From the Colonial Archive to the Global Microphone: Women’s Voices and Self-Representation in Cornelia Sorabji’s India Calling (1934) and Malala Yousafzai’s I Am Malala (2013)

 

From the Colonial Archive to the Global Microphone

Women’s Voices and Self-Representation in Cornelia Sorabji’s India Calling (1934) and Malala Yousafzai’s I Am Malala (2013)
A Comparative Blog on Gender, Agency, and the Politics of Voice

Blog Details

• Written by: Nidhi R. Pandya (Roll No. 19), Sem 3, Batch 2025-27
• Paper: Paper 201: Indian English Literature, Pre-Independence (Paper Code 22406)
• Submitted to: Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
• Date: October 12th, 2026

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction: Two Women, Two Centuries, One Question
• 2. Research Question and Hypothesis
• 3. The Theoretical Lens: Can the Subaltern Speak?
• 4. Cornelia Sorabji: Professional Citizenship, Zenana, and Conservative Modernity
  • Point 1: Professionalism as a Way to Claim Citizenship
  • Point 2: The Zenana and Colonial Modernity
  • Point 3: Conservative Modernity in India Calling
  • Point 4: Narrative Strategies and Their Limits
• 5. Malala Yousafzai: Blog, Collaborative Memoir, Empathy, and Human Rights
  • Point 5: From a Childhood Blog to a Collaborative Memoir
  • Point 6: Human Rights and the Politics of Production
  • Point 7: Empathy as a Political Tool
  • Point 8: Reclaiming the Girls’ Education Story
• 6. How Genre Shapes the Story: Life-Writing Frameworks
• 7. Comparative Analysis
  • Comparison I: Genre, Form, and Narrative Strategies
  • Comparison II: Audience, Reception, and Political Context
  • Comparison III: Agency, Hierarchy, and Mediation
  • Silence and Mediation Across Time
• 8. Hypothesis Justified
• 9. Lessons for Today
• 10. Conclusion
• 11. Key Takeaways
• 12. Limitations and Further Scope for Research
• Works Cited

1. Introduction: Two Women, Two Centuries, One Question

What happens when a woman gets to tell her own story? Who listens, who is left out, and who speaks on behalf of the women who stay silent? These questions run through two very different books: India Calling by Cornelia Sorabji and I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai.

Cornelia Sorabji (1866 to 1954) was the first Indian woman to study law at Oxford and the first woman lawyer in British India. In 1934 she published India Calling, a memoir looking back on her professional life. Malala Yousafzai (born 1997) is an education activist who was shot by the Taliban in 2012. She co-authored I Am Malala in 2013 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.

Both books are life-writing, but they belong to very different worlds. In Sorabji’s time, the colonial idea of the zenana (the women’s quarters) pictured Indian women as secluded and restricted. In Malala’s time, the post-9/11 habit of “saving the Muslim girl” pictured Muslim women as victims waiting for rescue. This blog looks at how each writer deals with gender, agency, and the power to tell her own story.

2. Research Question and Hypothesis

Research Question

How do Cornelia Sorabji’s India Calling and Malala Yousafzai’s I Am Malala negotiate gender, agency, and the politics of voice as women’s life-writing moves from colonial constrained professionalism to global human-rights testimony?

Hypothesis

Women’s life-writing shifts from colonial-era constrained professionalism to global human-rights testimony. Sorabji builds a limited, hierarchical agency that still polices other women’s modernity, while Malala reclaims and expands agency through collaborative, empathic, and transnational narrative forms.

3. The Theoretical Lens: Can the Subaltern Speak?

To read both books fairly, we need a careful theory. This blog uses Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Her main warning is simple: when intellectuals claim to speak for the marginalized, they often forget their own position of power.

“the much-publicized critique of the sovereign subject thus actually inaugurates a Subject”
— (Spivak 66-67)

• Hidden power: Intellectuals who claim to “disclose and know the discourse of society’s Other” often ignore their own place in “intellectual and economic history.”
• Erased specifics: Spivak notes that Foucault and Deleuze speak as “two monolithic and anonymous subjects-in-revolution,” which erases geopolitical detail (Spivak 66).
• Why it matters here: The same caution applies to Sorabji speaking for purdah women and to the Western reception of Malala’s story.
• Key idea: Agency is not a pure recovery of voice. It is a mediated, power-laden practice that can bring back the very Subject it claims to critique.

4. Cornelia Sorabji: Professional Citizenship, Zenana, and Conservative Modernity

Point 1: Professionalism as a Way to Claim Citizenship

Sukanya Banerjee shows that Sorabji built a special language of professionalism to deal with the difficult position of colonial women in the working world of her time.

“etches a particular idiom of professionalism that negotiates with the otherwise difficult position of women, especially colonial subjects”
— (Banerjee 291)

A good example is the US-Canada border scene. Sorabji says she is “from British India, and [was] equally with Canadians of the British Empire” (Sorabji qtd. in Banerjee 292). Her profession becomes a space where she can claim a wider, though still hierarchical, kind of citizenship. This strategy is both resistance and accommodation, because it challenges limits on her while staying inside the empire’s structures of race, gender, and power.

Point 2: The Zenana and Colonial Modernity

Antoinette Burton explains that Sorabji’s memoirs turn the zenana into “a ‘vanishing monument’ of a bygone India” (Burton 145). Sorabji uses it to criticize the gender politics of Indian nationalism in the 1930s. Ana Quiring links this picture to “the colonial heritage of the trapped housewife,” showing how colonial reform ideas still shape feminist ideas of domestic confinement today.

The purdahnashin (a woman living in seclusion) client is very important. She is the ground of Sorabji’s professional authority, yet she is kept at a hierarchical distance. So colonial modernity creates closeness and hierarchy at the same time. One woman’s speech gains authority by mediating the silence of others.

Point 3: Conservative Modernity in India Calling

Anwesha Kundu argues that the modern colonial Indian woman was a “paradoxical and conservative figure.” Her self-making “produces hierarchic intimacies between traditional womanhood and the exceptional category of the modern colonial woman” (Kundu 583).

“To be modern as a colonial woman is to keep modernity from others”
— (Kundu 583)

Sorabji borrows Western genres, such as women’s autobiography and harem literature, and this leads to “the resultant impossibility of creating a coherent self.” The failure of her self-construction is itself evidence of the limits that empire placed on colonial women’s modernity. Her agency is real, but it is carefully rationed and conservative in its effect on other women.

Point 4: Narrative Strategies and Their Limits

• Sorabji builds her professional self by repeatedly contrasting it with the “Orthodox Hindu community,” which she says she makes visible “in their setting” as “a hitherto unexplored country” (Sorabji qtd. in Burton 146).
• The memoir puts personal and travel stories second to the ethnographic display of her purdah clients.
• Agency belongs to the exceptional professional woman, while traditional women stay as objects of representation, not speaking subjects.
• Result: her text shows a constrained, professional form of women’s voice under empire that both expands and polices possibility.

5. Malala Yousafzai: Blog, Collaborative Memoir, Empathy, and Human Rights

Point 5: From a Childhood Blog to a Collaborative Memoir

Malala’s life-writing began with “the pseudonymous blog that she wrote for the BBC in 2009” under the name Gul Makai, describing life under Taliban control in Swat (Douglas). Ana Belén Martínez García points out that her childhood blog and teenage autobiography both use careful narrative strategies (Martínez García 253). Even the blog balances “between witnessing and involvement,” which depends on building an emotional bond with the reader.

Kate Douglas calls Malala’s texts a “collaborative archive.” It includes the 2013 memoir co-written with Christina Lamb and a young-reader edition. This archive answers the criticism made against Malala as it goes along, which makes “moments of resistance” visible. Malala also uses the ideas of childhood and youth, as citizens and representatives of a nation’s future, to become a voice for educational reform. Collaboration multiplies her agency, though it also raises questions of authorship, editorial control, and market influence.

Point 6: Human Rights and the Politics of Production

Shazia Sadaf reminds us that a memoir that helps spread rights awareness is also “a commodity driven by the politics of its production, marketing and reception” (Sadaf 855). Western readers see “an obvious message about girls’ right to education,” yet the book has been received less warmly in Pakistan than in the West. This difference shows how post-9/11 audiences make sense of an age that saw the War on Terror and the universal human-rights project together.

In short, production, marketing, and reception decide which human-rights concerns become globally recognized.

