About

Whitney Arnold is an Assistant Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA. She holds a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and both her M.A. and Ph.D. from UCLA. Her research and publications focus on self-narratives and autobiographical texts, narratives of health and illness, theories of self-representation, and literary history. Her current project explores embodiment and authorial narration in autobiographical texts written in English and French across centuries and continents. She is also the chair of the Medical and Health Humanities Theme in the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and has a joint appointment in the Department of Medicine.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Social Science
• History
• Literature
• Art
• Computer Science
• Geography
• Art history
• Library science
• Medicine
• Psychoanalysis
• Psychology

Selected publications

• The Secret Subject: Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, and the Interview as Genre

  De Gruyter eBooks · 2024 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science

  In a 1983 interview with Charles Ruas, Michel Foucault reflects on his 1963 Raymond Roussel (translated Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel), characterizing the text as both personal and outside the sequence of the rest of his works. While Death and the Labyrinth explores Roussel's Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres (How I Wrote Certain of My Books), in which Roussel describes his methods for writing various of his texts, Foucault's interview about Death and the Labyrinth participates in a similar gesture, as Foucault describes his own relationship to Death and the Labyrinth through the interview. This essay analyzes Foucault's interview with Ruas while examining Foucault's many interviews as a particular body of work. Highlighting complexities of the interview form, the essay argues that Foucault's interview about Death and the Labyrinth mirrors the same tensions and nonrevealing revelations that he explores in Death and the Labyrinth, with Foucault ultimately pointing to his own subjectivity and aesthetic transformation as a key to the text.*

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Narrating the Self: 200 Years of Autobiographical Texts

  a/b Auto/Biography Studies · 2024-01-02 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Scholarly consensus as to defining the genre of autobiography has largely coalesced around the determination that there can be no fixed and overarching definition of genre. In this study, we turn to the autobiographical texts themselves in order to discern large-scale conventions and commonplaces of writing about the self. Employing the machine learning technique of statistical topic modeling, this study analyzes over 83,000 pages of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century autobiographical texts written in English. In doing so, it reveals common autobiographical conventions, subjects, and discourses, while shedding light on current scholarly understandings of autobiography.

  PublisherDOI

• A Century of Literary Criticism: A Large-Scale Analysis of the <i>Monthly Review</i>

  European Romantic Review · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • History
  • Literature

  For almost 100 years, the Monthly Review documented literary history in Britain through its efforts to review every published text. Appearing monthly from 1749 to 1844, the periodical sheds light not only on texts published during this time, many of which are now “lost” to scholarly analysis, but also on the original critical discourse surrounding these texts. Analysis of the Monthly Review presents an opportunity to discern influential trends in publishing and literary criticism, yet close examination of the periodical proves formidable due to its size. In this paper, we use statistical topic modeling to “read” the over 140,000 pages of the Monthly Review, revealing prominent themes and discourses in the corpus. In particular, we highlight the periodical’s presentation of genre differences and its privileging of specific discourses and frameworks of critical evaluation, all of which served to shape contemporary readers’ perceptions of the rapidly expanding literary sphere.

  PublisherDOI

• Medicine in the<i>Monthly Review</i>: Revealing public medical discourse with topic modelling

  Digital Scholarship in the Humanities · 2021 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Social Science
  • Sociology
  • History

  Abstract Historians of science and medicine have long argued for the need to recover non-specialist views of medicine and health, as research has often concentrated on practitioner accounts. In this paper, we examine medical discourse in the British periodical the Monthly Review. Published monthly from 1749 to 1844, the Monthly was greatly influential in its time. However, it has received limited scholarly attention, due in part to the unwieldy size of its corpus, which spans 96 years and 246 volumes, each composed of three–six monthly issues. We employ statistical topic modelling to analyse the Monthly, revealing the presentation and prevalence of various public medical discourses, as well as how these discourses varied over the course of the periodical’s almost 100 years. As the Monthly aimed to review every published text, it provides records of and contemporary discussions about thousands of texts currently lost from archives. This analysis of the Monthly ultimately sheds light on the medical topics and texts that featured prominently in British public discourse during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

  PublisherDOI

• Coleridge and the Strategy of Genius

  European Romantic Review · 2018-11-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  While Coleridge’s 1817 Biographia Literaria has gained a reputation as a perplexing mix of disparate elements, this essay argues that analysis of Coleridge’s construction of genius in the text uncovers a consistent and pervasive concern with the early-nineteenth-century literary market. After bringing to light the ideological underpinnings of genius in the Biographia Literaria, the essay examines the function of genius, or the work that genius performs in the text. By pinpointing slippages in Coleridge’s depiction of a purportedly transcendent genius, the essay reveals the inescapable other present in this depiction: the reading public. Genius, for Coleridge, is not only an ideological construction privileging his preferred readings of author and text, but also a concerted response to the reading public and his position as an author in the expanding literary market. Close examination of the Biographia Literaria thus reveals Coleridge’s “practice” of genius in the unprecedented era of Romantic literary celebrity.

