LITERARY STUDIES IN THE DIGITAL FUTURE
Chapter 1. Literary Studies in the Digital Age 1 Morize, Problems and Methods, 3
2 In addition to the book historical approaches that I will discuss in detail in this chapter – and which, I think, are becoming increasingly familiar to literary scholars – quantitative approaches to literature include relatively new research in Literary Darwinism, as well as established research paradigms in computational stylistics and the social sciences. For quantitative studies in Literary Darwinism see: Carroll, Reading Human Nature; Gotteschall, Literature, Science; Gottschall, ‘Quantitative Literary Study’; Kruger, Fisher and Jobling, ‘Proper Hero’; Salmon, ‘Crossing the Abyss’. Studies in computational stylistics use large amounts of
data, mainly to explore authorial attribution: see, for example, Craig and Kinney, Shakespeare, Computers; Hoover, ‘Statistical Stylistics’. Quantitative methods are also frequently employed in Empirical Literary Studies, which includes research in psychology and sociology: see Janssen and Dijk, The Empirical Study; Zyngier et al., Directions in Empirical.
3 Joshi, ‘Quantitative Method’, 264.
4 Moretti, ‘Conjectures’; Moretti, Graphs.
5 Just to give some sense of the tenor of the discussion Moretti has generated: Rachel Serlen describes him as ‘arguably the most controversial fi gure working in English and Comparative Literature today’, and claims that he ‘courts controversy’. ‘This is a man’, she notes,
‘whose own jacket copy’ for Graphs, Maps, Trees ‘twice calls his work “heretical”’ (Serlen,
‘The Distant’, 214). Similarly, Jonathan Arac calls Moretti’s method of ‘distant reading’ ‘a deliberately scandalous agenda’ (Arac, ‘Anglo-Globalism?’, 37), while William Deresiewicz goes considerably further, criticising Moretti as ‘a very ambitious man’ driven by a desire ‘to place himself at the center of global novelistic study’ (Deresiewicz, ‘Representative Fictions’).
Almost inevitably, Harold Bloom dismisses Moretti and his methods as an ‘absurdity’ (cited in Serlen, ‘The Distant’, 218). The volume, as well as the tenor, of commentary Moretti’s work motivates is remarkable. For instance, Moretti’s book has been the subject not only of multiple articles and reviews by academics, such as those above, but of newspaper articles in the New York Times and the Guardian, numerous blogs and even an entire edited collection. For these newspaper articles see Sutherland, ‘The Ideas Interview’; Eakin, ‘Studying Literature by the Numbers’. Two of the more thought-provoking of a great many blogs on Moretti’s book are Paul Ford, ‘Tufte vs. Bloom 1’, Ftrain.com, blog, accessed 23 April 2011. http://www.ftrain.
com/TufteVsBloom001.html; and Mike Johnduff, ‘Franco Moretti’, Working Notes: On Literary Criticism, Philosophy, Literary Theory, blog, accessed 15 June 2010. http://mikejohnduff.blogspot.
com/2009/04/franco-moretti-and-close-reading.html. The edited collection discussing Moretti’s book is Goodwin and Holbo, Reading.
6 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, 187.
7 Levine, ‘Why Science’, 175.
8 Moretti, Signs, 15.
9 Moretti, Graphs, 76, 77.
10 Ibid., 3.
11 Krzysztof Pomeian, cited in Moretti, Graphs, 3.
12 Moretti, Graphs, 4.
13 Ibid., 1.
14 Timothy Burke and Matt Greenfi eld also point out and refute the widespread perception that Moretti is alone in using quantitative methods in literary studies (Burke, ‘Book Notes’, 42;
Greenfi eld, ‘Moretti and Other’).
15 Neavill, ‘From Printing History’, 225. Darnton locates the origins of book history in the 1960s (Darnton, ‘What’, 10).