Point 7: Empathy as a Political Tool

Martínez García shows how human-rights life narratives win global support by appealing to empathy. Drawing on Schaffer and Smith, she notes that stories can “promote healing and solidarity among disaffected groups,” yet can also “turn subjects of story into spectacle, reduce difference to sameness, and induce exhaustion.” So empathy cuts both ways. It can build solidarity, and it can also simplify complex local realities. Malala’s texts carefully manage this bond across the blog and the memoir.

Point 8: Reclaiming the Girls’ Education Story

Walters argues that Yousafzai “negotiates and challenges discourses around young women, Pakistan, and Islam.” She adds that a truly emancipatory view of girls’ rights would look “to young women themselves” and not only to powerful organizations (Walters 23). UK media often labelled her the “shot Pakistani girl” instead of a powerful survivor or a feminist. Malala’s own text answers this by explaining her childhood, refusing orientalist assumptions, and turning the gaze back on the West. Her self-representation becomes discursive resistance against both Taliban violence and Western rescue stories.

6. How Genre Shapes the Story: Life-Writing Frameworks

Bart Moore-Gilbert argues that postcolonial life-writing has its own features, especially in “writing styles and narrative conceptions of the Self,” and forms “a distinctive parallel tradition of auto/biographical writing.” Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson add that autobiographical acts are always “situated,” and that “new genres, new subjects”, especially around gender and human rights, appear after 2000.

Sorabji’s book belongs to the earlier tradition, which negotiates imperial and nationalist claims. Malala’s book belongs to the modern human-rights life-narrative boom. So genre itself becomes a site of political struggle over who may speak, how, and for whom.

7. Comparative Analysis

Comparison I: Genre, Form, and Narrative Strategies

Aspect	Cornelia Sorabji: India Calling	Malala Yousafzai: I Am Malala
Genre	Women’s autobiography and harem literature	Collaborative autobiography and political testimony
Narrative form	Retrospective, ethnographic, professionally framed	Multi-platform, collaborative, and evolving
Strategy	Presents Indian womanhood through the exceptional modern colonial woman (Kundu 583)	Builds a “collaborative archive” of resistance (Douglas)
Audience	Shaped by colonial literary habits and professional authority	Global readers through blogs, memoirs, and many editions
Agency	Gains authority while negotiating colonial hierarchies	Amplifies her voice while negotiating collaboration and global politics
Key argument	Self-representation works inside colonial frameworks	Collaboration expands visibility and chances for self-revision

Comparison II: Audience, Reception, and Political Context

Aspect	Cornelia Sorabji: India Calling	Malala Yousafzai: I Am Malala
Audience	Mostly British and imperial readers	Global readers, especially human-rights and education audiences
Reception	Shows the zenana as an “unexplored country” (Burton 146)	Celebrated in the West, less warmly received in Pakistan (Sadaf 855)
Circulation	Elite professional and reform networks of the 1930s	Global human-rights memoir market and media networks
Political framing	Shaped by colonial and orientalist images	Negotiates post-9/11 stories of Muslim women as victims needing rescue
Agency	Limited by colonial respectability and conservative modernity	Challenges dominant stories while negotiating media and editors
Key argument	Audience and empire shape how her voice is understood	Global circulation expands her reach but also shapes how her story is read

Comparison III: Agency, Hierarchy, and Mediation

Aspect	Cornelia Sorabji: India Calling	Malala Yousafzai: I Am Malala
Whom she speaks for	Purdahnashin clients and women in colonial India	Fellow schoolgirls and the people of Swat
Representation	Creates “hierarchic intimacies” that separate her modernity from other women’s lives (Kundu 583)	Builds solidarity but risks turning others into spectacle (Martínez García)
Theoretical lens	Spivak questions the authority of the privileged speaking subject	Human-rights discourse also asks who speaks for whom
Ethical tension	How to amplify women’s experiences without reinforcing hierarchy	How to build solidarity without reducing others to victims
Key argument	Life-writing negotiates the ethics of speaking for others but never fully resolves it	Voice and visibility bring responsibility as well as agency

Silence and Mediation Across Time

In both books, the speaking “I” gains authority partly by mediating the experiences of other women who remain less audible. Sorabji’s purdahnashin clients and Malala’s fellow schoolgirls in Swat are the ethical ground of the story, yet their voices are filtered through the main narrator. Spivak’s warning that critique can still “inaugurate a Subject” applies to the colonial professional and the global human-rights speaker alike (Spivak 66). The challenge never goes away: how can a woman expand her own agency without making other women transparent or merely useful? Life-writing keeps negotiating this tension instead of solving it.

8. Hypothesis Justified

The evidence supports the hypothesis. Sorabji’s professionalism creates a real yet conservative and hierarchical form of agency. Malala’s narrative expands women’s voices through collaboration and human-rights advocacy. At the same time, both remain constrained by colonial hierarchies, global media, market forces, and geopolitical pressure. The comparison shows that women’s life-writing has moved from colonial self-representation to globally circulated testimony, becoming more visible but still shaped by dominant power structures.

9. Lessons for Today

• Women activists today still balance local authenticity against global legibility, just as Sorabji and Malala did in different ways.
• Digital platforms multiply voices, yet they also create new hierarchies of visibility and marketability, echoing the collaborative but mediated archive Douglas describes.
• Empathy remains double-edged: it can build solidarity and it can simplify, as Martínez García warns.
• Professional and human-rights discourses still authorize some women’s speech while pushing others aside.
• Critical reading of life-writing is still needed to understand how gender, agency, and testimony work under present geopolitical conditions.

10. Conclusion

India Calling and I Am Malala reveal a century-long change in women’s public voices. From the constrained professionalism of the colonial zenana lawyer to the collaborative, media-driven testimony of a global education activist, women’s agency has grown but is still shaped by power. Genre, audience, and geopolitical context decide which voices become audible and influential. The shift from colonial silence to global testimony is significant yet incomplete, which is why the critical study of life-writing matters for understanding gender, agency, and the continuing politics of women’s self-representation.

11. Key Takeaways

Point	Remember This
Spivak	Agency is mediated and power-laden, never a pure recovery of voice
Sorabji	Professional citizenship: real agency, but hierarchical and conservative (Banerjee, Kundu)
Zenana	Both the ground of her authority and a figure kept at a distance (Burton, Quiring)
Malala	Collaborative archive, empathy, and human-rights testimony (Douglas, Martínez García)
Production	Her book is also a commodity shaped by marketing and reception (Sadaf)
Shared problem	Speaking for other women without making them silent or instrumental

12. Limitations and Further Scope for Research

Limitations

• The study covers only two primary texts and cannot represent the full range of South Asian women’s life-writing.
• Large differences in religion, class, and historical position (a Parsee Christian elite and a Pashtun Muslim activist) risk being oversimplified.
• I Am Malala is co-authored and commercially mediated, so the author’s voice cannot be fully separated from editorial and market influence.
• The reception analysis relies mainly on secondary scholarship, not extensive primary reader data.

Further Scope

• Add other South Asian women life-writers from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
• Study more closely how religious and community differences shape self-representation.
• Investigate the material and editorial histories of both texts, including translations and multiple editions.
• Study Malala’s digital and transmedial archive, and how both figures are politically appropriated in current debates.

Works Cited

• Banerjee, Sukanya. “Empire, Nation, and the Professional Citizen: Reading Cornelia Sorabji’s India Calling.” Prose Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, 2006, pp. 291-317. https://doi.org/10.1080/01440350600975515.
• Burton, Antoinette. “‘The Purdahnashin in Her Setting’: Colonial Modernity and the Zenana in Cornelia Sorabji’s Memoirs.” Feminist Review, vol. 65, no. 1, 2000, pp. 145-158. https://doi.org/10.1080/014177800406985.
• Douglas, Kate. “Malala Yousafzai, Life Narrative and the Collaborative Archive.” Life Writing, vol. 14, no. 3, 2017, pp. 297-311. https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2017.1328299.
• Kundu, Anwesha. “Conservative Modernity: The Self-Making of the Modern Colonial Woman in Cornelia Sorabji’s India Calling.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 70, no. 4, 2024, pp. 583-608. https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2024.a950444.
• Martínez García, Ana Belén. “Empathy for Social Justice: The Case of Malala Yousafzai.” Journal of English Studies, vol. 17, 2019, pp. 253-275. https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.3540.
• Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-Representation. Routledge, 2009.
• Quiring, Ana. “Behind the Veil of the Zenana: Cornelia Sorabji and the Colonial Heritage of the Trapped Housewife.” Feminist Modernist Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 2022, pp. 72-88. https://doi.org/10.1080/24692921.2021.1934804.
• Sadaf, Shazia. “I Am Malala: Human Rights and the Politics of Production, Marketing and Reception of the Post-9/11 Memoir.” Interventions, vol. 19, no. 6, 2017, pp. 855-871. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2017.1347053.
• Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed., University of Minnesota Press, 2010. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv3m0.
• Sorabji, Cornelia. India Calling: The Memories of Cornelia Sorabji. Nisbet & Co., 1934.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Macmillan, 1988, pp. 271-313.
• Walters, R. “‘Shot Pakistani Girl’: The Limitations of Girls Education Discourses in UK Newspaper Coverage of Malala Yousafzai.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, vol. 18, no. 3, 2016, pp. 650-670. https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148116631274.
• Walters, R. “‘This Is My Story’: The Reclaiming of Girls’ Education Discourses in Malala Yousafzai’s Autobiography.” Girlhood Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, 2017, pp. 23-38. https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2017.100304.
• Yousafzai, Malala, with Christina Lamb. I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2013.

