Rachel Sagner Buurma
Biographic Data
| ID | 343408 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rachel Sagner Buurma |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rachel Sagner |
| FAMILY NAME | Buurma |
| SIGNATURE | BUURMA R S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Swarthmore College |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1517-0195 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 11 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 8 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Professing Criticism
The Teaching Archive
The fictionality of topic modeling
This essay describes how using unsupervised topic modeling (specifically the latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling algorithm in MALLET) on relatively small corpuses can help scholars of literature circumvent the limitations of some existing theories of the novel. Using an example drawn from work on Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire series, it argues that unsupervised topic modeling's counter-factual and retrospective reconstr…
"Notation After "The Reality Effect
In "The Reality Effect," Roland Barthes reveals notation's ideological function within the realist novel; a decade later in Preparation of the Novel, Barthes reconsiders notation as the practice by which the writer provisionally makes literary meaning. Barthes's revision of his claims for the reality effect helps us see how an emerging genre-the novel of commission-pulls referential, preparatory materials into the novel in order to reimagine the …
Interpretation, 1980 and 1880
This article reviews recent methodological interventions in the field of literary study, many of which take nineteenth-century critics, readers, or writers as models for their less interpretive reading practices. In seeking out nineteenth-century models for twenty-first-century critical practice, these critics imagine a world in which English literature never became a discipline. Some see these new methods as formalist, yet we argue that they act…
The Common Reader and the Archival Classroom
The essay draws on archival research to reconstruct the midcentury classrooms of Cleanth Brooks and Edmund Wilson. Our description of these classrooms-the participants, texts, and the exemplary as well as the undertheorized moments gathered within them-dissolves the divisions between research and teaching, historicist and formalist methods, skeptical critics and invested common readers, disciplinary spaces and public ones, that have particularly …
Ephemeral Forms
Research Article| March 01 2008 Ephemeral Forms: E. S. Dallas, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Review Rachel Sagner Buurma Rachel Sagner Buurma Swarthmore College [email protected] Rachel Sagner Buurma is assistant professor of English literature at Swarthmore College. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled “A Material History of Omniscience.” Her essay “Anonymity, Corporate Authority, and the Archive: the Production of Autho…
Anonymity, Corporate Authority, and the Archive
This essay considers the persistence of collective and corporate models of literary authority within late-Victorian literature and print culture. While modern critics often understand Victorian authorship to be individually centered and governed by a dynamic of secrecy and disclosure, the periodical debates about anonymity that intensified in the fin de siècle suggest that Victorian readers and writers embraced a more flexible, collective notion …
The fictionality of topic modeling
This essay describes how using unsupervised topic modeling (specifically the latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling algorithm in MALLET) on relatively small corpuses can help scholars of literature circumvent the limitations of some existing theories of the novel. Using an example drawn from work on Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire series, it argues that unsupervised topic modeling's counter-factual and retrospective reconstr…
Anonymity, Corporate Authority, and the Archive
This essay considers the persistence of collective and corporate models of literary authority within late-Victorian literature and print culture. While modern critics often understand Victorian authorship to be individually centered and governed by a dynamic of secrecy and disclosure, the periodical debates about anonymity that intensified in the fin de siècle suggest that Victorian readers and writers embraced a more flexible, collective notion …
"Notation After "The Reality Effect
In "The Reality Effect," Roland Barthes reveals notation's ideological function within the realist novel; a decade later in Preparation of the Novel, Barthes reconsiders notation as the practice by which the writer provisionally makes literary meaning. Barthes's revision of his claims for the reality effect helps us see how an emerging genre-the novel of commission-pulls referential, preparatory materials into the novel in order to reimagine the …
The Common Reader and the Archival Classroom
The essay draws on archival research to reconstruct the midcentury classrooms of Cleanth Brooks and Edmund Wilson. Our description of these classrooms-the participants, texts, and the exemplary as well as the undertheorized moments gathered within them-dissolves the divisions between research and teaching, historicist and formalist methods, skeptical critics and invested common readers, disciplinary spaces and public ones, that have particularly …
Interpretation, 1980 and 1880
This article reviews recent methodological interventions in the field of literary study, many of which take nineteenth-century critics, readers, or writers as models for their less interpretive reading practices. In seeking out nineteenth-century models for twenty-first-century critical practice, these critics imagine a world in which English literature never became a discipline. Some see these new methods as formalist, yet we argue that they act…
Anonymity, Corporate Authority, and the Archive
This essay considers the persistence of collective and corporate models of literary authority within late-Victorian literature and print culture. While modern critics often understand Victorian authorship to be individually centered and governed by a dynamic of secrecy and disclosure, the periodical debates about anonymity that intensified in the fin de siècle suggest that Victorian readers and writers embraced a more flexible, collective notion …
Ephemeral Forms
Research Article| March 01 2008 Ephemeral Forms: E. S. Dallas, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Review Rachel Sagner Buurma Rachel Sagner Buurma Swarthmore College [email protected] Rachel Sagner Buurma is assistant professor of English literature at Swarthmore College. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled “A Material History of Omniscience.” Her essay “Anonymity, Corporate Authority, and the Archive: the Production of Autho…
The Common Reader and the Archival Classroom
The essay draws on archival research to reconstruct the midcentury classrooms of Cleanth Brooks and Edmund Wilson. Our description of these classrooms-the participants, texts, and the exemplary as well as the undertheorized moments gathered within them-dissolves the divisions between research and teaching, historicist and formalist methods, skeptical critics and invested common readers, disciplinary spaces and public ones, that have particularly …
Interpretation, 1980 and 1880
This article reviews recent methodological interventions in the field of literary study, many of which take nineteenth-century critics, readers, or writers as models for their less interpretive reading practices. In seeking out nineteenth-century models for twenty-first-century critical practice, these critics imagine a world in which English literature never became a discipline. Some see these new methods as formalist, yet we argue that they act…
"Notation After "The Reality Effect
In "The Reality Effect," Roland Barthes reveals notation's ideological function within the realist novel; a decade later in Preparation of the Novel, Barthes reconsiders notation as the practice by which the writer provisionally makes literary meaning. Barthes's revision of his claims for the reality effect helps us see how an emerging genre-the novel of commission-pulls referential, preparatory materials into the novel in order to reimagine the …
The fictionality of topic modeling
This essay describes how using unsupervised topic modeling (specifically the latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling algorithm in MALLET) on relatively small corpuses can help scholars of literature circumvent the limitations of some existing theories of the novel. Using an example drawn from work on Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire series, it argues that unsupervised topic modeling's counter-factual and retrospective reconstr…
The Teaching Archive
Professing Criticism
Art (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · History (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Linguistics (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · Digital Humanities and Scholarship (3 works)