16 Darnton, The Forbidden, xxii.
17 Darnton, cited in Daskalova, ‘Book History’, 3; see also Barker, ‘Intentionality’, 199.
18 Another example of this criticism comes from William St. Clair, who rejects the way literary historians privilege the writing of literature while ignoring how literary works circulated and were read in the past. He identifi es this neglect in both the ‘parade-of-authors’ convention, which imagines literary history as a progression of great names, and the ‘parliament of texts’
model, which presents ‘the printed texts of a particular historical period as debating and negotiating with one another in a kind of open parliament with all the members participating and listening’ (St. Clair, The Reading, 2).
19 For example, Moretti attributes the rise of the novel to a shift in the ‘horizon of novel-reading’
and identifi es reader selections as a key factor in the development of clues in detective fi ction (Moretti, Graphs, 5, 72–76; see also Moretti, ‘The Slaughterhouse’).
20 Finkelstein and McCleery, ‘Introduction’, 1.
21 Darnton, ‘What’, 10–11.
22 For example, Eliot, Some Patterns; Darnton, The Forbidden; St. Clair, The Reading.
23 Examples of such research include Wendy Griswold’s work on Nigerian novels, Priya Joshi’s studies of literature in India and Jonathan Zwicker’s analyses of Japanese literature (Griswold, Bearing Witness; Griswold, ‘Nigeria, 1950–2000’; Griswold, ‘Number Magic’; Joshi, ‘Culture and Consumption’; Joshi, In Another Country; Joshi, ‘Quantitative Method’; Zwicker, ‘Japan, 1850–1900’; Zwicker, Practices; Zwicker, ‘The Long Nineteenth Century’).
24 Moretti, ‘Style, Inc’; Moretti, ‘Network Theory’.
25 There has been debate regarding the connections between Moretti’s work and Literary Darwinism. As Emily Apter writes, ‘Moretti’s rehabilitation of evolutionary theory has been criticised as a throwback to nineteenth-century theories of natural selection (with their eugenicist baggage)’ (Apter, ‘Untranslatables’, 591). Chad Hines distinguishes the two, arguing that Moretti uses evolutionary theory as a metaphor or analogy rather than a theoretical framework (Hines, ‘Evolutionary Landscapes’, 5). While there may be connections – beyond the use of fi ctional data – Moretti’s analyses are signifi cantly more sophisticated and less didactic than any I have come across in Literary Darwinism (for a thorough critique of this paradigm see Kramnick, ‘Against Literary Darwinism’).
26 See, for example, Milkman, Carmona and Gleason, ‘A Statistical Analysis’; Milic and Slane,
‘Quantitative Aspects of Genre’.
27 It is interesting that feminist criticism has been and still is dismissed in the same terms. Rita Felski characterises the attack on feminist literary criticism as follows: according to those who dismiss feminist literary criticism, ‘[a]ll literary critics worthy of the name…share a deep and abiding love of the works they read. Their response to a great work of literature is one of overpowering awe and almost painful pleasure. Feminists, however, are conspicuously lacking in such higher emotions. They are mean-spirited malcontents who only know how to debunk and denounce, who are importing sterile ideologies into a sphere that was once blessedly free of political wrangling’ (Felski, Literature After Feminism, 1).
28 Moretti, ‘Style, Inc’.
29 Trumpener, ‘Critical Response’, 160.
30 Tally, ‘Review of Graphs’, 134.
31 Rothberg, ‘Quantifying Culture?’, 321.
32 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 108.
33 Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges’, 584.
34 Izzo, ‘Outside Where’, 597.
35 Arac, ‘Anglo-Globalism?’, 45.
36 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 108.
37 English, ‘Everywhere and Nowhere’, xiii. Bill Readings likewise decries the ‘logic of quantifi cation’ and the ‘logic of accounting’ that governs contemporary universities (Readings,
‘The University’, 471).
38 Lever, ‘Criticism and Fiction’, 67.
39 Nussbaum, Poetic Justice; Poovey, A History; Merry, ‘Measuring’.
40 Merry, ‘Measuring’, 84.
41 Eric Hayot also proposes a specifi cally disciplinary reason for the attention Moretti has received, suggesting that this notion of ‘distant reading’ has arrived just at the ‘moment when the last major wave of new ideas seems to have fl oundered. Many people seem to want a new Theory to replace the exhausted old Theory’ (Hayot, ‘A Hundred’, 65).