Paper 204: From Eisenstein’s Montage to the Attention Economy Film Editing, Algorithmic Feeds, and the Politics of Digital Attention

Paper 204: From Eisenstein’s Montage to the Attention Economy

Film Editing, Algorithmic Feeds, and the Politics of Digital Attention
Assignment of Paper 204: Contemporary Western Theories and Film Studies

Academic Details

• Name: Nidhi R. Pandya
• Roll No.: 20
• Enrollment No.: 5108250024
• Sem.: 3
• Batch: 2025 - 2027
• E-mail: nidhipandya206@gmail.com

Assignment Details

• Paper Name: Contemporary Western Theories and Film Studies
• Paper No.: Paper 204
• Paper Code: 22409
• Topic: From Eisenstein’s Montage to the Attention Economy: Film Editing, Algorithmic Feeds, and the Politics of Digital Attention
• Submitted To: Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
• Submitted Date: October 19th 2026

Document Statistics (via QuillBot)

• Words: 4223
• Characters: 32583
• Characters without spaces: 28305
• Paragraphs: 129
• Sentences: 323
• Reading time: 16 m 54 s

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Keywords
• Research Question
• Hypothesis
• Introduction
• 1. Eisenstein’s Montage as Dialectical Collision and Metaphorical Production
  • 1.1. Montage as Collision rather than Linkage
  • 1.2. Metaphor-Producing Juxtaposition
  • 1.3. Aesthetic Foundations and Japanese Influences
  • 1.4. Performance, Gesture, and Embodied Montage
  • 1.5. The Collective and the Individual in Eisenstein’s Evolving Practice
• 2. From Revolutionary Form to Algorithmic Sequencing: Continuities and Mutations in Short-Form Video
  • 2.1. Metric and Rhythmic Montage in the Attention Economy
  • 2.2. Intellectual Montage without Dialectical Synthesis
  • 2.3. Creator Performance as Contemporary Montage Cell
  • 2.4. The Speed of Collision and the Exhaustion of Attention
• 3. Algorithmic Publics: From Networked Communities to Interest Clusters
  • 3.1. The Shift from Networks to Clusters
  • 3.2. Opacity and the Loss of Structural Transparency
  • 3.3. Subcultural Fragmentation and the Limits of Collectivity
  • 3.4. Political Implications for the Public Sphere
• 4. The Data Attraction Model and the Reshaping of the Attention Economy
  • 4.1. From Influencer Charisma to Modular Data
  • 4.2. Consequences for Content Production and Aesthetic Form
  • 4.3. Global Convergence of Platform Logics
  • 4.4. The Limits of the Attention-Economy Framework
• 5. Algorithmic Attention Rents and Platform Market Power
  • 5.1. Control over the Allocation of Attention as Market Power
  • 5.2. Implications for Creators, Advertisers, and Users
  • 5.3. Regulatory Implications and the Demand for Transparency
  • 5.4. Attention Rents and the Politics of Visibility
• 6. The Ethics of Attention Capture, Platform Addiction, and the Ambiguity of Credit
  • 6.1. Addiction as Design Feature rather than Side Effect
  • 6.2. The Moral Specificity of Social Media Addiction
  • 6.3. Authorship, Credit, and Racialised Inequality on TikTok
  • 6.4. Public Engagement within the Attention Economy
• 7. The Politics of Digital Attention: Continuities, Ruptures, and Critical Stakes
  • 7.1. Depoliticisation of Formal Power
  • 7.2. Fragmentation versus Collectivity
  • 7.3. Authorship, Credit, and the Politics of Visibility
  • 7.4. Critical Recovery of Montage Principles
  • 7.5. Broader Cultural and Ideological Stakes
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Abstract

This assignment examines the conceptual and political trajectory from Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage as dialectical collision and ideological construction to the algorithmic curation of attention on contemporary short-video platforms such as TikTok. It argues that the principles of juxtaposition, conflict, and the production of meaning through the collision of discrete units—central to Eisenstein’s silent cinema—have been transformed, intensified, and largely depoliticised under the conditions of the digital attention economy. Drawing on classical film theory and recent scholarship on algorithmic media, the study analyses how metric, rhythmic, and intellectual forms of montage reappear in the rapid sequencing of short-form video, while recommendation systems reorganise publics into interest clusters rather than networked communities. The discussion addresses the commodification of attention, the extraction of algorithmic attention rents, the ethics of platform-induced addiction, racialised and gendered inequalities of credit and visibility, and the ideological implications of opaque curation. By tracing continuities and ruptures between revolutionary cinematic form and contemporary platform logics, the assignment demonstrates that digital attention is not merely a commercial resource but a site of political struggle over perception, collectivity, authorship, and agency.

Keywords

Eisenstein, montage, attention economy, algorithmic curation, TikTok, dialectical collision, short-form video, platform power, interest clusters, algorithmic rents

Research Question

How do the formal principles of Eisensteinian montage—juxtaposition, collision, and the dialectical production of meaning—reappear, mutate, and become politicised within the algorithmic attention economy of short-video platforms, and what are the ideological consequences of this transformation for contemporary digital publics, authorship, and collective perception?

Hypothesis

The hypothesis of this study is that algorithmic feeds on platforms such as TikTok operationalise a depoliticised yet intensified form of montage: discrete audiovisual fragments are continuously collided and sequenced to maximise engagement and extract attention rents, thereby converting Eisenstein’s revolutionary technique of ideological construction into an instrument of continuous attention capture, affective modulation, the fragmentation of publics into interest clusters, and the uneven distribution of visibility and credit.

Introduction

Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage remains one of the most influential contributions to the understanding of cinematic form and its political possibilities. For Eisenstein, montage was never a neutral technique of continuity or invisible storytelling. It was a dialectical process in which the collision of independent shots produces a new concept that exceeds the sum of its parts. In works such as Strike (1925) and Battleship Potemkin (1925), the juxtaposition of images generated intellectual and emotional effects that served explicitly political ends. Montage, in this framework, functioned simultaneously as aesthetic method, cognitive operation, and ideological weapon.

Nearly a century later, the rapid sequencing of short audiovisual units on algorithmic platforms appears, at first glance, to revive montage principles with unprecedented intensity. TikTok’s For You Page, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts present users with an endless stream of discrete clips whose succession is governed by recommendation systems rather than by the conscious design of a single director. The formal operations of cutting, collision, and rhythmic acceleration are everywhere. Yet the political valence of this contemporary montage has shifted dramatically. Where Eisenstein sought to construct revolutionary consciousness through conflict, platform algorithms optimise for retention, completion rates, engagement metrics, and the monetisation of attention.

This assignment situates the transition from classical montage to algorithmic feeds within the broader framework of the attention economy. It draws on foundational studies of Eisenstein’s theory—Kuiper’s analysis of metaphor-producing juxtaposition, Siegler’s emphasis on montage-as-collision, Odin’s exploration of Japanese aesthetic influences, Baron’s work on performance and gesture as montage elements, and Parra’s recent examination of the collective and the individual in Eisenstein’s evolving practice—and on recent scholarship that examines TikTok’s transformation of social media publics, the data-driven reorganisation of attention, the ambiguity of credit and authorship, the ethics of platform addiction, the political economy of algorithmic rents, the limits of the attention-economy framework itself, and the practical challenges of public engagement within the attention economy.