  PublisherDOI

• Rousseau and Reformulating Celebrity

  ˜The œEighteenth century/˜The œeighteenth century (Lubbock, Tex. Online) · 2014-03-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay examines Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s changing efforts to grapple with his unprecedented celebrity through each of his major autobiographical texts (the Confessions, the Dialogues, and the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire). It argues that Rousseau advocates a new, if ultimately untenable, model of celebrity that emphasizes the authenticity of the author’s embodied person. With this new model, Rousseau suggests that his person must be read along with his texts. Highlighting the author’s fraught attempts to manage his celebrity through his autobiographical texts, the essay explores the inherent slippages between Rousseau’s embodied person, textual representation, and celebrity persona.

  PublisherDOI

• Mary Robinson’s <i>Memoirs</i> and the Terrors of Literary Obscurity

  Women s Studies · 2014-08-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Mary Robinson’s return to authorship was widely anticipated. After having gained immense celebrity as a popular actress and the first mistress of the Prince of Wales (the future George IV), she acq...

  PublisherDOI

• The Secret Subject: Michel Foucault, &lt;i&gt;Death and the Labyrinth,&lt;/i&gt; and the Interview as Genre

  Criticism · 2012-01-01 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Secret Subject: Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, and the Interview as Genre Whitney Arnold (bio) My relationship to my book on Roussel, and to Roussel’s work, is something very personal. . . . I would go so far as to say that it doesn’t have a place in the sequence of my books. —Michel Foucault, “An Interview with Michel Foucault”1 In this 1983 interview with Charles Ruas, Michel Foucault reflects on his 1963 work Raymond Roussel (translated into English as Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel).2 While Foucault often uses his interviews to paint trajectories of his thought—even characterizing his interviews as “scaffolding” holding together and plotting a course between his works—in this particular interview he insists on the differences between Death and the Labyrinth and the rest of his oeuvre. In Death and the Labyrinth—a text that has received a marked lack of critical attention—Foucault examines Roussel’s Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (How I Wrote Certain of My Books),3 in which Roussel describes the methods he employed for structuring certain of his works.4 Foucault’s efforts to clarify Death and the Labyrinth through his interview about the text parallel Roussel’s problematic efforts to explain his texts with How I Wrote Certain of My Books. Much as Roussel veils while unveiling in his explanatory text, revealing the presence of an undisclosed “secret,” Foucault clarifies Death and the Labyrinth in the interview by pointing to what he does not reveal. He presents Death and the Labyrinth as a personal text intricately connected to his private thoughts, desires, and experiences, yet he declines to elaborate on these connections. This essay analyzes Foucault’s interview about Death and the Labyrinth while examining his many interviews themselves as a particular body of [End Page 567] work. It explores the processes and practices of the Foucauldian interview while interrogating its disclosures. In the later interviews Foucault responds to questions concerning a turn to the subject—an issue of continued critical debate—by insisting that he has always been interested in the subject.5 He recasts earlier works in terms of current preoccupations, painting Death and the Labyrinth in light of his later work on aesthetics.6 Throughout the interviews he suggests that his texts are intricately tied to his subjectivity, yet in the Death and the Labyrinth interview, in particular, he portrays his early text as a concerted, unique work of aesthetic self-fashioning. Much as Foucault analyzes Roussel’s laborious efforts to create beauty in Death and the Labyrinth, in the interview about Death and the Labyrinth he claims that his early text incorporates and reveals his own efforts to create a beautiful life. While he puts forth a history of aesthetic practices in many of his later texts, in the Death and the Labyrinth interview he points to a personal practice of aestheticism. Mirroring the same tensions and nonrevealing revelations that he examines in Death and the Labyrinth, Foucault portrays his own subjectivity and aesthetic transformation as the veiled core and foundation of the early work. The Foucauldian Interview Although Foucault’s interviews often appear in scholarly analyses, little work has been done on the Foucauldian interview itself.7 However, critics, as well as Foucault, assert the significance of the interview in Foucault’s body of work. Paul A. Bové observes that “many of Foucault’s most telling statements” appear in his interviews, and Gilles Deleuze declares, “If Foucault’s interviews form an integral part of his work, it is because they extend the historical problematization of each of his books into the construction of the present problem.”8 The interviews work to tie together his earlier and current texts. Foucault himself states of his interviews, “[They] tend to be reflections on a finished book that may help me to define another possible project. They are something like a scaffolding that serves as a link between a work that is coming to an end and another one that’s about to begin.”9 The interviews speak to prominent critical debates about Foucault’s thought: while scholars have disputed the methodological soundness of using a biographical lens...

  PublisherDOI

• Robotic Arms. A Contribution to the Curriculum. An Occasional Paper.

  OpenGrey (Institut de l'Information Scientifique et Technique) · 1984-07-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Corey Arnold

  2 shared

• Cathryn Carpenter

  Illinois Tool Works (Australia)

  1 shared

• Nick Schwieterman

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Benjamin Niedzielski

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• CLGSA Fellowship and Graduate Support