42 It is also, I would suggest, signifi cantly easier to attack another humanities scholar than a scientist or someone in senior university management.
43 Hermanson, ‘Review’. Similarly, Marc Parry notes that, ‘As the humanities struggle with fi nancial stress and waning student interest, some worry that the lure of money and technology will increasingly push computation front and center’ (Parry, ‘The Humanities’).
44 Hermanson, ‘Review’.
45 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 108. For an excellent discussion of the changing role of visual representation – and the relationship of the image to ‘truth’ – in medical science see Kemp,
‘“A Perfect”’.
46 English, ‘Everywhere and Nowhere’, xiii.
47 Hudson, ‘Numbers and Words’, 140.
48 Black et al., ‘Geographical Information’, 12–13.
49 Darnton, ‘Book Production’, 259.
50 Black et al., ‘Geographical Information’, 12.
51 Darnton, ‘Book Production’, 259.
52 Joshi, ‘Quantitative Method’, 273. Many book historians integrate both qualitative and quantitative approaches. For instance, Joshi argues that statistics often ‘indicat[e] the question, but only close textual reading…can address [it]’ (Joshi, ‘Quantitative Method’, 273). Similarly, Jonathan Zwicker uses both ‘anecdotes’ on individual texts and ‘numbers’ – statistical analysis of the fi ction market – to explore nineteenth-century Japanese literature (Zwicker, ‘Japan, 1850–1900’, 512).
53 Zwicker, ‘Japan, 1850–1900’, 514.
54 Eliot, ‘Very Necessary’, 284.
55 Black et al., ‘Geographical Information’, 12–13; see also Eliot, ‘Very Necessary’, 283.
56 Gottschall et al., ‘Are the Beautiful’, 44.
57 Trumpener, ‘Critical Response’, 163.
58 Ibid., 164.
59 For an insightful critique of literary history’s foundations ‘on a claim about the importance of acquaintance’ and ‘how far that insistence…has made literary history look like a relatively temporary business indeed’, see Ferguson, ‘Planetary Literary’, 661.
60 Moretti, ‘Conjectures’, 55.
66 Moretti, ‘Moretti Responds (II)’, 74.
67 Moretti, Graphs, 4.
68 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 108.
69 Frow, ‘Thinking the Novel’, 142.
70 Moretti, Graphs.
71 Moretti, ‘Conjectures’.
72 Serlen, ‘The Distant’, 217. Moretti makes much the same comment about Literary Darwinism, disparaging the ‘passion’ of those in this fi eld ‘for fuzzy or crude units of analysis’ (Moretti,
‘Moretti Responds (II)’, 73).
73 Moretti, Graphs, 9.
74 Serlen, ‘The Distant’, 219.
75 Moretti, Graphs, 9.
76 Serlen, ‘The Distant’, 219–220.
77 Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 108.
86 Moretti, Graphs, 29.
92 Joshi, ‘Quantitative Method’, 269.
93 Eliot, ‘Very Necessary’, 289.
94 Frow, ‘Thinking the Novel’, 142.
95 AustLit, ‘About AustLit’, accessed 3 June 2011. http://www.austlit.edu.au/about 96 AustLit, ‘About Scope’, accessed 3 June 2011. http://www.austlit.edu.au/about/scope 97 On 31 December 2011 AustLit listed its content as: 737,896 works; 132,115 agents and 29,546
subjects (AustLit, ‘AustLit’, accessed 31 December 2011. http://www.austlit.edu.au/).
98 This has been the case in Australia since at least the 1920s, when the Palmers emphasised the importance of the Australian novel to the development of national and cultural identity (Carter, ‘Critics, Writers’ 267).
99 AustLit, ‘About Books’, accessed 3 June 2011. http://www.austlit.edu.au/about/books 100 Another modifi cation I have made to the data extracted from AustLit is in my treatment of
uncertain years. Approximately four per cent of the Australian novels published between 1830 and 1899 and 1945 and 2009 have as their date of publication a decade rather than a specifi c year (for instance, 197–). I have chosen to divide such novels evenly among the other years in the decade, even if this produces a fractional result (for instance, 124.5 Australian novels published between 1890 and 1894).