The central claim is that digital platforms have absorbed and redirected the formal power of montage while evacuating much of its original political intentionality. Collision becomes continuous stimulation; dialectical synthesis becomes algorithmic clustering; and the spectator is reconstituted as a source of behavioural data and attention rent rather than as a political subject capable of critical synthesis. The discussion proceeds through seven analytical sections that move from Eisenstein’s theoretical foundations to the political, economic, ethical, and cultural consequences of algorithmic attention. Together these sections establish that the politics of digital attention cannot be understood without recovering the formal and ideological stakes of montage.

1. Eisenstein’s Montage as Dialectical Collision and Metaphorical Production

Eisenstein’s conception of montage rests on the principle that meaning arises not from the smooth linkage of shots but from their conflictual juxtaposition. Montage is understood as a process analogous to Marxist dialectics: thesis and antithesis collide to produce a synthesis that constitutes a new idea. This theoretical position distinguishes Eisenstein sharply from continuity editing traditions that prioritise invisible transitions and narrative transparency. The spectator is not merely guided through a story but is compelled to perform an active intellectual and emotional labour of synthesis.

1.1. Montage as Collision rather than Linkage

Eisenstein insisted that the essence of cinema lies in the collision of independent shots. Each shot functions as a discrete cell whose interaction with the next generates an intellectual or emotional explosion. Robert Siegler’s extrapolation of this theory emphasises that montage-as-collision produces ideological construction rather than mere sequential storytelling. The spectator is forced to synthesise conflicting images into a higher-order concept, thereby participating in the production of meaning. This participatory dimension is crucial: montage does not deliver a pre-formed message so much as it stages the conditions under which a new idea can emerge in the mind of the viewer.

1.2. Metaphor-Producing Juxtaposition

John B. Kuiper’s analysis of Eisenstein’s silent montage highlights the capacity of juxtaposition to generate metaphor. Visual images, like linguistic units, can be combined so that associations arising from their meanings produce figurative effects. The famous sequence of the three stone lions in Battleship Potemkin—sleeping, awakening, and rising—illustrates how successive images construct a metaphorical argument about the awakening of revolutionary consciousness. Montage here operates as a form of cinematic rhetoric capable of producing abstract political statements through concrete visual collision.

1.3. Aesthetic Foundations and Japanese Influences

Steve Odin has demonstrated the significant influence of traditional Japanese aesthetics on Eisenstein’s thinking. Concepts drawn from haiku, kabuki theatre, and the ideogrammatic structure of Japanese writing informed Eisenstein’s understanding of discontinuous yet generative juxtaposition. The collision of images could produce a conceptual whole without relying on continuous narrative linkage, much as a haiku presents discrete perceptions that crystallise into a single insight. This cross-cultural dimension underscores both the formal sophistication of Eisenstein’s method and its openness to non-Western aesthetic logics.

1.4. Performance, Gesture, and Embodied Montage

Cynthia Baron’s reconsideration of montage in relation to performance further expands the concept beyond the purely visual cut. Montage is not confined to the editing of shots; it also encompasses the selection and combination of gestures, movements, and expressions. Actors’ physical actions become montage elements that interact with framing, duration, and cutting to produce meaning. This insight is particularly productive for analysing contemporary short-form video, in which creator performance, facial micro-expressions, and bodily rhythm are inseparable from the algorithmic sequencing of clips.

1.5. The Collective and the Individual in Eisenstein’s Evolving Practice

Ricardo Parra’s recent study traces the mutation in Eisenstein’s work from an early emphasis on the collective revolutionary hero to a later focus on the individual historical figure, corresponding to broader shifts in Soviet cultural policy from the relative pluralism of the NEP period toward Stalinist Socialist Realism. This historical trajectory reveals that montage itself was never a fixed technique but a form whose political and narrative orientation changed in response to ideological pressure. The tension between collective and individual remains relevant for understanding how algorithmic systems today organise attention around both mass trends and highly personalised clusters.

Taken together, these dimensions establish montage as a formal system capable of generating metaphor, ideology, embodied meaning, and shifting relations between collective and individual. The subsequent sections examine how this system is transformed under algorithmic conditions.

2. From Revolutionary Form to Algorithmic Sequencing: Continuities and Mutations in Short-Form Video

The formal operations of Eisensteinian montage reappear, in mutated form, in the rapid editing practices of TikTok and related platforms. Short-form video relies on abrupt transitions, rhythmic acceleration, text overlays, and the juxtaposition of disparate audiovisual fragments. Yet the intentionality and political horizon of these operations have been fundamentally altered. What was once a directed construction of consciousness becomes a continuous, data-driven optimisation of engagement.

2.1. Metric and Rhythmic Montage in the Attention Economy

Eisenstein distinguished metric montage (cutting according to absolute length) from rhythmic montage (cutting according to the movement within the frame and the development of action). Contemporary short-video editing frequently employs both: clips are timed to musical beats or to platform-optimised retention intervals, while internal motion, zooms, and text animations accelerate affective response. The goal is no longer the construction of a coherent ideological argument but the maximisation of completion rates, rewatches, and subsequent recommendations. The formal tools of montage survive; their purpose is inverted.

2.2. Intellectual Montage without Dialectical Synthesis

Intellectual montage, which Eisenstein regarded as the highest form, sought to produce abstract ideas through the collision of conceptual images. Algorithmic feeds generate continuous collisions of images, sounds, texts, and memes, yet the resulting “ideas” are more often affective intensities, ironic associations, or memetic recognitions than dialectical arguments. The spectator is stimulated and prompted to continue scrolling rather than invited into sustained critical synthesis. The political potential of intellectual montage is thereby neutralised even as its formal intensity is amplified by the speed and volume of algorithmic delivery.

2.3. Creator Performance as Contemporary Montage Cell

Drawing on Baron’s framework, the individual TikTok creator functions as a mobile montage unit. Gesture, facial expression, vocal delivery, sound choice, and on-screen text collide within the fifteen-to-sixty-second format. The algorithmic system then collides these units with one another according to behavioural data. Montage is no longer the exclusive province of the director-editor but is distributed across millions of creators and the recommendation engine that sequences their output. The result is a massively parallel, continuously updating form of montage whose overall logic remains opaque to most participants.

2.4. The Speed of Collision and the Exhaustion of Attention

The acceleration of cultural attention cycles, documented across multiple domains, finds its purest expression in short-form video. Content rises and falls with extreme rapidity; trends exhaust themselves within days or hours. This temporal compression intensifies the formal power of collision while simultaneously reducing the space for reflective synthesis. What Eisenstein achieved through carefully calculated sequences is now produced at industrial scale by systems optimised for the rapid consumption and discarding of attention.

This section demonstrates that formal continuities between classical montage and algorithmic sequencing are real and significant, yet they serve a different political economy of attention—one oriented toward continuous capture rather than transformative consciousness.

3. Algorithmic Publics: From Networked Communities to Interest Clusters

Paolo Gerbaudo’s analysis of TikTok identifies a structural transformation in the organisation of online publics. First-generation social media platforms centred on networked publics formed through explicit interpersonal connections—friendships, follows, and mutual visibility. TikTok and similar platforms generate clustered publics: statistically constructed neighbourhoods of users grouped by behavioural similarity and shared interests rather than by social ties.

3.1. The Shift from Networks to Clusters

Recommendation systems assemble audiences around content rather than around relationships. Users are exposed to material selected for predicted engagement rather than for relational proximity. This produces extraordinarily high levels of attention concentration while simultaneously depersonalising online experience. The “For You” logic replaces the “who you know” logic with a “what you might like” calculus.

3.2. Opacity and the Loss of Structural Transparency

The algorithmic construction of clusters renders the structures of online communication increasingly opaque. Users cannot readily discern why particular content reaches them, how their interests have been classified, or how publics are being assembled and reassembled. Gerbaudo notes that this opacity contributes to a growing sense of disconnection even amid intense engagement.

3.3. Subcultural Fragmentation and the Limits of Collectivity

Clustered publics facilitate rapid mobilisation around shared interests and aesthetic styles, yet they inhibit the formation of broader solidarities. The dialectical collision that once aimed at collective consciousness is replaced by the continuous reinforcement of existing preferences and affective dispositions. Attention is captured within narrow enclaves whose boundaries are continually redrawn by the algorithm.

3.4. Political Implications for the Public Sphere

The transformation from networked to clustered publics has profound consequences for the possibility of a shared critical public sphere. When attention is organised around statistical proximity of interest rather than around deliberative encounter, the conditions for collective political reflection are weakened. Montage’s original promise of forging new forms of collective perception is inverted into a technology of fragmentation.

