Form, criticality, and humanity: topic modeling the field of literary studies for English education

Abstract

Purpose

Research on disciplinary literacy in English has struggled with how to represent large-scale disciplinary communities and consider issues of justice and power. The purpose of this study is to offer insights into the disciplinary practice of a community of literary scholars.

Design/methodology/approach

Using statistical topic modeling augmented with complementary qualitative analysis and interpretive rhetorical analysis, the authors describe patterns in a corpus of 4,039 articles published in the year 2018 and drawn from 215 peer-reviewed literary journals, a corpus comprising 15.5 million words.

Findings

Analysis suggests that contemporary literary scholars collectively build knowledge that considers diverse matters of form, including literary and linguistic forms, literary works and other representational forms; criticality, including critical theories and critical concepts; and humanity, including humanistic themes, human institutions and people/places.

Originality/value

This manuscript offers detail about the nature of contemporary literary scholarship as evident through linguistic patterns in and across published works.