (publications, reviews, book festivals, prizes). I encountered several practical and theoretical issues which troubled my choice of mixed methods. The positivist method of quantitative data analysis which requires counting in categories felt oppositional to my feminist understanding of knowledge as situated, and gender as experienced. This paper reflects on the responsibility of researchers who are interested in being part of social change, in particular on how and why we count gender.

In this paper, I examine the epistemological bases for feminist statistical research, drawing on research on researching gender (Crenshaw 1989; Butler 2006; Cram and Mertens 2015; Serano 2016; Leavy and Harris 2018; McHugh 2020; Spencer, Pryce, and Walsh 2020) and queering quantitative data (Browne 2010; Browne and Nash 2010; Simmons and White 2014; Guyan 2022). I conclude that this epistemological contradiction ought to play a bigger part in feminist methodology, and that counting of gender in categories is possible through what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak terms “strategic or operational essentialism” (quoted in Leavy and Harris 2018, 69).

Sprecher: Christina Neuwirth (University of Stirling)

2 Popular Feminist Textual Interventions in the Manosphere

This paper will provide a comparative analysis of two texts from self-identified feminists that respond to the manosphere: Laura Bates’ Men Who Hate Women (2020) and Caitlin Moran’s What About Men? (2023). Feminist non-fiction for general audiences is one of the most significant sites of feminist activism with regard to the manosphere, with prominent feminists writing texts – aimed predominantly toward female readers – that address the operations of, threats posed by, and potential recourses regarding contemporary digital misogyny. This paper will ask what specific value there is in researching online extremism via the disciplines of literary studies and digital humanities.

Bates’ magnum opus on the manosphere breaks down the manosphere into its subgroups and therein undertakes research into each facet; Moran’s text also includes several facets of the manosphere, though it does not exclusively focus on digital misogyny. Instead, Moran places it into a wider context of contemporary masculinity, specifically focalised through the author’s perceptions.

These texts will be contextualised within the increasing corpus of texts written for general audiences that lay bare the mechanics of the manosphere with a view to raising awareness and affecting change. This paper will evaluate whether such texts constitute a cultural challenge to the manosphere by bringing it into public consciousness, since it has previously benefitted from its obscurity. This will be achieved by providing a comparative analysis of Bates and Moran’s texts, and considering the aims and efficacy of their approaches, with a particular focus on the motifs of ‘raising awareness’ and ‘activism’.
Biographical note
Dr. Shelby Judge is an Early Career Academic in Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Derby, researching digital and popular feminist responses to INCELs and the Manosphere. Her doctoral project was “Contemporary Feminist Adaptations of Greek Myth” 2005—2022, which investigated the current trend of women writers retelling Greek myths and what this illuminates about current concerns within feminism. Shelby’s overarching research interests are in feminist and queer theory and contemporary British and North American women’s fiction.

Sprecher: Shelby Judge (Speaker)

14:30 Coffee Break

3 Responsibility and the law on children’s publishing in France: Hachette and the case of the revisions to Jules Verne c. 1955-1965

Children’s publishing is one of the sectors of the industry where the need for responsibility is felt most keenly. ‘Books offer children a way of exploring and understanding the world’, as artist Quentin Blake put it. Consequently, books for the young are amongst the most adapted and modified (Gouanvic, 2014).

This paper proposes the case of France to provide historical perspectives on attempts to encourage ‘responsibility’ in the industry, and the ways this can influence both content and approaches to making books. France is unusual in having formalised the notion of ‘responsibility’ in the Law No 49-956 of 16 July 1949 on publications for children. Written in the aftermath of war, and in the emerging Cold War, it has sought to fix the boundaries of children’s reading matter ever since.

This paper uses the records of the new regulatory body established by the law, and the editorial files preserved by Hachette, the largest children’s publisher in France in the 1950s and 60s, and wider discourses on children’s media consumption, to show how the perspectives of regulator and publisher were sometimes competing, but always in dialogue. It focuses on Hachette’s controversial modernisation of Jules Verne’s oeuvre, as an example of the collaboration and conflicts between critics, campaigners, and publishers on making old content conform to new values. Seeing ‘censors’ as readers, reviewers and even co-authors, my paper argues the Verne revisions were a radical, iterative, and creative process. The revisions were as much about working out what the new limits were, where they lay and testing how far they could be pushed as they were about enforcing them, and ultimately trying to understand what ‘modern’ books for children could and should be.

Gouanvic, Jean-Marc Sociologie de l’adaptation et de la traduction. Le roman d’aventures anglo-américain dans l’espace littéraire français pour les jeunes (1826–1960) Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014.

Sprecher: Prof. Sophie Heywood

4 Responsibility, trust and the truth: Reading travelogues within the command book communication circuit in 1950s Czechoslovakia.

In his Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-revolutionary France Darnton challenged the “big questions in history” regarding which books cause revolutions, or shall we say, are responsible for them? [xvii] He proposed to raise the query of a different order: what did the French actually read before the Revolution? In my contribution I suggest to ask what (and how?) did the Czechs read after the 1948 Communist Revolution, which among other things resulted in the state assuming responsibility for and full control of book production and reception. While instead of Voltaire and Diderot, the French were hungry for the salacious, often pornographic booklets, for the Czechs – rather than works by Marx and Lenin – among the most desired and sought-after texts were travelogues.