4. The Data Attraction Model and the Reshaping of the Attention Economy

Zhen Zhang (published as Meng Liang) argues that platforms such as Douyin/TikTok instantiate a “data attraction model” that supersedes earlier influencer-centred attention economies. Content is classified according to digital labels and modular features recognised by machine learning systems. Attention is attracted less by the personality or charisma of a human influencer than by the algorithmic performance of modular content units measured in real time.

4.1. From Influencer Charisma to Modular Data

In the data attraction model, metrics such as completion rate, viewing duration, likes, shares, and interaction signals determine visibility. Human creators become suppliers of modular units whose value is calculated dynamically. This represents a radical intensification of flexible accumulation within participatory media: labour is fragmented, metrics are immediate, and accumulation is continuous yet precarious for individual creators.

4.2. Consequences for Content Production and Aesthetic Form

Creators adapt their practices to the demands of the algorithm, producing shorter, more rapidly paced, more easily categorisable, and more immediately affective material. The formal principles of montage—collision, rhythm, juxtaposition—are subordinated to the requirements of data extraction and recommendation optimisation. Aesthetic decisions become, in effect, experiments in algorithmic legibility.

4.3. Global Convergence of Platform Logics

Although exemplified by Chinese platforms, the data attraction model is increasingly visible across Western short-video services. The reorganisation of attention around algorithmic modularity constitutes a general tendency of contemporary digital media rather than a culturally specific phenomenon. Platforms compete by refining the same core logic: maximising the efficiency with which attention can be attracted, measured, and monetised.

4.4. The Limits of the Attention-Economy Framework

Greg Elmer has cautioned against treating the attention economy as a universal or fully adequate explanatory framework. Focusing solely on attention risks overlooking the financial and infrastructural processes through which platforms convert user activity into capital. The data attraction model must therefore be understood not only as a transformation of attention but as part of a broader political economy of platform financialisation.

5. Algorithmic Attention Rents and Platform Market Power

Tim O’Reilly, Ilan Strauss, and Mariana Mazzucato advance a theory of algorithmic attention rents. As platforms grow, they acquire the capacity to extract rents from users, suppliers (creators), and advertisers through algorithmic control over attention. Attention harvested from users is monetised by being resold within advertising markets or used to shape competitive conditions in ways that advantage the platform itself.

5.1. Control over the Allocation of Attention as Market Power

Platforms decide which content receives visibility and which is suppressed or demoted. This power constitutes a form of market power that operates on the “free” side of the platform economy. The ability to direct attention becomes a rent-generating asset independent of the production of content itself.

5.2. Implications for Creators, Advertisers, and Users

Creators and advertisers become dependent on the opaque metrics through which attention is allocated. Users supply the raw material of attention without transparent knowledge of how it is valued or redirected. The platform captures value from the labour of content production and from the attention of users while remaining largely unaccountable for the distributive consequences of its algorithmic decisions.

5.3. Regulatory Implications and the Demand for Transparency

O’Reilly, Strauss, and Mazzucato argue that regulation should mandate disclosure of the operating metrics used to allocate attention and of the mechanisms through which that attention is monetised. Without such transparency, algorithmic control remains a black box of political-economic power. The demand for metric disclosure is simultaneously an economic and a democratic demand.

5.4. Attention Rents and the Politics of Visibility

The extraction of attention rents is inseparable from the politics of who is seen and who remains invisible. Algorithmic systems do not merely allocate attention neutrally; they reproduce and sometimes intensify existing inequalities of race, gender, and class in the distribution of visibility and credit.

6. The Ethics of Attention Capture, Platform Addiction, and the Ambiguity of Credit

Vikram R. Bhargava and Manuel Velasquez contend that social media platforms are commonly designed in ways that render them addictive. The attention-economy business model strongly incentivises this design. Addiction to social media raises distinctive ethical concerns because it harms users in a manner that is both demeaning and exploitative.

6.1. Addiction as Design Feature rather than Side Effect

Platform features—infinite scroll, variable reward schedules, algorithmic personalisation, and the continuous promise of social recognition—exploit cognitive and affective vulnerabilities to maximise time-on-platform. These design choices are not accidental; they are integral to the extraction of attention and the generation of engagement data.

6.2. The Moral Specificity of Social Media Addiction

Unlike addiction to substances such as alcohol or tobacco, social media addiction operates through the continuous modulation of social recognition, identity performance, and affective states. The harm is therefore simultaneously psychological, social, and political: it diminishes the capacity for sustained attention, critical reflection, and collective deliberation.

6.3. Authorship, Credit, and Racialised Inequality on TikTok

Zari Taylor’s analysis of TikTok reveals how the platform’s affordances—particularly the For You Page algorithm, sound pages, and caption practices—shape authorship and the distribution of credit. Black creators have repeatedly staged strikes to protest the suppression of their content and the lack of recognition for trends they originated. Informal practices of “Dance Credit” or “Idea Credit” emerge as imperfect responses to systemic ambiguity. The algorithmic organisation of attention is thus inseparable from questions of racial justice and cultural appropriation.

6.4. Public Engagement within the Attention Economy

Anna Chitwood’s examination of archaeological social media illustrates the practical challenges faced by those who attempt to use short-form platforms for educational and public-facing purposes. Creators must navigate engagement bait, clickbait dynamics, and the constant pressure to retain attention while trying to convey substantive knowledge. The tension between educational intentionality and algorithmic demand recapitulates, in microcosm, the larger conflict between critical montage and continuous stimulation.

7. The Politics of Digital Attention: Continuities, Ruptures, and Critical Stakes

The final analytical section synthesises the preceding arguments and situates them within a broader political critique. Eisenstein’s montage was explicitly oriented toward the production of revolutionary consciousness and the forging of collective perception. Algorithmic montage is oriented toward the continuous capture and monetisation of attention, the clustering of publics, and the extraction of rents. The formal continuity of collision and juxtaposition masks a profound political rupture.

7.1. Depoliticisation of Formal Power

The techniques that once served ideological construction now serve engagement optimisation. Collision produces affective intensity, memetic recognition, or momentary amusement rather than dialectical insight. The spectator is addressed as a source of data and attention rather than as a political subject capable of critical synthesis. Formal power persists; political intentionality is largely evacuated.

7.2. Fragmentation versus Collectivity

Where Eisenstein sought to forge collective identification through montage, algorithmic systems produce clustered publics whose commonalities are statistical rather than solidaristic. The possibility of a shared critical public sphere is undermined by the very mechanisms that organise attention with unprecedented efficiency. Collectivity is simulated as interest clustering while genuine collective agency is constrained.

7.3. Authorship, Credit, and the Politics of Visibility

The ambiguity of credit on TikTok, the racialised dynamics of trend appropriation, and the unequal distribution of visibility demonstrate that the politics of digital attention are inseparable from questions of authorship and cultural power. Montage is no longer solely a formal technique; it is also a terrain on which struggles over recognition and attribution are waged.

7.4. Critical Recovery of Montage Principles

A critical response to the attention economy may involve the deliberate recovery of montage as an intentional, reflective, and potentially oppositional practice. Creators and audiences who reclaim the dialectical potential of juxtaposition—using rapid sequencing to generate critique, historical consciousness, or alternative forms of collectivity rather than mere stimulation can contest the dominant logics of algorithmic capture. Such practices remain marginal and precarious, yet they constitute an important site of formal and political resistance.

7.5. Broader Cultural and Ideological Stakes

The politics of digital attention ultimately concerns the organisation of perception itself. Platforms that control the sequencing of experience exercise power over the conditions under which meaning is produced, publics are assembled, and agency is exercised. Recovering the theoretical resources of Eisensteinian montage—its emphasis on collision, synthesis, metaphor, and the relation between collective and individual—provides one indispensable means of analysing and contesting that power.

Conclusion

This assignment has traced the trajectory from Eisenstein’s theory of montage as dialectical collision and metaphorical production to the algorithmic sequencing of attention on contemporary short-video platforms. The seven analytical sections have demonstrated both formal continuities and decisive political, economic, and ethical ruptures. Metric, rhythmic, and intellectual principles reappear in short-form video, yet they are subordinated to the imperatives of engagement, data extraction, and rent generation. Networked publics give way to interest clusters; influencer charisma yields to modular data attraction; the ethics of addiction become inseparable from the political problem of captured attention; and struggles over credit and visibility reveal the racialised and gendered dimensions of algorithmic power.

