Sarah M. Corse

Cultural Valorization and African American Literary History: Reconstructing the Canon

The determinants of and variations in processes of cultural valorization are of increasing interest to sociologists. In the case of high-culture literary texts, the central evaluation process takes place through canon formation. We explore the mechanisms of canon formation and of cultural valorization processes more generally by analyzing the critical history of Zora Neale Hurstons novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Published in 1937 to lukewarm reviews, the novel is currently considered a core canonical text. We specify three processes involved in the reconstruction of Hurstons novel and in the establishment of the African American literary canon: (1) the application of new evaluative criteria, (2) the reconstruction of textual meaning through newly available interpretative strategies, and (3) changes in the institutional and organizational environment that allowed new claims on high-status critical positions to be made by those previously outside the literary hierarchy. The implications of this study for theoretical models of cultural valorization in sociology are considered.

When it comes to product innovation, what is so bad about bureaucracy?

Abstract In theory, bureaucracy is said to be “bad” for innovation. Yet large bureaucratic organizations often need to be both adept at innovation and capable of ongoing routinized production. Unfortunately, little is actually known about how bureaucracy hinders innovation, since research on the relationship of structural characteristics of organization and innovation is ambiguous. This study attempts to illuminate the specific relationship between bureaucracy and innovation so as to permit progress beyond the innovation-bureaucracy stalemate. Building on an interpretive rather than structure perspective, we analyzed 134 peoples experiences with product innovation in 15 large bureaucracies. We found four patterns of bureaucratic thinking and acting that systematically inhibited effective action in defining, organizing, evaluating, and staffing the innovation effort. These patterns are described and illustrated at some length. Then, drawing on Webers original theory of bureaucracy and other classics of innovation, we theorize that it is an interpretive system of instrumental rationality, not only a bureaucratic structure, that creates and maintains these patterns. From this insight we speculate on how large bureaucracies can become more innovative without losing their efficiency.

GENDER AND LITERARY VALORIZATION: THE AWAKENING OF A CANONICAL NOVEL

We use the reception history of Kate Chopins The Awakening to study the social context in which and processes through which literary texts are evaluated. We explain The Awakening‘s ascendancy from an initial negative critical position in 1899 to its current canonical status by the emergence of new “interpretive strategies” for understanding and evaluating texts. The dominant interpretive strategies of nineteenth-century reviewers sentimentalized women as selfless wives and mothers responsible for moral purity, making it difficult to construct a valued or fruitful narrative from The Awakening. Late-twentieth-century feminist interpretive strategies, however, were highly productive tools for rereading The Awakening, generating a socially resonant narrative focused on the search for an independent female self. Most important, we show that analytic attention to interpretive strategies allows sociologists to analyze both the meanings constructed from texts and the differential judgments attached to them under varying interpretive strategies.

Picture My Gender(s) Using Interactive Media to Engage Students in Theories of Gender Construction

We present an exercise on “doing gender” that uses digital media to create an opportunity for interactive learning. Students create photo essays on gender performances in everyday life and then present their photo essays to their peers. This exercise allows undergraduates to engage in “real-life” learning regarding the socially constructed and performative nature of gender. In discussing each other’s images in class, students confront both the ubiquity of gender performances and understand how they produce, receive, and police performances. We present the assignment and grading rubric in detail, describe examples of photo essays ranging from unsuccessful to excellent, and detail student learning and assessments of the assignment.

Two by Two: Heteronormativity and the Noah Story for Children

Abstract Purpose In this paper, I look at one of the most archetypal of children’s stories, that of Noah and the flood, to understand the classificatory schema it presents. Methodology/approach Drawing on an analysis of 47 children’s picture books based on the biblical story, including those held in the historical archive of the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton, I show that the single most consistent frame for the story is the trope of “two by two”, referencing both the animals and people in the story. The books in the sample, intended for children aged 4–10 years, were published between 1905 and 2006, and are between 14 and 60 pages long. Findings The repeated emphasis on mated pairs, one male and one female, serves to reproduce the twinned categories of gender and heterosexuality in an overtly “natural” fashion that ties the animal bodies to human social divisions. These constitutive categories of social division – gender and heterosexuality – then become central schemas for organizing people and experience. I draw on Martin (2000) arguing that children encounter picture books before they have had experience in actual social life. Therefore, the books help instill these primary categorization schemas in children, creating the social groupings and relations among them that order their worlds. Originality/value The argument makes a strongly causal role for culture and argues that the impact/importance of the content of children’s books may be subordinate to the role they play in helping establish classificatory schema that help construct children’s understandings of the social world.

Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Culture in Canada and the United States

1. Introduction: cultural fields and literary use 2. Nation-building and the historical timing of a national literature in the United States 3. Nation-building and the historical timing of a national literature in Canada 4. The canonical novels: the politics of cultural nationalism 5. The literary prize-winners: revision and renewal 6. The bestsellers: the economics of publishing and the convergence of popular taste 7. Literary meaning and cultural use Appendices.