In Winter 2021, I’m teaching “Literary Evidence in the Information Age,” a graduate seminar in the Department of English (ENGL607.55). I’ll deliver it as a series of asynchronous podcasts and synchronous Zoom/Slack classes on Tuesday afternoons (1:00-3:45).
Here’s the provisional description:
In the 1980s, new historicists expanded literary critics’ use of archival evidence. Similarly in the 2010s, digital humanists expanded our use of machine-readable texts. Using tools like the Natural Language Toolkit on text corpora like the HathiTrust Digital Library, we base critical arguments on ever-expanding evidence. But setting aside mere capabilities, what methodological principles impel this expansion?
This course considers how literary critics have used textual evidence in the past, how we use it today, and how future critics can combine persuasive discourse with claims to categorical evidence. We begin with new-historicist and cultural-materialist arguments for embedding literary texts in social texts. Then we examine digital editions and text corpora that critics parse with increasingly nuanced tools.
Our core question is what effect these expansions of evidence have on literary-critical methodologies, particularly as they resist arbitrary case-studies or exemplary close readings. What do we gain and lose by treating literary texts as data? How much evidence is sufficient to make an argument, and who decides? How can our criticism be both rhetorical and empirical?
Assignments will include:
- a presentation on a major text by a chosen author comparing it to a larger corpus;
- an annotated bibliography of books and articles since 2015; and
- a research essay.
Provisional Reading List
Readings will include the 2019 and forthcoming 2021 editions of Debates in the Digital Humanities; recent books on texts and data (Andrew Piper, Jessica Pressman) and on literary periods (Ted Underwood); recent articles on computation and evidence from New Literary History and Critical Inquiry; and key backgrounds on reader response (Stanley Fish) and new historicist criticism (Stephen Greenblatt, Catherine Gallagher). Students will also read 1 book-length text by a proposed author whose complete corpus is machine-readable and out of copyright.