The research question is answered by recognising that algorithmic feeds operationalise a depoliticised intensification of montage. The hypothesis is confirmed: the revolutionary technique of ideological construction has been converted into an instrument of continuous attention capture, the fragmentation of publics into interest clusters, and the uneven distribution of visibility and authorship. The broader critical significance of this argument lies in its insistence that formal analysis of media remains indispensable to political critique. Without understanding how discrete units of experience are collided, sequenced, measured, and monetised, it is impossible to grasp the contemporary organisation of attention and its consequences for collective life, democratic agency, and cultural justice. Recovering the dialectical, metaphorical, and collective potential of montage offers one pathway toward a more critical and resistant engagement with the attention economy.

Works Cited

• Baron, Cynthia. “Acting Choices/Filmic Choices: Rethinking Montage and Performance.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 59, no. 2, 2007, pp. 32–40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20688557.
• Bhargava, Vikram R., and Manuel Velasquez. “Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction.” Business Ethics Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 3, 2021, pp. 321–359. Cambridge Core, doi:10.1017/beq.2020.32. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-ethics-quarterly/article/ethics-of-the-attention-economy-the-problem-of-social-media-addiction/1CC67609A12E9A912BB8A291FDFFE799.
• Chitwood, Anna. “The Public, the Attention Economy, and Archaeological Social Media.” Advances in Archaeological Practice, vol. 13, 2025, pp. 643–651. Cambridge Core, doi:10.1017/aap.2025.10133. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/advances-in-archaeological-practice/article/public-the-attention-economy-and-archaeological-social-media/BE5E69DFE276BD44BD4E0492379B02DE.
• Elmer, Greg. “Prospecting Facebook: The Limits of the Economy of Attention.” Media, Culture & Society, vol. 41, no. 3, 2019, pp. 332–346. SAGE, doi:10.1177/0163443718813467. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0163443718813467.
• Gerbaudo, Paolo. “TikTok and the Algorithmic Transformation of Social Media Publics: From Social Networks to Social Interest Clusters.” New Media & Society, 2024. SAGE, doi:10.1177/14614448241304106. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448241304106.
• Kuiper, John B. “Cinematic Expression: A Look at Eisenstein’s Silent Montage.” Art Journal, vol. 22, no. 1, 1962, pp. 34–39. Taylor & Francis, doi:10.1080/00043249.1962.10794359. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043249.1962.10794359.
• Odin, Steve. “The Influence of Traditional Japanese Aesthetics on the Films of Sergei Eisenstein.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 23, no. 2, 1989, pp. 69–81. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3332942.
• O’Reilly, Tim, Ilan Strauss, and Mariana Mazzucato. “Algorithmic Attention Rents: A Theory of Digital Platform Market Power.” Data & Policy, vol. 6, 2024, e6. Cambridge Core, doi:10.1017/dap.2024.1. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/data-and-policy/article/algorithmic-attention-rents-a-theory-of-digital-platform-market-power/ [open access via UCL Discovery: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10188892/].
• Parra, Ricardo. “The Collective and the Individual in Sergei Eisenstein.” Slavonica, vol. 30, no. 1, 2025, pp. 32–47. Taylor & Francis, doi:10.1080/13617427.2025.2560066. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13617427.2025.2560066.
• Siegler, Robert. “Masquage: An Extrapolation of Eisenstein’s Theory of Montage-as-Conflict to the Multi-Image Film.” Film Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 3, Spring 1968, pp. 15–21. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1210990. https://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article/21/3/15/38226/Masquage-An-Extrapolation-of-Eisenstein-s-Theory.
• Taylor, Zari. “Algorithms, Affordances and the Ambiguity of Credit on TikTok.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2026, pp. 280–293. Taylor & Francis, doi:10.1080/10304312.2025.2518971. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10304312.2025.2518971.
• Zhang, Zhen [Meng Liang]. “The End of Social Media? How Data Attraction Model in the Algorithmic Media Reshapes the Attention Economy.” Media, Culture & Society, vol. 44, no. 6, 2022, pp. 1110–1131. SAGE, doi:10.1177/01634437221077168. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01634437221077168.

Paper 205A: Who Gets to Define Great Literature? Literary Prizes, University Syllabi, Publishing Capital, and the Politics of the Canon

 

Paper 205A: Who Gets to Define Great Literature?

Literary Prizes, University Syllabi, Publishing Capital, and the Politics of the Canon
Assignment of Paper 205A: Cultural Studies

Academic Details

• Name: Nidhi R. Pandya
• Roll No.: 20
• Enrollment No.: 5108250024
• Sem.: 3
• Batch: 2025 - 2027
• E-mail: nidhipandya206@gmail.com

Assignment Details

• Paper Name: Cultural Studies
• Paper No.: Paper 205A
• Paper Code: 22410
• Topic: Who Gets to Define Great Literature? Literary Prizes, University Syllabi, Publishing Capital, and the Politics of the Canon
• Submitted To: Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
• Submitted Date: October 19th 2026

Document Statistics (via QuillBot)

• Words: 3512
• Characters: 28420
• Characters without spaces: 24855
• Paragraphs: 123
• Sentences: 314
• Reading time: 14 m 3 s

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Keywords
• Research Question
• Hypothesis
• Introduction
• 1. Literary Prizes and the Paradox of Prestige and Commerce
  • 1.1. The Booker Prize as a Mechanism of Symbolic and Commercial Conversion
  • 1.2. Historical Institutionalisation and Questions of Literary Durability
  • 1.3. Digital Amplification and the Hybridisation of Prize Culture
  • 1.4. Structural Constraints on the Field of Possible Winners
• 2. University Syllabi as Sites of Institutional Canon Formation
  • 2.1. Continuities with Earlier Canon Debates
  • 2.2. Negotiating Institutional Recognition in Black and Asian British Poetry
  • 2.3. Cultural Capital and Pedagogical Transmission
  • 2.4. Temporal Lag between Popular Visibility and Curricular Inclusion
• 3. Publishing Capital, Gatekeeping, and Market Logics
  • 3.1. Selection Mechanisms under Platform Capitalism
  • 3.2. Platformisation of Authorship and Discovery
  • 3.3. Postcolonial Circulation and Metropolitan Recoding
  • 3.4. Publishing as the Primary Filter of Literary Possibility
• 4. Race, Empire, and the Politics of Literary Recognition
  • 4.1. Asserting Centrality within Constrained Institutional Frameworks
  • 4.2. The Booker Prize and Residual Colonial Authority
  • 4.3. Historical Precedents of Gendered and Classed Gatekeeping
  • 4.4. Visibility without Redistribution of Definitional Power
• 5. BookTok and the Rise of Algorithmic and Peer Tastemakers
  • 5.1. Stratified Visibility on BookTok
  • 5.2. Readers as Co-Producers within Algorithmic Systems
  • 5.3. Community, Peer Pedagogy, and Commercial Capture
  • 5.4. Affective Reading and Longer Histories of Reader Authority
• 6. Cultural Capital, Diversification, and the Limits of Inclusion
  • 6.1. Conversion of Marginalised Works into Academic Currency
  • 6.2. Managed Diversity and the Persistence of Systemic Exclusion
  • 6.3. Alternative Valorization and Its Vulnerabilities
  • 6.4. The Paradox of Proliferating Diversity Discourse
• 7. From Prescriptive Lists to Descriptive Technologies: Digital Humanities and the Measurable Canon
  • 7.1. The Canon as Descriptive Technology
  • 7.2. Empirical Assemblages of Awards, Criticism, and Platforms
  • 7.3. Transparency, Contestation, and New Forms of Mediation
  • 7.4. Extension Rather than Transcendence of Institutional Politics
• Works Cited

Abstract

This assignment examines the contested institutional, commercial, pedagogical, and technological processes that determine literary value. It argues that “great literature” is not an intrinsic aesthetic category but the product of intersecting forces: literary prizes (especially the Booker), university syllabi, publishing capital, racialised and gendered hierarchies, and digital platforms such as BookTok. Drawing on the supplied scholarship, the analysis demonstrates that definitional authority has historically been concentrated among metropolitan publishers, prize juries, and academic institutions, and is now increasingly shared with algorithmic systems and peer-driven online communities. These mechanisms generate prestige and commercial value while frequently reproducing asymmetries of race, gender, class, and geography, even as they create limited openings for disruption. Through seven major analytical sections the assignment maps the politics of canon formation and concludes that contemporary struggles over literary authority reveal both the persistence of gatekeeping and the emergence of alternative circuits of valuation.