101 I created the two main datasets underpinning the analysis in this book as follows: performing guided searches in AustLit, asking for all ‘single work’ novel titles in particular year ranges;
displaying these results as tagged text and copying them to a text fi le; and using command lines in terminal to organise the data before exporting it in CSV format. This process left me with Excel fi les that initially included the type, title, author, year of publication, publisher and genre/s for each Australian novel. I then looked at each publisher to determine if it was owned by another company (a task that was especially complex for data after the 1980s, due to the growing rate of acquisition and conglomeration of publishing companies). I also added information to these fi les as my research developed and specifi c questions emerged:
for instance, I categorised all the authors by gender; for nineteenth-century Australian novels I differentiated the years of publication – that is, fi rst serial and fi rst book – and included the number of volumes in which books were published. To experiment with and visualise the data I used the pivot table and graphing functions in Excel. The only datasets used in this book that were not extracted using the process described above related to critical discussion of authors (explored in Chapter 5). Because these datasets were much larger than the others – and because AustLit only allows searches with less than 1,000 results to be displayed as tagged text – they were extracted through a process known as screen-scraping, performed in February 2007.
102 Most ‘Non-AustLit Novels’ are by well-known authors (such as George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stow and Charles Dickens) deemed to have profoundly infl uenced particular Australian authors.
103 ‘Banned in Australia’ is one of AustLit’s specialist datasets, led by Nicole Moore and including approximately 500 titles (AustLit, ‘Banned in Australia’, accessed 4 June 2011. http://www.
austlit.edu.au/specialistDatasets/Banned).
104 Four print-versions of AustLit were published from 2001 to 2008. See Arnold and Hay, The Bibliography: A-E; Arnold and Hay, The Bibliography: F-J; Arnold and Hay, The Bibliography: K-O;
Arnold and Hay, The Bibliography: P-Z.
105 The only datasets I have not updated are the ones concerning critical discussion of Australian authors.
106 AustLit, ‘About Scope’, accessed 3 June 2011. http://www.austlit.edu.au/about/scope
107 AustLit, ‘Inclusion Criteria for Authors’, accessed 3 June 2011. http://www.austlit.edu.au/
about/scopepolicy#selectionCriteria
108 For discussion of these parameters and decisions in Australian bibliography see Arnold and Hay, ‘Introduction’, viii, xi.
109 Dever, ‘“Conventional Women”’, 133.
110 Darnton, ‘Book Production’, 240.
111 Moretti, Signs, 15.
112 Darnton, ‘Book Production’, 240.
113 Joshi, ‘Quantitative Method’, 264.
114 Griswold, ‘Number Magic’, 276.
115 In presenting my results, one decision I made – based on this status of literary data as indication rather than proof of historical trends – was not to give statistics with decimal points. Given that the data is inevitably incomplete, I felt that multiple decimal points (as well as interrupting the reading process for literary scholars perhaps not accustomed to dealing with charts and numbers) implied a level of exactitude that was misleading.
116 Arthur, ‘Virtual Strangers’.
117 McCarty, Humanities Computing, 27.
118 Rothberg, ‘Quantifying Culture?’, 322.
119 See also Drucker, ‘Philosophy and Digital’.
120 McGann, Radiant Textuality, 18.
121 McCarty, Humanities Computing, 6.
122 Ibid., 12.
123 Davidson, ‘Humanities 2.0’, 710.
124 McCarty, ‘Knowing…: Modeling’.
125 McCarty, Humanities Computing, 24.
126 Ibid., 36, 27.
127 McCarty, ‘Knowing…: Modeling’.
128 AustLit, ‘Reading by Numbers’. http://www.austlit.edu.au/ResourcefulReading/ReadingBy Numbers
129 McCarty, ‘Knowing…: Modeling’.
130 McCarty, Humanities Computing, 26–27.
131 Eliot, ‘Very Necessary’, 293.
Chapter 2. Beyond the Book: Publishing in the Nineteenth Century