Debabelization: Language, Literature, and Computational Culture

“Debabelization,” as linguist C.K. Ogden put it in 1931, motivated rich debates about whether technological intervention could make particular languages more efficient agents of cultural exchange. Aarthi Vadde, Associate Professor of English at Duke University, will consider how the competitive and techno-utopian discourse around debabelization intersects with the history of empire and the aesthetics of modernist and postcolonial literature.

Hosted by Colonialism, Post, and Anti, in the Digital Age (CPADA) Workshop at Stanford Humanities Center, co-sponsored by the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Department of English, and the Postcolonial Reading Group.

This is an hybrid event. Dinner will be provided for in person attendees. Please RSVP here for the Zoom link and for us to know how much food to order.

Information about the Speaker

Aarthi Vadde works in the field of 20th-21st century Global Anglophone literature, and is broadly interested in the relationship of literary history to computational technologies and internet culture.  In 2021 she joined the editorial board of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and is co-editing Volume F: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. She is also the co-founder of Novel Dialogue a podcast about how novels are made - and what to make of them. Her book in progress is called “We the Platform: Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0.”  In it, she considers how technical and rhetorical shifts in the formulation of the World Wide Web (from network to platform) are shaping contemporary literary culture and popular literacy practices.  The book’s archive features print-based writers of fiction alongside social media upstarts, guerilla writer-publishers, fans, data artists, and engineers. Communications platforms are never neutral, and this book will show how literary works and humanistic criticism can play key roles in the dialogue on responsible computing.Her book Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914-2016 was published by Columbia UP in 2016 and won the ACLA's 2018 Harry Levin Prize for outstanding first book in the field of comparative literature. In addition to her monograph projects, Vadde is co-editor of a volume on the history of literary criticism entitled The Critic as Amateur (Bloomsbury Academic 2019).  Read the intro here. She is also the co-editor of an open-access cluster of essays entitled Web 2.0 and Literary Criticism (Post45 Contemporaries) and the Palgrave Handbook of 20th and 21st Century Literature and Science.