Keywords

literary prizes; Booker Prize; canon formation; publishing capital; university syllabi; BookTok; cultural capital; digital humanities; postcolonial publishing; literary prestige; algorithmic tastemaking

Research Question

How do literary prizes, university syllabi, publishing capital, and digital platforms such as BookTok jointly determine who gets to define “great literature,” and what political, racial, commercial, and technological interests shape these definitional processes?

Hypothesis

Literary value is neither purely aesthetic nor democratically determined. It is actively produced through institutional mechanisms (prizes and syllabi), commercial infrastructures (publishing capital), and emerging digital practices. These mechanisms often reinforce metropolitan, racialised, and gendered hierarchies even while generating new forms of visibility and occasional challenge, particularly through platforms such as BookTok and computational approaches to the canon.

Introduction

The authority to designate certain texts as “great literature” has never been a neutral aesthetic exercise. From F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition to the canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s, and from the rise of major literary prizes to the contemporary influence of algorithmic recommendation systems, definitional power has been exercised through institutions that convert symbolic prestige into economic capital and market success into claims of enduring worth. This assignment investigates four interlocking sites of that authority—literary prizes (with particular attention to the Booker), university syllabi, publishing capital, and digital platforms, especially BookTok—and examines the political, racial, commercial, and technological interests that shape them.

The analysis draws primarily on the scholarly materials supplied for this assignment: Molly Ferguson’s examination of the Booker as a paradox of art and commerce; Omaar Hena’s study of canons, publishing, and publics in British Black and Asian poetry; Corinna Norrick-Rühl’s investigation of whether books remain “different” under contemporary publishing conditions; Alysia De Melo and related BookTok scholarship on diversity, algorithms, and peer pedagogy; Mark Algee-Hewitt’s account of the digital transformation of the canon; and complementary work on cultural capital, Victorian canonicity, and postcolonial circulation. These sources collectively demonstrate that literary value is produced rather than merely recognised. The seven major analytical sections that follow develop distinct but interrelated dimensions of this production, moving from traditional institutional mechanisms to digital and computational reconfigurations of authority. The central argument is that struggles over the canon are struggles over the allocation of symbolic and material resources, and that any critical account of “great literature” must therefore remain attentive to the infrastructures that enable and constrain literary recognition.

1. Literary Prizes and the Paradox of Prestige and Commerce

Literary prizes occupy a structurally paradoxical position: they claim to identify aesthetic excellence while simultaneously functioning as powerful instruments of market promotion, brand consolidation, and media spectacle. This dual character is especially visible in the Booker Prize, where symbolic recognition and commercial calculation continually reinforce one another.

1.1. The Booker Prize as a Mechanism of Symbolic and Commercial Conversion

Molly Ferguson’s analysis frames the Booker as a modern paradox of art and commerce in which prestige, residual colonial structures, publishing power, media spectacle, and commercial sales converge. The “Booker effect” converts jury judgement into measurable sales uplift and long-term visibility, demonstrating that prize recognition redistributes both symbolic and economic capital within an already stratified field. This conversion process reveals that literary value is not merely discovered by the prize but actively manufactured through its institutional and media apparatus. Consequently, the prize functions less as an independent arbiter than as a central node in the contemporary literary economy.

1.2. Historical Institutionalisation and Questions of Literary Durability

Nicholas Hewitt’s examination of literary prizes situates this commercialisation within a longer European tradition. Prizes function as institutionalised events whose capacity to guarantee lasting literary quality or durability remains open to serious question; many winning works fade once the promotional cycle ends. The ritualised nature of prize culture—complete with sponsorship, media coverage, and annual spectacle—tends to privilege works that can be readily framed within existing promotional narratives. As a result, the long-term critical survival of prize-winning titles often depends less on intrinsic aesthetic power than on sustained institutional and pedagogical reinforcement.

1.3. Digital Amplification and the Hybridisation of Prize Culture

The entanglement of prizes with social-media ecosystems, particularly BookTok influencers and algorithmic recommendation, intensifies commercial dynamics. Platform visibility can extend, accelerate, or partially substitute for traditional prize publicity, creating feedback loops in which institutional recognition and digital hype mutually reinforce one another. In this hybrid environment, the boundaries between critical judgement, marketing campaign, and viral trend become increasingly porous. The prize’s authority is therefore no longer confined to the jury room but is continually renegotiated across digital platforms.

1.4. Structural Constraints on the Field of Possible Winners

Because prize success is heavily mediated by publishing resources, marketing budgets, and media access, the pool of viable candidates is already constrained before any jury convenes. Prizes therefore both reflect and actively reproduce existing hierarchies of race, geography, and capital. Even when juries seek to diversify their selections, the upstream filtering performed by major publishers continues to shape the shortlist in decisive ways. The politics of the prize thus begin long before the judges meet.

2. University Syllabi as Sites of Institutional Canon Formation

University syllabi operate as slower but highly durable mechanisms for the institutionalisation of literary value, shaping the literary education of successive generations and thereby influencing critical taste and research agendas over decades.

2.1. Continuities with Earlier Canon Debates

The concise treatment of the “Canon” in Victorian Literature and Culture links contemporary curricular decisions to the legacy of F. R. Leavis’s “Great Tradition,” the canon wars, digitisation, and ongoing tensions between popularity and prestige. Syllabi do not merely reflect an existing canon; they actively reproduce and occasionally revise it. The relative stability of reading lists means that changes in critical fashion often take years to appear in the classroom. This temporal lag gives syllabi a conservative force even when individual instructors seek innovation.

2.2. Negotiating Institutional Recognition in Black and Asian British Poetry

Omaar Hena’s chapter “Canons, Publishing, and Publics” shows how poets such as Bernardine Evaristo, Lemn Sissay, and Daljit Nagra develop aesthetic strategies that assert the centrality of Black British culture while remaining alert to the constraints of managed diversity and the unequal domain of publishing. Their work simultaneously claims space within British literary history and exposes the limits of institutional inclusion. By excavating forgotten histories and counter-memories, these poets transform the very terms on which canonicity is negotiated. Institutional recognition, however, still frequently arrives on conditions set by existing cultural hierarchies.

2.3. Cultural Capital and Pedagogical Transmission

Helen Siourbas’s application of John Guillory’s theory of cultural capital to L. M. Montgomery illustrates that university-mediated value converts texts into academic currency. Canonisation is less a discovery of intrinsic merit than a redistribution of cultural capital through pedagogical institutions. Once a text enters the syllabus, it acquires a form of durability that sales figures or temporary prize success cannot guarantee. The classroom therefore remains one of the most powerful long-term instruments of literary valuation.

2.4. Temporal Lag between Popular Visibility and Curricular Inclusion

Syllabi frequently lag behind both prize culture and digital popularisation. Texts that achieve rapid visibility on platforms such as BookTok may take years, if ever, to appear on university reading lists, revealing hierarchical gaps between different regimes of valuation. This lag underscores the distinct temporalities of market-driven and institutionally driven forms of prestige. Bridging the gap requires not only individual pedagogical choices but structural changes in departmental and disciplinary priorities.

3. Publishing Capital, Gatekeeping, and Market Logics

The material conditions of publishing exert decisive prior influence over which texts enter circuits of prestige, prize consideration, or curricular inclusion.

3.1. Selection Mechanisms under Platform Capitalism

Corinna Norrick-Rühl’s Are Books Still ‘Different’? analyses contemporary selection practices, diversity initiatives, prize culture, digital self-publishing, and platform capitalism. Traditional trade publishing continues to function as a gatekeeping system shaped by editorial taste, marketing budgets, and commercial risk calculation. Even as digital platforms lower certain barriers to entry, the major houses retain disproportionate power over which books receive professional editing, design, and large-scale marketing. The claim that books occupy a special cultural status is increasingly tested by the same commercial logics that govern other media industries.

3.2. Platformisation of Authorship and Discovery

Tully Barnett’s discussion of the literary marketplace in the digital age highlights how e-books, self-publishing, and algorithmic recommendation alter pathways to readers without abolishing the concentration of capital and attention. Major publishers retain structural advantages in production, distribution, and marketing. Self-published authors may achieve sudden visibility through platforms, yet sustained careers still frequently depend on eventual incorporation into traditional publishing infrastructures. The digital marketplace therefore expands access while simultaneously creating new forms of dependency.

