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The hypercanon

I read this PDF yesterday and it has some very cool things to say about the Canon of literature. Essentially they map authors in a 2D space where the x-axis is popularity on Goodreads and the y-axis is number of citations in MLA papers: https://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet17.pdf

You can define a quadrant system with lines at the xy medians: NE - prestigious but not popular: academic darlings NW - prestigious and popular: the sweet spot
SW - popular but not prestigious: genre fiction, guilty pleasures SE - neither: unknowns, undesirables, the forgotten

_1396099155269877767-E1_wx2zVEAECRgh.jpg

This canonicity is fractal: if you zoom in on the top right corner, the same dynamics are at play. Even at double zoom, look at the author names: NE: Milton, Joyce, Beckett NW: Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen SW: Rowling, Orwell, Salinger SE: DeLillo, Roth, Rushdie 💀💀💀

_1396100394388885504-E1_x5vxVIAA_6RP.jpg

_1396100394388885504-E1_x6EEVcAIF2i-.jpg

Oops, I forgot I’m bad at East and West. Maybe delete these or something.

Nah, on second thought, forget it. This is philosophy now. I’m defining my own terms. Here’s a key:

_1396104461014102016-E1_1mqdVcAE3ALC.jpg

Should have used Lawful/Chaotic on the x-axis and Good/Evil on the y, lmao.

But check it out: all those graphs are log-scaled, meaning each tick on the graph is an order of magnitude. If you try to graph them all on a linear scale, only a few dozen authors escape the singularity. These are the hypercanon.” Can you find your favorites on here?

_1396107377510805512-E1_4Qe9UYAIeb5C.jpg

I also like this graph of genre averages. It matches my sense of the terrain of market vs academy:

_1396108175447773186-E1_4_AaUUAAGHvy.jpg

This is the one I stared at the longest though. Top MLA authors, ranked by their MLA popularity over the last few decades. You can literally see the stock” of a certain author go up or down with time:

_1396108896385785866-E1_5o0sVoAIgC9s.jpg

I’m trapped inside the Earth btw. That’s why I do E on the left and W on the right. https://x.com/jcalpickard/status/1396124742881533958?s=19

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