The case study draws on the resources of H&Z Archives in Zlín, depository of over 100 linear metres of correspondence and documentation related to the career and multi-media production of travellers and writers Miroslav Zikmund (1919-2023) and Jiří Hanzelka (1920-2003). Following recent impulses of paperwork studies (Kafka) and STS (Asdal, Haraway) I develop the term epistolary document which allows me to adopt “practice perspective on texts” and explore “the ways in which (in this case highly personalised and intimate) documents enact, or take part in enacting, realities” (Asdal). It enables me to move beyond the notion of casual fandom correspondence as a representation of reception history. Instead, I focus on the way epistolary documents took part “in modifying and transforming issues” (Asdal) and established an (truthful and credible!) embodiment of the exotic and unreachable for which the authors were largely held accountable. Consequently, at the peak of the de-personalised era of ‘cult of personality’ a male fan in his letter demanded that the travellers import a “suitable and obedient” Black woman for him to marry; group of schoolchildren requested seashells to decorate their classroom; or a pregnant lady asked them to bear witness to her child's christening as godfathers. I examine the textual practices through which responsibility, trust and truth became the Leitmotifs in H&Z readers’ epistolary writing and formed the basis of their para-social relationships (Rojek) with the authors of the travelogues.

Sprecher: Jirina Smejkalova (Speaker)

18:30 optional dinner at Caputo's

Freitag, 27. September

Reception: Coffee, tea, fruit, light breakfast options

5 Assessing the Iwanami Shoten Cases of 1940 and 2005: Intellectuals, Publishers and Responsibility in Modern Japan

From the late nineteenth century, Japanese publishers played a major role in making a wide variety of literature and scholarship available to a growing readership against the backdrop of modernization. As vehicles of ideas and mediators in debates, publishers struggled to gain respect amidst traditional suspicion of the book trade as a (literally and figuratively) dirty enterprise; simultaneously, they were expected to uphold proper social values, and were held responsible for the writers and concepts they put into circulation. This led to intense scrutiny as social critics and activists sought to punish publishers and halt the publication of works with which they disagreed.
This paper considers two legal cases, the first a criminal case in 1940 against the leading historian Tsuda Sōkichi, and the second a civil suit in 2005 against the Nobel Prize-winning author Ōe Kenzaburō. Despite a gap of over sixty years, the two cases have much in common: they involved not extreme material by cranks, but works by prominent intellectuals that proved controversial outside of the intellectual community proper, and both involved the same publisher, Iwanami Shoten, which was dragged into court alongside the writers. Because Iwanami was (and remains) Japan’s premier high-brow publisher, and long represented the Japanese intellectual establishment, it had long been targeted by reactionary forces, which seized any chance to invoke legal sanction against the publisher as a means of discrediting progressives. An analysis of these two cases sheds light on changes and continuities in thinking regarding the responsibility of publishers in Japan.

Sprecher: Andrew Kamei-Dyche (Aoyama Gakuin University)

6 Whose words are we promoting? Cartelisation of Anglophone Trade Book Publishing

In the cartelised setup of Anglophone trade book publishing, Indians can easily access books produced by UK and US publishers due to Commonwealth rights and multinationalisation in the publishing industry. However, it is not a two-way street: books written by Indian authors published by local Indian publishers or the Indian subsidiaries of multinational publishers often do not cross the domestic border to reach an international readership, nor access the associated economic and social awards. Thus, India is seen as a ‘market’ country rather than a source of literature worth reading abroad. Even within India, due to the cultural hegemony of the UK and US, the books generating the most revenue are foreign titles. Thus, Indian writing in English is treated as ‘less than’ its British and American counterparts, within India and abroad.
The paper will examine this cartelisation, the role that multinationalisation plays within it, and their combined postcolonial impact upon local Indian publishers and writers. The paper will also ask: does publishing have a social responsibility? Are British publishers responsible for catering to and platforming the international communities they reach?
The paper utilises secondary research within Indian, Kenyan, Australian and Chinese book history and publishing, as well as postcolonial theory. The paper is informed by primary research conducted via semi-structured interviews with senior professionals in the UK and India at literary agencies and multinational and independent publishing firms, such as Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Scholastic, Faber & Faber, Atlantic Books, Juggernaut, Yoda Press, and Srishti Publishers & Distributors.

Sprecher: Sonali Misra

11:15 Break

7 Labor Activism in the U.S. Trade Publishing Industry - Harper Collins workers on Strike

In the context of the contemporary rise in labor mobilization and unionization in the U.S., the working conditions in the trade publishing industry have become openly discussed and politically challenged. The strike at the Harper Collins office in NYC in the winter of 2022/23 is probably the most prominent example of a vast array of labor actions ranging from unionizing efforts and working with paid union staff, to solidarity funds, public statements, and the founding of collectively organized and owned presses. All these struggles not only address the industry’s normality of low pay and long hours but have also been drawing our attention to unequal access, a homogenous workforce, and how the labor of publishing is unequally exploited due to gender and racial divides.
Based on interviews with unionized Harper Collins employees, protest ephemera, and news coverage, I analyze how the strike at Harper Collins addressed and challenged the
exploitative strategies of multinational media conglomerates. I am furthermore interested in how the striking workers (re)narrated the labor of publishing and defied the idea of publishing as a labor of love, which makes workers prone to exploitation and sustains the industry’s elitist and exclusionary mechanisms.
Yet activist strategies and knowledge always need to also be seen as susceptible to corporate and capitalist appropriation. Thus, my talk conceptualizes forms of labor activism in constantly restructuring publishing landscapes within gendered and racialized post-Fordist regimes of production as not just unruly and disruptive but always contested and caught up in contradictions.

Sprecher: Carla Schäfer

8 (German) publishing & representation

--- replacement input in the slot alloted to Prof. Koegler ---

To bookend our discussions, Corinna Norrick-Rühl will give a work-in-progress report for a handbook article she is writing for the German handbook "Handbuch Verlag" (Springer/JB Metzler, forthcoming) on (German) publishing & issues of representation.

Sprecher: Corinna Norrick-Rühl (English Department, Chair of Book Studies)

13:00 Closing Remarks: refreshments and light lunch