3.3. Postcolonial Circulation and Metropolitan Recoding

Chatarina Edfeldt’s study of Paulina Chiziane demonstrates how translation, metropolitan publishers, prizes, paratexts, and digital media jointly determine the global visibility of African women’s writing. Vernacular poetics are frequently recoded to meet Anglophone and European market expectations. This recoding process often involves the strategic framing of texts through familiar postcolonial or feminist lenses that facilitate metropolitan reception. The politics of translation and packaging thus become inseparable from the politics of literary value itself.

3.4. Publishing as the Primary Filter of Literary Possibility

The cumulative effect of these gatekeeping practices is that the pool of texts available for subsequent forms of recognition is already heavily filtered. Publishing decisions constitute a primary, often invisible, stage in the politics of the canon. Without attention to this upstream stage, analyses of prizes and syllabi risk mistaking secondary effects for primary causes. Any comprehensive account of who defines great literature must therefore begin with the material conditions of textual production and circulation.

4. Race, Empire, and the Politics of Literary Recognition

The definition of great literature has historically been entangled with imperial and racial hierarchies that continue to structure contemporary systems of valuation.

4.1. Asserting Centrality within Constrained Institutional Frameworks

Omaar Hena shows that Black and Asian British poets negotiate institutional recognition while remaining conscious of systemic inequalities in publishing and cultural institutions. Progressive aesthetic strategies excavate counter-memories yet still operate inside frameworks of managed diversity. These poets refuse the role of permanent outsiders while simultaneously exposing the limits of inclusion on existing terms. Their work therefore constitutes both a claim to canonicity and a critique of the institutions that confer it.

4.2. The Booker Prize and Residual Colonial Authority

Molly Ferguson situates the Booker within longer histories of colonial literary authority and post-imperial cultural capital. The prize’s expansion to writers from the former Commonwealth has been both democratising and continuous with older patterns of metropolitan validation. Prestige continues to flow, in significant measure, through London-centred institutions and Anglophone publishing networks. The globalisation of the shortlist has not fully displaced the residual geography of literary power.

4.3. Historical Precedents of Gendered and Classed Gatekeeping

Alison Chapman’s account of Victorian women’s writing reveals how reviews, anthologies, biographies, prizes, gender norms, and the book market produced or withheld canonicity—patterns that provide a useful analogue for understanding contemporary racialised exclusions. The historical record demonstrates that literary value has long been distributed according to social as well as aesthetic criteria. Recognising these continuities helps prevent the romanticisation of present-day diversification efforts.

4.4. Visibility without Redistribution of Definitional Power

Diversification initiatives frequently grant visibility without a corresponding redistribution of the authority to define literary value. Inclusion can occur on terms that preserve the structural dominance of existing gatekeepers. Genuine transformation would require not only the addition of new names to shortlists and syllabi but a reconfiguration of the institutions that decide what counts as literary excellence in the first place.

5. BookTok and the Rise of Algorithmic and Peer Tastemakers

Digital platforms have introduced alternative circuits of literary authority that both challenge and reproduce traditional gatekeeping.

5.1. Stratified Visibility on BookTok

Alysia De Melo’s analysis finds greater gender equity among popular authors than in traditional publishing, yet persistent underrepresentation of authors of colour and LGBTQ+ writers. Most highly visible women creators and authors remain white. The platform’s apparent democratisation of taste is therefore partial and uneven. Algorithmic amplification tends to reward content that already aligns with dominant demographic patterns of the user base.

5.2. Readers as Co-Producers within Algorithmic Systems

Bronwen Low, Christian Ehret, and Anita Hagh argue that BookTok users participate in algorithmically mediated cultural production rather than passively receiving recommendations. Readers become co-producers of value, yet algorithmic amplification can reinforce racialised hierarchies. The interface itself shapes what becomes visible and what remains marginal. Critical digital literacy is therefore essential if peer recommendation is to challenge rather than merely reproduce existing inequalities.

5.3. Community, Peer Pedagogy, and Commercial Capture

Jessica Maddox and Fiona Gill, Michael Dezuanni and Amy Schoonens, and Gitte Balling and Marianne Martens collectively show how BookTok’s recommendation culture, peer pedagogies, and marketing power disrupt traditional publishing timelines, revive backlist titles, and simultaneously generate new forms of community and exclusion. Publishers increasingly treat the platform as a marketing channel, capturing the energy of peer recommendation for commercial ends. The boundary between authentic reader community and industry instrument is continually contested.

5.4. Affective Reading and Longer Histories of Reader Authority

Dorothee Birke situates BookTok’s public performance of emotional response within longer histories of sensibility and readerly display that have often contested institutional gatekeeping. The platform therefore participates in an extended struggle over who is authorised to define literary experience. By privileging affective intensity and communal sharing, BookTok challenges the cooler, more formal modes of evaluation traditionally associated with academic and prize culture.

6. Cultural Capital, Diversification, and the Limits of Inclusion

Diversification initiatives within prizes, syllabi, and publishing frequently operate through the logic of cultural capital rather than structural transformation.

6.1. Conversion of Marginalised Works into Academic Currency

Helen Siourbas’s application of Guillory demonstrates that curricular or prize inclusion converts previously marginalised works into forms of cultural capital that can be transmitted within institutions, often without altering the underlying hierarchical structure. Once converted, these works can circulate as markers of progressive taste. The conversion process itself, however, remains controlled by the very institutions that previously excluded them.

6.2. Managed Diversity and the Persistence of Systemic Exclusion

Omaar Hena’s poets recognise that institutional diversity agendas can coexist with continued systemic exclusion in publishing and critical discourse. Visibility does not automatically equal transformative power. Managed diversity can function as a strategy of containment that expands the surface of inclusion while leaving deeper structures of authority intact. Critical attention must therefore distinguish between representation and redistribution.

6.3. Alternative Valorization and Its Vulnerabilities

Norrick-Rühl and the BookTok scholarship together indicate that self-publishing, platform virality, and peer recommendation offer partial exits from traditional gatekeeping, yet these alternatives remain vulnerable to commercial appropriation and algorithmic bias. What begins as an autonomous space of reader authority can be rapidly reabsorbed into marketing strategies. The durability of alternative circuits of value remains an open question.

6.4. The Paradox of Proliferating Diversity Discourse

The language of diversity proliferates while the concentration of definitional and economic power remains relatively stable. Genuine democratisation would require redistribution of the means of production, circulation, and critical evaluation. Without such redistribution, diversification risks becoming a permanent horizon rather than an achieved condition.

7. From Prescriptive Lists to Descriptive Technologies: Digital Humanities and the Measurable Canon

Computational approaches reconfigure the canon from a primarily prescriptive list into a descriptive and measurable phenomenon.

7.1. The Canon as Descriptive Technology

Mark Algee-Hewitt argues that digital archives and cultural analytics have transformed the canon into a descriptive technology. Computational methods map patterns of circulation, citation, and formal properties that traditional criticism often left implicit. This shift does not abolish questions of value; it relocates them onto empirical terrain. The canon becomes something that can be measured, compared, and contested with new forms of evidence.

7.2. Empirical Assemblages of Awards, Criticism, and Platforms

Miłosz Stelmach’s treatment of film canons as measurable outcomes of awards, criticism, festivals, streaming, and fan practices offers a transferable methodological model. Literary canons can similarly be analysed through prize data, syllabus corpora, sales figures, and platform metrics. Such approaches reveal the canon as an assemblage of institutional, commercial, and popular practices rather than a pure aesthetic hierarchy. The empirical turn therefore demystifies without necessarily democratising literary authority.

7.3. Transparency, Contestation, and New Forms of Mediation

Quantification relocates the evidence base on which political claims about the canon are made and potentially democratises access to that evidence. At the same time, the construction of corpora and choice of metrics remain value-laden activities. Digital methods introduce new layers of mediation even as they promise greater transparency. Critical digital literacy remains essential.

7.4. Extension Rather than Transcendence of Institutional Politics

Digital methods both challenge and extend the apparatus of literary valuation. They convert the canon into an object of empirical as well as critical inquiry without abolishing its political character. The question of who gets to define great literature is not resolved by quantification; it is restated in a new technical and institutional register. Future scholarship must therefore combine computational mapping with continued attention to the material and ideological conditions of literary power.

Works Cited

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• Balling, Gitte, and Marianne Martens. “BookTok Helped Us Sell It: How TikTok Disrupts Publishing and Fuels the #Romantasy Boom.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241301271.
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