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[ 108 ] 5 LITERARY TASTE AND LIST CULTURE IN A TIME OF “ENDLESS CHOICE” David Wright T he ways in which we come to know, like, and choose books at the start of the twenty-first century suggest that a reconsideration of some established theoretical narratives about literary taste is merited. This chapter introduces and develops the concept of “list culture” as a means of investigating these issues. The starting point for this analysis is a gap, identified by Elizabeth Long, in the research surrounding the “literary.” Researchers have studied numerous elements of literary activity , from the biographies of particular authors to semiotic and psychological accounts of textual interpretation, and from popular literary participation to patterns of literacy. Despite this, Long observes that “how actual readers choose from the vast universe of possible books to read—how they sort through it, make it manageable, and finally settle on a title that they have some reason to believe will provide them with whatever reading experience they are seeking—has remained mysterious.”1 In the contemporary context there is arguably more at stake than ever before in the resolution of this “mystery,” as the “vast possible universe” of books continues to expand. The size, scope, and reach of the book industry has never been greater, despite perennial laments over its inevitable death at the hands of—and here the villain can be chosen from a historical range that extends throughout the twentieth century—film, TV, video, video games, e-mail, and the Internet. The extent of this ongoing growth has led the Mexican critic Gabriel Zaid to speculate mischievously that “in the near future there will be more people writing books than reading them.” According to UNESCO estimates , at the dawn of the twenty-first century, 1 million titles were published annually around the world—a figure four times the number of titles published in the decades preceding the invention of television.2 Stories of abundance of various kinds are persistent in the development of the cultural industries. We can identify them in discourses that emerge from the turn of the twentieth LITERARY TASTE AND LIST CULTURE [ 109 ] century, from political-economic critiques of the emergence of mass culture in the mid-twentieth century, and more recently in the context of the digital age. The changing strategies of managing this abundance can be revealed through a consideration of the cultural list as a mediating structure. The Long Tail, a book by the business analyst Chris Anderson, is one of the more recent stories of abundance, and its imagined recasting of the cultural industries is an important stepping-off point for the consideration of list culture in its current incarnation. For Anderson, “many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching—a market response to inefficient distribution.”3 Based on the remarkable revelation that 98 percent of Amazon.com’s top 100,000 books sell at least one copy once a quarter, his thesis is that, in the contemporary cultural industry, producers are following, rather than shaping, the tastes of their consumers. In the context of questions around literary taste and its relation to choices of reading material, literary institutions and expertise are being sidestepped. Readers are able to exchange forms of literary value among themselves through various online fora, including but not limited to those directly connected to retailers , such as the general customer recommendations and the Listmania feature through which users volunteer and share their enthusiasms on Amazon.com. At the same time, these processes allow producers to gather data about preferences through sophisticated data mining and collaborative filtering techniques and subsequently feed this information back to consumers as guides. Accounts such as Anderson’s suggest a logical undermining of traditional forms of cultural authority in place of a relatively “flat” community of engaged readers from which shared ideas of value can emerge. This chapter looks at the literary list in a variety of forms as one persistent technology of circulation that ascribes literary value in quite specific ways in the light of some stories of abundance, which precede Anderson’s thesis. The next section addresses one element of this change through a reflection on the changing processes of book recommendation. It connects developments within the book industry with theories of cultural production and more general explanations of the nature of contemporary capitalism to suggest that such accounts might provide interesting answers to the “mystery” of contemporary literary taste. Recommendation: From (Dis)Interested Critic to...

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