Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel.
Clayton Childress, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto

10/30, 12:30 pm
SAV 409

Starting in the early 1970s, in sociology and allied disciplines the studies of cultural production and reception began to split apart. Likewise, while applications of field theory to cultural production and reception have generated no shortage insights about the internal orders within fields, for the most part empirical analyses have stopped short at the relationships betweenfields. What are the consequences of both of these of arrangements? Through following a novel in real-time all the way from its authoring, into its publishing and selling, and then to the reading of it in 21 book groups, this talk reveals how decisions are made, inequalities are reproduced, and novels are built to travel in the creation, production, and consumption of culture.

Bio:  Clayton Childress is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Toronto. His work on the creation, production, and reception of culture has been published in American Sociological Review, Poetics, Cultural Sociology, American Behavioral Scientist, and other venues. His book, Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel, is now out with Princeton University Press.