Modelling Plot: On the “conversional novel”
I am pleased to announce the acceptance of a new piece that will be appearing soon in New Literary History. In it, I explore techniques for identifying narratives of conversion in the modern novel in German, French and English. A great deal of new work has been circulating recently that addresses the question of plot structures within different genres...
Novel Conversions
What would it mean for a novel to turn us, even as we turn it? How are we not simply moved, but transformed – turned around, converted – through the novel’s combination of gestural and affective structures? How might we think about the correspondences between the novel’s technics and its tropes in its ability...
Conversional Reading
This project is about studying the legacy of Augustinian conversion in the age of modern autobiography. What happens to a notion of the conversional life in a secular world? Building a model of conversional plot detection, I found that the poetics of conversion lives on most strongly in the genre of the modern novel and not autobiography....