[Commlist] New book: The Digital Future of English: Literary Media Studies

The Digital Future of English: Literary Media Studies - Simone Murray - 
Oxford University Press 
<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-digital-future-of-english-9780198952619?cc=au&lang=en&#>

*Synopsis:*
More than any other academic discipline, literary studies is the 
creation of print culture. How then can it thrive in the digital era? 
Early 1990s predictions of the book's imminent demise presented a 
simplistic either/or choice between the legacy of moribund print and 
triumphalist digital technology. Yet we have grown to experience the two 
media as complexly interdependent and even complementary. Clearly, 
digital does not kill print. But literary studies in the digital era 
cannot simply resume business as usual. It is urgently necessary to 
reconsider the discipline's founding assumptions in light of digital 
technology.

The digital era prompts rethinking of literary studies' object of study, 
as well as its methods, theories, audiences and pedagogical practices. 
*What *counts as literature necessarily shifts in an age of 
proliferating born-digital texts and do-it-yourself (DIY) online 
publication. *Where *should literary studies sit institutionally, and 
how might it graft contextually-oriented social sciences methods onto 
its traditionally humanistic mode of textual analysis? *Why *should 
literary study continue to marginalize emotional responses to texts when 
online communities bond via readerly affect? *Who *is the audience for 
literary criticism in an age where expertise is routinely challenged yet 
communication with global book-loving publics has never been 
technologically easier? Finally, *how *can we utilize digital tools to 
rejuvenate literary studies pedagogy and help English staff better 
connect with millennial-age students?

Literary studies has been convulsed for decades by debates over 
electronic literature and, more recently, digitally-aided 'distant 
reading'. But these discussions still mostly confine themselves to 
demarcating our proper object of study. We need to think more 
expansively about digital technology's impact on the underpinning tenets 
of the discipline. /*The Digital Future of English: *//*Literary Media 
Studies*/**is pitched at fellow literary scholars, book historians, 
media theorists, cultural sociologists, digital humanists and those 
working at the interface of these converging disciplines. It models 
constructive engagement with contemporary digital culture. Most 
importantly, it brings a burst of sorely needed optimism to the question 
of literary studies' digital future.

*Table of contents:*
Introduction: Varieties of Digital Literary Studies: Micro, Macro, Meso
1:Object of Study: Broadening Conceptions of 'Literature' for the 
Digital Era
2:Literary Institutions: Situating English between the Humanities and 
Social Sciences
3:The Problem of Affect: Literary Studies, BookTube, and BookTok
4:Reading Publics: Bridging Scholarly and Popular Bookish Audiences in 
the Digital Age
5:Machine Learning: Literary Studies Pedagogy in the Digital Era
Conclusion: Realizing Literary Media Studies

*Author bionote:*
*Simone Murray* is Associate Professor in Literary Studies at Monash 
University, Melbourne, and an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy 
of the Humanities. She is author of four previous monographs: /Mixed 
Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics/ (Pluto Press, 2004) 
which was awarded the 2005 DeLong Book Prize by the Society for the 
History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing; /The Adaptation Industry: 
The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation/ (Routledge US, 
2012); /The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing,//and Selling 
Books in the Internet Era/ (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018); and /Introduction 
to Contemporary Print Culture: Books as Media/ (Routledge UK, 2021).


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